euclid

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Timeline of the universe. A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe. (Credit: NASA)

ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope And The Quest For Dark Energy

July 31, 2023 by 30 Comments

Most of what humankind and other mammalian species on Earth experience of the Universe is primarily restricted to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum which our optical organs can register. Despite these limitations, we have found ways over the centuries which enable us to perceive the rest of the EM spectrum, to see both what is incredibly far away, and what is incredibly small, to constantly get a little bit closer to understanding what makes the Universe into what we can observe today, and what it may look like in the future.

An essential element of this effort are space telescopes, which gaze into the depths of the Universe with no limitations imposed by the Earth’s atmosphere, or human activity. Among the many uses of space telescopes, the investigation of the expansion of the Universe is perhaps the most fascinating, as this brings us ever closer to the answers to the most fundamental questions about not only its shape, but also to its future, which may include hitherto unknown types of matter and energy.

With the recently launched Euclid space telescope, another chapter is being opened in the saga on dark energy and matter, and their nature and effects on the Universe, as well as whether they exist at all. Yet how exactly do you use a space telescope to ferret out the potential effects of dark energy?

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Intel’s Vision For Single Board Computers Is To Have Better Vision

May 26, 2017 by 33 Comments

At the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend, Intel was showing off a couple of sexy newcomers in the Single Board Computer (SBC) market. It’s easy to get trapped into thinking that SBCs are all about simple boards with a double-digit price tag like the Raspberry Pi. How can you compete with a $35 computer that has a huge market share and a gigantic community? You compete by appealing to a crowd not satisfied with these entry-level SBCs, and for that Intel appears to be targeting a much higher-end audience that needs computer vision along with the speed and horsepower to do something meaningful with it.

I caught up with Intel’s “Maker Czar”, Jay Melican, at Maker Faire Bay Area last weekend. A year ago, it was a Nintendo Power Glove controlled quadcopter that caught my eye. This year I only had eyes for the two new computing modules on offer, the Joule and the Euclid. They both focus on connecting powerful processors to high-resolution cameras and using a full-blown Linux operating system for the image processing. But it feels like the Joule is meant more for your average hardware hacker, and the Euclid for software engineers who are pointing their skills at robots but don’t want to get bogged down in first-principles of hardware. Before you rage about this in the comments, let me explain.

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Intel Makes A Cool Robot Brain In Latest Attempt To Pry Hackers From Their Wallets

August 26, 2016 by 25 Comments

Hackerboards got a chance to sit down with Intel’s latest attempt to turn hackers into a willing and steady revenue stream, the, “Euclid.” The board is cool in concept, a full mini computer with stereo cameras, battery, Ubuntu, and ROS nicely packaged together.

We would be more excited if we knew how much it costs, but in principle the device is super cool. From a robotics research perspective it’s a sort of perfect package. ROS is a wonderful distributed and asynchronous robotic operating system, test, and development platform. The Intel developers designed this unit around the needs of ROS and it comes pre-installed on the camera.

For those who haven’t used ROS before, this is a really cool feature. ROS is natively distributed. It really doesn’t care where the computer supplying its data lives. So, for example, if you already had a robot and wanted to add stereo vision to it. You could offload all the vision processing components of your existing ROS codebase to the Euclid and continue as if nothing changed.

The other option is to use the board as the entire robot brain. It’s self contained with battery and camera. It’s a USB to serial connection away from supercharging any small robotics project.

Unfortunately the board is still a demo, and based on Intel’s history, likely to be too expensive to lure ordinary hackers away from the RasPis and import cameras they already know how to hack together into more or less the same thing. Universities will likely be weak at the knees for such a development though.