Recently, Devin, Carol, and I helped with the UNH KEEPERS Camp “Biomedical Engineering” Day. The children were able to have tours of Professor Wayne Smith’s lab, build simple parallel and series circuits, and create their own “Operation”-style board games. The picture below is of me and a student displaying his “Operation” game. It was great witnessing children being exposed to the fields of eletrical and biomedical engineering at such a young age, and they all seemed very interested and intrigued by the science behind the technology they use in their day-to-day lives. I hope every participant will further their understanding of engineering and pursue an education in the field.

-Erika Swanson

Project54 assisted with two sections of KEEPERS summer camp. It turned out to be a great way for the second to fifth grade students to explore electrical and computer engineering. Mark gave tours to groups of the students of a Project54 lab and a police cruiser. While he did that, Erika, Devin and I helped the other students build simple parallel and series circuits that lit a light bulb. It was eye opening to see how fast they caught on to the general ideas of circuiting, even to the point where Devin started to explain Ohm’s Law to them. With knowledge of this they created their own Operation game shown in the pictures below. Both groups of eager students seemed to finish the half day with more knowledge and inquiry of engineering than they started with. I am grateful to have taken part in that.

Carol Perkins

Laster Technologies, a French company, has developed a new set of glasses that allows users to view data in a heads up display type of configuration. These glasses appear to be just as normal as most correctional lenses, with the exception of a projection system. A projector is attached to the glasses on either side, just in front of where the glasses touch the ear of the user.

Not only do these glasses display information, but they also read the displayed data through cameras and send it back to the host computer. These glasses give the user the ability to display any information the user needs, less than an inch away. This technology could prove useful for situations ranging from reading a book, to viewing schematics or instructions when working on a project.

Devin Mullen

Last week, undergraduates from the Project54 lab visited the KEEPERS camp. KEEPERS stands for Kids Eager for Engineering Program with Elementary Research-based Science. The purpose of the camp is to get young children interested in engineering. One of the tours that the camp went on was a trip to Professor Wayne Smith’s Biomedical Engineering lab, where campers learned about how electrical engineers design prosthetic limbs that react to signals from the brain. Chris Bancroft, a recent graduate of the UNH ECE masters program, gave a demonstration to the campers of how the technology works. He attached electrical leads to his arm and explained to the campers that when a person with a prosthetic limb moves their arm, the brain sends signals to the muscle. That is where the leads pick up the signals and send it to a microcontroller. In the demonstration in the lab, Chris had the microcontroller attached to pneumatic pumps that forced air into a muscle-like air bladder. He explained that when the signals from the brain are picked up by the muscle, they are amplified and then sent to the microcontroller which decides which pumps to turn on and move the muscle, lifting a wooden arm.

Devin Mullen

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a device that allows a user to transform virtually any surface into a multitouch computer. The name of this new technology is Project LuminAR, which is basically an embedded computer in a lamp. The LuminAR bulb contains a pico projector, a camera, and a computer with wireless connectivity - all packaged into an area not much larger than a digital camera. The LuminAR bulb uses a pico projector to display a computer interface (which would normally be seen on a liquid crystal display) onto any flat surface. A built-in camera detects and interprets movement from the user, and sends that data to the computer. The user can navigate and type on the interface using gestures and a graphical keyboard. This reduces the need for hardware such as a mouse, keyboard, and display that are necessities on any desktop or laptop PC. Another great feature of this device is that it plugs into a robotic lamp which has the ability to move around based on the user’s movements and gestures. The LuminAR bulb can also be installed in any household lamp.

Take a look at the original article from the IEEE here.

Devin Mullen

Recently, users of Project54 have reported that the USB devices connected to their in-car computers at random would not power up correctly. Typically, a system reboot would solve the problem and power up the devices, but this situation is not ideal. The police officers using the Project54 application need all USB devices to consistently perform, and rebooting their computers is time consuming. Carol Perkins and I set up a diagnostic test in which 5 USB devices, including a GPS, wireless antenna, touch screen monitor, video adapter, and scanner, were set up in 5 different USB port configurations with a CoolGear USB hub. As shown in the figure below, two devices, the video adapter and the Symbol Scanner DS6707, had issues booting up. The Symbol Scanner did not power on 14% of the 50 trial runs. Of these 7 failures, twice the device booted initially, but eventually powered down without instruction. The figure below also shows that the power failures occurred while connected to 4 different ports, so we concluded that the reported problem was not due to any power allocation problems within the USB hub. When powered correctly, this scanner performs exceptionally well, so users will be asked to unplug and then replug the scanner when a power up is not successful. 

