Researchers at the University of Texas have been experimenting with optical 3D printing using near infrared (NIR) light instead of the more traditional ultraviolet. They claim to have a proof of concept and, apparently, using NIR has many advantages. The actual paper is paywalled, but there are several good summaries, including one from [3D Printing Industry].
UV light degrades certain materials and easily scatters in some media. However, decreasing the wavelength of light used in 3D printing has its own problems, notably less resolution and slower curing speed. To combat this, the researchers used an NIR-absorbant cyanine dye that exhibits rapid photocuring. The team reports times of 60 seconds per layer and resolution as high as 300 micrometers. Nanoparticles in the resin allow tuning of the part’s appearance and properties.
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
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.
Since the 70s, NASA, NOAA, and the USGS have been operating a series of satellites designed to look at vegetation health around the world. These satellites, going under the name Landsat, use specialized camera filters that look at light reflecting off chlorophyll to gauge the health of forests, plains, oceans, and even farms. It’s all very interesting technology, and a few very cool people want to put one of these near infrared cameras in the hands of everyone.
The basic idea behind gauging the health of plants from orbit, or the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is actually pretty simple: absorb red and blue light (thus our verdant forests), and reflect nearly all infrared light. By removing the IR filter from a digital camera and adding a ‘superblue’ filter, the NDVI can be calculated with just a little bit of image processing.
The folks behind this have put up a Kickstarter with rewards including a modified webcam, a custom point and shoot camera, and a very low-cost source of one of these superblue filters. Just the thing to see how your garden grows or how efficiently you can kill a houseplant.
