OUTSIDE THERE’S that hum you get in the city on a really hot day. Inside there’s a hum of a different kind, call it industrious activity crossed with intense focus and fun. This is MakeShop – where people come to make “stuff”: Everything from Bristle Bots and LED Throwies (a combination of lights and magnets) to eight-bit cross stitch (needle work and retro computer design) and clocks (here you can “clockify” anything you like). It’s craft but not as we know it in a place where you can create robots from markers and paper cups or a bird house from Gay Mitchell’s face. What’s not to like?
This newly opened collaborative workspace was created by the Science Gallery and is open to adults and children of any skill level. Here the imagination can run riot, confined only by the four walls and the ability of the facilitators who help to turn your curiosity into reality. On a smaller scale it’s like Fab Labs in the US – fully-fitted design and fabrication laboratories where the public can turn concepts into creations.
In MakeShop, a trestle table which seats eight to ten people, stands in front of a well-stocked wall on which the tools of invention hang neatly arranged: scissors and screwdrivers, Dremels (multi-tasking handheld tools) and battery packs and temptingly dangerous soldering irons and glue guns.
In this mass-produced age, when it’s often cheaper and easier to buy new things than to make or fix old ones, it can sometimes be difficult to find the time or reason to create. But the desire to make and mend is still strong, as evidenced by the steady stream of enthused visitors throughout the afternoon. An Italian family, two friends who buy some books – all curious people enticed by the funky-looking wooden 3D printer in the window.
Once inside, the staff’s enthusiasm finds them, glue guns poised, creating spinning robots from sawn-up dishwashing brushes and three-volt battery packs. Gearoid Keane one of the facilitators, who helps me make a bird house-shaped clock from a Gay Mitchell election poster, says that “The workshops last around 15 or 20 minutes so we get the kids’ full concentration. We get a wide range of ages but all really interested in what they are doing.”
While the target audience is 15- to 25-year-olds, people of all ages can attend the drop-in workshops. Adults and children sit side-by-side and there is a quiet sense of community interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter and excitement. Fionn Kidney of the Science Gallery says it’s about “Taking DIY and turning it into ‘Doing it Together’. It’s about developing a spark of discovery. We want to help young people find their interests.” Fundamentally, he says, MakeShop is about getting hands-on and creative, encouraging questioning and conversation.
Niall Hunt a 14-year-old from Sandymount in Dublin was making a badge – incorporating soldering techniques with learning about circuits by connecting LED lights to a battery. “I’ve always wanted to try soldering but never had the chance before,” says Niall, who likes the idea of a space where people can try out new things. With an interest in DIY, Niall’s dad John says that MakeShop provides access to materials he wouldn’t have at home as well as being an “ideas space”.
“Technology has now got to a stage where you can be creative very easily,” says Fionn Kidney. “Components are more readily available and low cost, so it makes things more accessible.” Aside from basic workshops, MakeShop also plan to run premium workshops including 3D printing, papercraft for model making and Arduino (a microcontroller platform that can be used to control everything from computers to household appliances).
English tourists Phil Eaton and Ian Patterson found MakeShop after visiting nearby Trinity College. “There’s no need to make things anymore – you can just go and buy them. But you come away from this workshop with something tangible that you’ve made, so there’s a great sense of satisfaction,” says Eaton. “I also think it’s great for kids as it gives them an interest in mechanics, electronics and finding out how things work. I feel like I’ve regressed to being a seven-year-old again. It’s nice sometimes to do that – to do things just for fun.”
2012年8月20日 星期一
2012年6月7日 星期四
Philips Road Show Visits Ghana
Philips Electronics will for the first time embark on a road show in Ghana aimed at driving growth in Africa through the introduction of innovative healthcare and lighting solutions for local markets.
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, a diversified health and well-being company, focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation.
It has been active in Africa for over a century, and has committed to an aggressive investment plan to significantly increase its business footprint in the coming years based upon locally relevant products and innovations that address the needs of the growing African population.
