TypeMatrix EZ-Reach 2030 Is Better Than Your Laptop Keyboard

May 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos 39 Comments

Maybe you’re not ready to take the leap into a full-on ergonomic split keyboard. That’s okay, that’s cool, that’s understandable. They’re weird! Especially ones like my Kinesis Advantage with the key bowls and such. But maybe your poor pinkies are starting to get tired and you’re ready to start using your thumbs for more than just the space bar. Or you want to be able to type ‘c’ properly, with your middle finger.

In that case, the TypeMatrix could be the keyboard for you. Or maybe for travel you, because it’s designed as a quasi-ergonomic, orthonormal layout travel keyboard to pair with your laptop, and as such it sits directly over a laptop keyboard without blocking the track pad. (How do people use those things, anyway?)

Of course, you could use this as a desktop keyboard as well, although it’s unfortunate that Control and Shift are stuck on the pinkies. More about that later.

First Impressions

When I saw this keyboard on eBay, I was attracted by two things: the layout, and the dedicated Dvorak light. (And, let’s be honest — the price was right.) I’ve always found myself generally turned off by chocolate bar-style ortholinear keebs because they’re so incredibly cramped, but this one seemed a more acceptable because of the slight split.

The first thing I noticed was the fantastic number pad integration. The different colored keycaps are a nice touch, because the gray makes the number pad stand out, and the red Delete is easy to find since Num Lock is squatting in the upper right corner. Why does Delete always feel like an afterthought on compact keebs? I also like the location of the arrows, and it makes me think of the AlphaSmart NEO layout. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of burying the right hand Enter down in no-man’s land where you can’t exactly hit it blindly with great accuracy right away. If only you could swap Shift and Enter without messing up the number pad!

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Keep Livestock From Razing Your Field With An Overgrazing Shield

May 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 49 Comments

You know, not every solution needs to be complicated to be absolutely awesome. Take the humble clothespin, for example, two pieces of cleverly carved wood (or plastic; we won’t judge) and a spring. And yet, the service it provides is useful for many applications.

The same simple elegance is also present in [Anteneh]’s overgrazing shield. When sheep and other animals are allowed to eat the vegetation down to the soil, it leads to soil erosion if not kept in check with regular grazing location rotation. As it turns out, if you want to keep an animal from eating grass and plants down to the soil, just slip a leather harness over its neck with a piece of wood in the right place so it literally can’t graze any lower than the wood allows.

According to [Anteneh]’s prototype tests, it only takes a few seconds to fit the shield to the animal’s head and neck, and then they’re off to grazing to the prescribed depth. We think this is a great solution and hope to see it in wide use along with regular rotation.

Need a way to track your livestock? [Sean Boyce]’s experiments with subcutaneous pig tracking makes for a good read, but the reality of that system will probably have you looking for a simpler solution.

Pool Temperature Monitor Mollifies Fortunate But Frustrated Children

May 2, 2021 by Kristina Panos 25 Comments

Who needs the city pool when you can party in the private pool over at Grandma and Grandpa’s house? No need to wait until Memorial Day weekend when it hits 90° F in the first week of May. But how can you placate grandchildren who want to know each and every day if it’s finally time to go swimming, and the pool itself is miles away? Although grandparents probably love to hear from you more often there’s no need to bother them with hourly phone calls. You just have to build a floating, remote pool temperature monitor which broadcasts every 30 minutes to an Adafruit MagTag sitting at kid’s eye level on the refrigerator.

Between the cost of commercial pool temperature monitors and all the reviews that mention iffy Wi-Fi connections, it sounds like [Blake] is better off rolling his own solution. Inside the floating part is an ESP32, a DS18B temperature sensor, and a 18650 cell. Most of the body is PVC, except for the 3D-printed torus that holds some foam for buoyancy. A handful of BBs in the bottom keep the thing pointed upright. For now, it shows the water temperature, but [Blake]’s ultimate goal is to show the air temperature as well.

Maybe it’s still too cold to swim, but the sun shines brightly most days. Why not harness its energy to heat up the water?

Coffee Cupping Is A Grind — Spectroscopy Could Brew Better Beans

May 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

If you’ve ever bought whole coffee beans, chances are good that there was all kinds of information on the bag that led to your decision, like the origin, the roast type, and the flavor notes. Traditionally, coffee grading — that’s judging the aroma of both dry and wet grounds and slurping the coffee evenly across the tongue to determine the flavor profile — is done by humans in a process called cupping. To call it a process is too clinical — it’s really more like a ceremony performed with the grave sincerity that coffee deserves.

A traditional cupping ceremony. Image via Kaldi’s Coffee

There’s an industry standard coffee flavor wheel, so why not leverage that to make a robot that can remove the human bias and possible error of doing things the traditional way? That’s exactly what Demetria, a Columbian-Israeli company is doing.

They’ve developed an AI platform that can determine bean quality as judged by handheld scanners that were born on Kickstarter. The scanner uses near-infrared to look for biochemical markers in the bean, which it uses to match up with a profile backed by the all-knowing coffee flavor wheel.