- Erika Swanson

Below: A pico projector made by the Microvision company

In the near future we could see a revolution in mobile display technology. Miniaturized projectors called pico projectors will replace current projector models and will make displaying media from mobile devices much easier. With this advance in technology, our mobile media will no longer be limited to a two inch screen. Instead, we will have the capability to increase the display size of a mobile device to about eight feet. These projectors will give mobile phone users the ability to display content such as movies or photos on a screen larger than most televisions. Currently most pico projectors are standalone units that connect to mobile devices via a cable. In a couple of years we could see built-in pico projectors in a variety of devices, ranging from mobile phones to mp3 players.

Below: A visual representation of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) Technology

There are currently three different types of technology that are used in these mini-projectors: liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), scanning mirror, and digital-light processing. Liquid crystal on silicon technology uses liquid crystals that sit on top of a chip, where the top of the chip is coated with material that makes it act like a mirror. The liquid crystals change their orientation based on an electric field, which in turn changes the polarization of the light that shines through the crystals and reflects off of the chip. In scanning mirror technology, three laser diodes direct light through a lens to a set of microelectromechanical mirrors mounted on silicon. These mirrors move horizontally and vertically to direct the light and create a picture. In digital-light processing technology, there is a chip that contains millions of microscopic mirrors that tilt to create pixels. Red, blue, and green light is reflected onto the microscopic mirrors, and then by tilting each mirror toward or away from the light source the pixel can be turned on or off respectively.

Below: Depiction of Scanning Mirror Technology

Take a look at the original article from the IEEE here.

Devin Mullen

These Lycra gloves are part of a new MIT prototype for a new gesture-based computing system. Graduate student Robert Wang and Associate Professor Jovan Popović developed this system that improves upon other techniques that use interfaces that adapt to human movement, such as the Nintendo Wii. Lycra gloves made of irregularly shaped patches are part of a system that rapidly produces 3-D images of the gloves on the screen using a new algorithm to produce images in a fraction of a second. Rather than incessantly calculating individual sets of data to determine the position of a hand, instead the algorithm searches through a database of various hand positions and selects the corresponding digital model.

I think it’s especially interesting that the motions used to control the screen on a Multi-Touch Table, in my experience, are very similar to the motions used with this gesture-based system in a virtual world, as shown in the video below. This prototype is faster and less expensive than the current methods to track the movements of the human body, and has the potential to increase the usage of such technology in areas like evaluations of athletic performances, animation, and of course video games.

Erika Swanson

A recent post on Slashdot led me to this interesting video produced by the folks at Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Using their Vision Chip, a CMOS image sensor with a parallel image processor, they created an in-air, finger motion based interface for a mobile phone. While I do not believe that in-air typing is the right application for this interface (a lack of tactile feel will I think turn off users), this certainly is a fascinating project that may be what we see commercially in the next couple of decades! Take a look at their video below. Also, if you haven’t done so, check out Zeljko’s post about Project Natal – a similar input interface for the future Xbox 360.

Mark Taipan

A memory resistor or memristor, is a controllable resistor that stores information it has acquired, hence the memory part. The memristor is a combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. It is on the cutting edge of memory, but it has now been found that the memristor may also be able to perform logic functions. This opens up the possibility of performing computations on the same chip as the memory is located, greatly increasing speed.

Memristors offer the advantages of requiring less energy to operate, being faster, and storing over twice as much data as solid state technologies (flash). Since they store information, they can be used like a computer that doesn’t need to boot up. HP Labs is on the front line of development for architectures to harness the immense potential of the memristor. Probably the most exciting part is that the memristor acts like human memory, which could lead to computations like the human brain, rather than following the von Neumann architecture. (Check out the article on the link HP Labs above)

Michael Litchfield