Ronald de Jong, Executive Vice President and Chief Market Leader at Philips was quoted in a press statement as saying, “We are committed to building a long-term sustainable business footprint in Africa”.
He said, “Growth in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be around 6% in 2012 and our ambition is to gain a strong presence in this continent by building on local talent and organizations, setting up distribution and route to market and above all, by developing solutions and innovations which are relevant for the local needs.”
The first Philip Cairo to Cape Town road show was organized in 2010 and the 2012 version covers 12,000 kilometers across eleven countries and seventeen cities across the continent.
During the road show, the Philips team will showcase its new innovations and continue to engage with customers, governments, NGOs and media on topics relating to key challenges facing Africa at present.
Some of these challenges include: Mother and Child Care, Women’s Healthcare, energy efficiency, solar lighting solutions as well as clinical education and training.
A statement issued by Philips stated that the woman and child care programme focuses on supporting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at reducing child mortality rates and improving maternal health.
“Philips provides a broad range of ultrasound, monitoring, clinical informatics and patient care solutions needed to care for mothers and children: from pregnancy, labor and delivery, to postnatal, neonatal and pediatric care, and the transition to home,” the statement said.
During the road show Philips also highlights the benefits of LED lighting, which offers solutions to some of the key issues and opportunities Africa faces today: energy efficiency, climate change, resource scarcity, safety in cities, productivity in offices, and an enhanced sense of health and well-being.
The New LED technology, when combined with the latest solar and battery developments, can also provide good quality practical light for rural areas where more than 500 million Africans currently live without electricity.
Philips would be promoting its new solar powered LED Street and Area lighting solutions which offer cost effective and reliable illumination.
A pan-African soccer tour under solar-powered LED floodlights is also planned to highlight these developments.
“We have already been in Africa for many years and have a strong installed base of our equipment, but we strongly acknowledge the benefits of dialogue during this road show and the need for our company to listen to the local market and understand how we can adapt our products to better serve this continent,” said Ronald de Jong.
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, a diversified health and well-being company, focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation.
It has been active in Africa for over a century, and has committed to an aggressive investment plan to significantly increase its business footprint in the coming years based upon locally relevant products and innovations that address the needs of the growing African population.
Ronald de Jong, Executive Vice President and Chief Market Leader at Philips was quoted in a press statement as saying, “We are committed to building a long-term sustainable business footprint in Africa”.
He said, “Growth in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be around 6% in 2012 and our ambition is to gain a strong presence in this continent by building on local talent and organizations, setting up distribution and route to market and above all, by developing solutions and innovations which are relevant for the local needs.”
The first Philip Cairo to Cape Town road show was organized in 2010 and the 2012 version covers 12,000 kilometers across eleven countries and seventeen cities across the continent.
During the road show, the Philips team will showcase its new innovations and continue to engage with customers, governments, NGOs and media on topics relating to key challenges facing Africa at present.
Some of these challenges include: Mother and Child Care, Women’s Healthcare, energy efficiency, solar lighting solutions as well as clinical education and training.
A statement issued by Philips stated that the woman and child care programme focuses on supporting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at reducing child mortality rates and improving maternal health.
“Philips provides a broad range of ultrasound, monitoring, clinical informatics and patient care solutions needed to care for mothers and children: from pregnancy, labor and delivery, to postnatal, neonatal and pediatric care, and the transition to home,” the statement said.
During the road show Philips also highlights the benefits of LED lighting, which offers solutions to some of the key issues and opportunities Africa faces today: energy efficiency, climate change, resource scarcity, safety in cities, productivity in offices, and an enhanced sense of health and well-being.
The New LED technology, when combined with the latest solar and battery developments, can also provide good quality practical light for rural areas where more than 500 million Africans currently live without electricity.
Philips would be promoting its new solar powered LED Street and Area lighting solutions which offer cost effective and reliable illumination.