Demetria is using SCiO scanners and a custom app to judge beans before they’re even roasted, which greatly speeds up the process but makes us wonder how green bean spectroscopy stacks up against roasted beans as judged by humans. You may remember the SCiO, a pocket-sized, connected spectrometer made by Consumer Physics that finally started delivering the goods a few years after funding. If you got your hands on a SCiO, you might like to know that there’s an open project out there to hack them. Sparkfun did a nice, thorough teardown, and it seems to be a well-engineered piece of hardware.

On the one hand, cupping is a tradition and thus may people feel that robbing coffee of this tradition will rob coffee of its soul. On the other hand, cupping is wasteful, as the coffee must be roasted and ground immediately prior to the ceremony and it requires the availability of Q graders who have been trained in the ways of coffee grading.

Want to know more about coffee production? Might as well learn the Retrotechtacular way.

[Main and thumbnail images via Demetria]

Apple-Picking Robot Stems From Labor Shortage

May 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 35 Comments

Among all the job-related problems wrought by the pandemic, here is another one that comes as the result of people generally staying home: there are hardly any backpackers to do traditional transient backpacker jobs like picking apples. Researchers at Monash University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering found a way to fill in the gap by building a pneumatic robot arm that can harvest an apple every seven seconds at top speed.

A suite of cameras and algorithms look for fruit amongst the foliage and carefully remove it by gripping it gently and twisting, much like a human would. In order to do this, the robot must consider the shape of the fruit, the way it’s hanging, and where to separate it from the tree while keeping damage to a minimum. A suction system helps pull the apple into the soft, four-fingered grip and then the arm twists and turns to deposit the apple into the bin.

There are a lot of upsides to this robot, including the fact that it works in any lighting and weather conditions and can ID an apple in less than 200 milliseconds. The only problem is that this operation results in the occasional missing stem — a cosmetic problem that sounds nit-picky, but would definitely prevent some stores from buying the fruit. Well, that, and there only seems to be one of these robots so far.

There are two videos after the break — a short one that gives you the gist, and a much longer one that offers a view of the suction cup, which emerges from the middle of the fingers like a xenomorph’s little mouth.

Some readers may be wondering why apples are still picked individually when shaking harvesters exists. “Shake-and-catch” tends to bruise apples, making them undesirable for produce sellers, however, apples destined for juicing have no issue with being handled roughly by the harvesters as shown in this fascinating harvest video. Robot grippers are gentle and we’ve seen all shapes and sizes that are suited to a particular need. When the needs are more general, rollers or squishy spheres might be the answer.

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Mice Develop Inside An Artificial Womb

April 30, 2021 by Kristina Panos 40 Comments

Well, it looks like those fetus fields from The Matrix (1999) just became a little bit more plausible. Although people-growing is probably a long way off, mice can now mostly develop inside an artificial uterus (try private window if you hit a paywall) thanks to a breakthrough in developmental biology. So far, the mice can only be kept alive halfway through gestation. There’s a point at which the nutrient formula provided to them isn’t enough, and they need a blood supply to continue growing. That’s the next goal. For now, let’s talk about that mechanical womb setup.

Carousel of Care

The mechanical womb was developed to better understand how various factors such as gene mutations, nutrients, and environmental conditions affect murine fetuses in development. Why do miscarriages occur, and why do fertilized eggs fail to implant in the first place? How exactly does an egg explode into 40 trillion cells when things do work out? This see-through uterus ought to reveal a few more of nature’s gestational secrets.

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Airports Are Now AirBNBs For Honeybees

April 30, 2021 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

In the summer of 2012, honeybees swarmed the Pittsburgh airport, probably because the conditions are favorable there. Like many airports, the tarmac is surrounded by wild, wide-open fields that exist to contain the cacophony. And a couple of nearby creeks are dotted with plenty of forage-worthy wildflowers.

Now, nearly a decade later, the airport is home to 110 colonies that house around 4 million honeybees. And they aren’t alone. Several other US airports are getting in on the apiary action, including O’Hare, Sea-Tac, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The relationship between honeybees and airports is a symbiotic one — the honey the bees produce is a litmus test for air pollution levels around the airport, which must fall within regulations. German airports have employed bees as ‘bio-detectives’ for over twenty years, and they give the honey away for free inside the terminal. It’s okay, though — analysis reveals that the hydrocarbon and heavy metal levels in the airport honey aren’t any higher than honey from non-industrial bees.

Given that honeybees pollinate around $15 billion in crops annually in the US alone, it’s a wonder that we aren’t doing everything possible to fight colony collapse disorder and other problems around the world. This mysterious issue has grown in the last few years, and 2020 saw highest death toll since 2016. Colony collapse disorder aside, plenty of problems persist for our fuzzy friends — pests, pesticides, pathogens, and poor nutrition.

What’s the deal with bees, anyway? How do they fly? Because they aren’t supposed to fly.