If you are thinking of buying Adafruit components like the ones I regularly use in my projects and you don’t want to pay for, or wait for shipping from the US then you are in luck!
I recently discovered that you can order Adafruit components from Core Electronics in Australia. They claim to stock the entire range of Adafruit components.
You can find them here:
There is one thing in life that you can count on: AI is going to be bigger and happen sooner than almost any of us expect.
Autonomous cars are perhaps the most visible implementations of AI, but it’s creeping in everywhere. From personal assistants (Sirri, Cortana, Alexa etc), to administration jobs (IBM’s Watson), and now – design and engineering. Have a look at this article about a team who have applied machine learning to automotive design:
http://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/how-artificial-intelligence-could-design-your-next-car-20170228-gumxy6.html
From the article:
The first Hack Rod prototype created using generative design resulted in a chassis that is 35 per cent lighter than the team’s engineers first managed.
Just let that sink in: on its first try the AI software managed to reduce the weight of a human designed chassis by 35%.
That is unbelievable. Gains of a few percentage points are what you expect in professional design and manufacturing. Not 35%. And this isn’t a design that you can look at and say “Well, ok, now that I have seen it, I could do it too”. No, this is design that is entirely beyond human ability to ever conceive.
As a deisgner that’s scary – and amazing.
For now we are still in charge of this process. Controlling and guiding every aspect of it. However, I can easily imagine a time in the future when an entirely automated, AI guided system can design, build, and operate a fleet of autonomous vehicles, continually monitoring the performance data of the fleet to optimise the physical performance, the satisfaction level of customers to optimise the aesthetics and comfort, and tweaking each new batch of 3D printed cars to improve over the last batch. No human guidance necessary.
And this isn’t some nebulous, far future, pie-in-the-sky idea. The pieces are coming together to make this possible very, very quickly. The McLaren Technology Group already know how to monitor and analyse vehicle performance to the Nth degree. Market research and analysis of consumer behaviour is what every single company on earth does to some degree or other. The only missing bit is for AI to tie all of these function together.
The consequences of such a system – economic, social, and political are literally unimaginable at this time.
But the writing is on the wall. It’s coming. It’s not going to be stopped.
I am lucky enough to have a locker at the Men’s Shed that I am a member of. However, the lockers there are all old and second hand and all missing their keys. So they aren’t really safe to store valuables in. I wanted a key for my locker, so I thought I would get one cut.
Initially I just took this photo of the front of the lock to [many] locksmiths and asked them to cut a key. I have heard that locksmiths have access to vast databases of key codes and all you should have to do is provide a code and they should be able to work out which blank and which pattern to cut on it.
However, none of them could figure it out. So I decided to pull the whole handle from the locker and see if they could work it out from that.
The following video tells the story – including my foray into lock picking because, why not?
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After nearly a month long wait my Bee Prusa 3D printer has arrived.
I don’t blame The 3D Shop – who I purchased it from, as their stock was held up by customs. Just the usual trials of international freight! They did however keep me appraised of the situation, which was good.
I bought two rolls of filament to go with the printer (since it has two heads) – PLA and PVA. PLA is mostly good for prototyping, or projects where structural strength of the plastic isn’t important. PVA filament (yes, it’s the same as the glue!) is great for printing scaffolding. If your design required support as it is laid down, then PVA is very convenient, once the print process is complete, then the object can be placed in warm water, and the PVA scaffolding simply dissolves away. It’s very clever and one of the principal reasons that I opted for a twin head printer.
So, the next step is I need to complete my second generation photographic stage (complete with inbuilt LED lighting, mount for camera, power supply for 240V AC, 12V and 5V DC and more. It’s going to be great and it will let me make a good clear film of the assembly process for the machine.