A pan-African soccer tour under solar-powered LED floodlights is also planned to highlight these developments.
“We have already been in Africa for many years and have a strong installed base of our equipment, but we strongly acknowledge the benefits of dialogue during this road show and the need for our company to listen to the local market and understand how we can adapt our products to better serve this continent,” said Ronald de Jong.
2011年11月29日 星期二
Potentially disruptive AC-LEDs
Novel AC-LED products have the potential to complicate the driver market. In its purest form, the AC-LED eliminates the driver, using the diode features of the LED to replace conventional diodes. Other designs use some basic components to limit the current, but sparingly. If highly successful, the AC-LED could make some LED lighting products – such as replacement bulbs – more competitive and greatly expand the LED-lighting market. Such a move could be good for both the LED industry and the end users, but would displace potential driver sales for those products.
However, we expect that AC-LEDs will have an impact only in certain product segments. In replacement bulbs, the pressure to innovate is so high that the AC-LED is just one of several novel solutions, and there is no room for older, less-innovative designs. Consequently, there are plenty of opportunities for everyone.
The high-voltage LED (HV-LED) is another buzz word but it will have minimal impact on the driver market. LED-based products commonly use long strings of LEDs in series. Until recently, the LEDs have been packaged in discrete packages and assembled together in the luminaire or lamp.
An HV-LED integrates the LED string onto the same chip or within the same package, gaining some advantages for the customer. It means little to the driver design, other than the usual considerations for the LED load that impacts every product design.
Estimates for IC pricing also complicate the forecast. It's obvious that IC prices decline over time as volumes increase and margins shrink. What's not as clear is the effect on the average price of changes in the product mix.
New products can appear at much higher prices than more-mature products in the same category, but can earn the difference via savings in component count or improved LED performance. The new products may be priced higher because they use a larger chip that takes up more wafer area, because they use a more expensive foundry process, or simply because they deliver more value, and can earn greater margin for the chip supplier.
Temporary oversupply or shortages of products within the supply chain – such as driver ICs, LEDs, or the end products – also create fluctuations in prices. We ignore these short-term fluctuations; in our studies we focus on the underlying medium-term trends in demand and technology.
LEDs are relatively uniform and easy to understand – compared to drivers. As one supplier said, explaining drivers requires a deep dive, but few customers have the patience or expertise to listen for very long. Yet, with some patience, LED drivers can be appreciated as a critical partner to LEDs, which garner so much attention.
Tom Hausken is Director of the Components Practice at Strategies Unlimited, a market research firm based in Mountain View, California. The company's most recent market-research report on LED Driver ICs was published in June 2011.
However, we expect that AC-LEDs will have an impact only in certain product segments. In replacement bulbs, the pressure to innovate is so high that the AC-LED is just one of several novel solutions, and there is no room for older, less-innovative designs. Consequently, there are plenty of opportunities for everyone.
The high-voltage LED (HV-LED) is another buzz word but it will have minimal impact on the driver market. LED-based products commonly use long strings of LEDs in series. Until recently, the LEDs have been packaged in discrete packages and assembled together in the luminaire or lamp.
An HV-LED integrates the LED string onto the same chip or within the same package, gaining some advantages for the customer. It means little to the driver design, other than the usual considerations for the LED load that impacts every product design.
Estimates for IC pricing also complicate the forecast. It's obvious that IC prices decline over time as volumes increase and margins shrink. What's not as clear is the effect on the average price of changes in the product mix.
New products can appear at much higher prices than more-mature products in the same category, but can earn the difference via savings in component count or improved LED performance. The new products may be priced higher because they use a larger chip that takes up more wafer area, because they use a more expensive foundry process, or simply because they deliver more value, and can earn greater margin for the chip supplier.
Temporary oversupply or shortages of products within the supply chain – such as driver ICs, LEDs, or the end products – also create fluctuations in prices. We ignore these short-term fluctuations; in our studies we focus on the underlying medium-term trends in demand and technology.
LEDs are relatively uniform and easy to understand – compared to drivers. As one supplier said, explaining drivers requires a deep dive, but few customers have the patience or expertise to listen for very long. Yet, with some patience, LED drivers can be appreciated as a critical partner to LEDs, which garner so much attention.
Tom Hausken is Director of the Components Practice at Strategies Unlimited, a market research firm based in Mountain View, California. The company's most recent market-research report on LED Driver ICs was published in June 2011.
2011年10月27日 星期四
Full text: Gov. Rick Snyder makes case for improving Michigan infrastructure
Michigan is also a national leader in the development of new technologies including:
Life-cycle budgeting, a process that abandons the old, short-term approach of quick fixes for road maintenance and places emphasis on maximizing the life of the road. A Congressional Budget Office study shows life-cycle budgeting can reduce long-term maintenance costs by 40 percent.
High-strength Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP) to reinforce concrete bridges. The use of this new product offers several distinct advantages, one of which is the virtual elimination of corrosion, a common problem among steel reinforced bridges.
Energy efficient LEDs in freeway lighting and trunkline signaling devices. Today, some 55 percent of state highway lights have been upgraded with LED lenses. As a result, MDOT is seeing a 90 percent power savings where LEDs are used.
The use of solar power to reduce its energy consumption. A demonstration project undertaken with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation Michigan Energy Office is using elevated solar panels at an MDOT carpool lot in west Michigan to feed power directly into the electrical grid during the day and offset the power needed for the freeway interchange lights at night.
A modern electronic bidding system developed in partnership with the private sector that uses the Internet to reduce errors, save taxpayer dollars, and shorten processing time. That means doing away with 10,000 pieces of paper that a single bid letting previously required along with the inefficiencies of such a labor-intensive process. For example, in 2002, the state had 34 low bid rejections, which cost about $370,000 to correct. In 2007, with the introduction of electronic bidding, there were no low bid rejections among 1,106 projects.
These innovations have saved money and stretched our transportation dollars, and we must do more. Today, I am challenging MDOT to provide opportunities for increased competition for maintenance services, like snow plowing. I propose taking a portion of the state network and competitively bidding for long-term engineering management services, construction and maintenance operations. I am giving the department 12 months to have the contracts in place and report back to me on the progress.
Moving to a performance-based system for managing and maintaining roads will lead to more efficiency in the preservation of our roads and bridges and save taxpayers money.
It is time to streamline the way we do business. We saw how successfully that worked for the auto companies who took painful steps to become leaner and more efficient. Ultimately, those difficult decisions helped make those companies sustainable. Many other businesses in Michigan have had to make similar painful choices in order to survive the past decade of difficult economic times.
Life-cycle budgeting, a process that abandons the old, short-term approach of quick fixes for road maintenance and places emphasis on maximizing the life of the road. A Congressional Budget Office study shows life-cycle budgeting can reduce long-term maintenance costs by 40 percent.
High-strength Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP) to reinforce concrete bridges. The use of this new product offers several distinct advantages, one of which is the virtual elimination of corrosion, a common problem among steel reinforced bridges.
Energy efficient LEDs in freeway lighting and trunkline signaling devices. Today, some 55 percent of state highway lights have been upgraded with LED lenses. As a result, MDOT is seeing a 90 percent power savings where LEDs are used.
The use of solar power to reduce its energy consumption. A demonstration project undertaken with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation Michigan Energy Office is using elevated solar panels at an MDOT carpool lot in west Michigan to feed power directly into the electrical grid during the day and offset the power needed for the freeway interchange lights at night.
A modern electronic bidding system developed in partnership with the private sector that uses the Internet to reduce errors, save taxpayer dollars, and shorten processing time. That means doing away with 10,000 pieces of paper that a single bid letting previously required along with the inefficiencies of such a labor-intensive process. For example, in 2002, the state had 34 low bid rejections, which cost about $370,000 to correct. In 2007, with the introduction of electronic bidding, there were no low bid rejections among 1,106 projects.
These innovations have saved money and stretched our transportation dollars, and we must do more. Today, I am challenging MDOT to provide opportunities for increased competition for maintenance services, like snow plowing. I propose taking a portion of the state network and competitively bidding for long-term engineering management services, construction and maintenance operations. I am giving the department 12 months to have the contracts in place and report back to me on the progress.
Moving to a performance-based system for managing and maintaining roads will lead to more efficiency in the preservation of our roads and bridges and save taxpayers money.
It is time to streamline the way we do business. We saw how successfully that worked for the auto companies who took painful steps to become leaner and more efficient. Ultimately, those difficult decisions helped make those companies sustainable. Many other businesses in Michigan have had to make similar painful choices in order to survive the past decade of difficult economic times.
2011年9月8日 星期四
Countdown Begins for UT Team in Department of Energy Solar Decathlon
In just three days, Team Living Led light begins transporting the stunning, state-of-the-art, zero-energy house to the Washington Mall to compete in the US Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon.
epresenting more than 200 students and nine academic programs, UT’s team will face off against nineteen other teams in a series of ten events beginning September 23. Winners will be announced October 1.
More than two years of work have gone into qualifying, planning, designing, and building the 750-square-foot home, inspired by Appalachia’s cantilever barns.
Along with being on display, the house will be part of ten competitive events to judge design excellence, sustainability, energy production, solar energy efficiency, consumer appeal, and cost-effectiveness. The house’s energy source must power its appliances and heat water and one event involves cooking and hosting a dinner party.
Visitors to the Washington Mall will tour the houses and learn how energy-saving features can help them save money. UT students have been preparing to give tours and have been advised to plan for seeing an average of 400 people an hour through the home.
These final days have been spent testing all of the home’s systems, practicing for tours, and moving the structure to its specially designed trailer attachments. Alumnus Bill Powell, of Powell Companies in Johnson City, has provided his expertise and the resources of his company to help the team move its self-contained house to the nation’s capital.
UT students designed the structure to be transportable on its own and to avoid extensive construction and set-up that they’ve seen teams struggle through when visiting the past Solar Decathlon competitions.
Living Light began with students and faculty in the College of Architecture and Design and is led by faculty members James Rose, Edward Stach, Richard Kelso, and Barbara Klinkhammer in the college, along with Deb Shmerler in the School of Art, Leon Tolbert in electrical engineering, and Stan Johnson and Bill Miller in mechanical engineering.
epresenting more than 200 students and nine academic programs, UT’s team will face off against nineteen other teams in a series of ten events beginning September 23. Winners will be announced October 1.
More than two years of work have gone into qualifying, planning, designing, and building the 750-square-foot home, inspired by Appalachia’s cantilever barns.
Along with being on display, the house will be part of ten competitive events to judge design excellence, sustainability, energy production, solar energy efficiency, consumer appeal, and cost-effectiveness. The house’s energy source must power its appliances and heat water and one event involves cooking and hosting a dinner party.
Visitors to the Washington Mall will tour the houses and learn how energy-saving features can help them save money. UT students have been preparing to give tours and have been advised to plan for seeing an average of 400 people an hour through the home.
These final days have been spent testing all of the home’s systems, practicing for tours, and moving the structure to its specially designed trailer attachments. Alumnus Bill Powell, of Powell Companies in Johnson City, has provided his expertise and the resources of his company to help the team move its self-contained house to the nation’s capital.
UT students designed the structure to be transportable on its own and to avoid extensive construction and set-up that they’ve seen teams struggle through when visiting the past Solar Decathlon competitions.
Living Light began with students and faculty in the College of Architecture and Design and is led by faculty members James Rose, Edward Stach, Richard Kelso, and Barbara Klinkhammer in the college, along with Deb Shmerler in the School of Art, Leon Tolbert in electrical engineering, and Stan Johnson and Bill Miller in mechanical engineering.
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