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AI may help electic cars

https://www.fastcompany.com/40405140/this-driverless-electric-pod-is-the-delivery-guy-of-the-future

Since a truck hauling 20 tons of freight needs a lot of energy to move, it has to stop fairly frequently to charge; the T-pod can make it 124 miles before it has to plug in again. For other electric semis, charging time is a bigger deterrent, because it’s also wasting a driver’s time.

“If you have to stand still maybe one-third of the time to actually charge, that makes the business case for having a truck driver in a battery-powered truck not that good,” says Robert Falck, CEO of Einride, the Sweden-based startup making the T-pod. “But if you remove them and create a system where the truck driver drives it remotely and controls a fleet, you overcome that problem.”

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Brexit as an excuse to speed up automation

“If U.K. employers embrace automation, 15 million British jobs could be lost, Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane has said. “

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-03/migrants-in-brexit-britain-beware-these-robots-want-your-jobs

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Loss of jobs to AI and Robotics

http://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/pwc-uk-economic-outlook-full-report-march-2017-v2.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/05/japanese-company-replaces-office-workers-artificial-intelligence-ai-fukoku-mutual-life-insurance

JPMorgan Software Reviews Contracts in Seconds Which Normally Takes Their Lawyers 360,000 Hours

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331144-500-ai-learns-to-write-its-own-code-by-stealing-from-other-programs/

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3D Printing – building and first days

My thought after one week with my printer is: If you are a geek and you do not have a 3d printer yet, then go and buy one now. It’s fun, there’s a lot to learn and most of all – the results are really gratifying. I’ve even printed *something useful* with it already (I’ll write about it in one of the next posts)!

Building a 3d printer

Two weeks ago I bought a 3d printer kit from a UK-based producer (http://disegna3d.com/) for £320 + £30 for optional LCD controller. The printer is RepRap based with some propitiatory improvements. All of the used software (firmware, slicing and printing tools) are open source. The controller is based on Arduino Mega with RAMPS shield (specialized motor controller). This means there’s plenty of documentation on the internet and the spare parts and upgrades are wildly available.

The printer comes in a big box full of stuff:

 

It took me roughly 20 hours to build the printer, set it up and then fix the small issues I’ve introduced. Now it looks like this:

 

The build process is fairly simple – the assembly manual is detailed enough. To make the machine I had to cut plastic, solder, apply vinyl, screw tens of screws and mount electronics. It wasn’t very easy, but since I completed this successfully it wasn’t that hard either.

Basics of the 3d printer

My 3D printer is a fused filament fabrication printer (a.k.a. fused deposition modelling). In simple words – it deposits a pieces of plasitc on top on other pieces to make an object – layer by layer.

The printer uses four step motors – one for each of X, Y, Z axis and one for extruder – for pushing a plastic wire to the heated nozzle.

Here’s a short video of first print job:


Close-ups on the nozzle:

 

Print Quality

The print quality is surprisingly good. Much better than expected actually – I compare printouts with Printrbot, which costs twice as much and the result is very similar. My printer does not fill bottom layer as much as the printrbot, but the vertical walls are much smoother.

The printer is most happy to print 3d objects based geometric shapes – rectangles, triangles or circles. The nozzle size 0.4mm makes it easier to print a bit larger objects – flats of 2-10 cm look brilliant. The irregular shapes are usually fine, but a lot depends on the model itself. I’m printing with a layer height of 0.25mm and it the model contains more information than that then the slicing software struggles a bit.

 

Few more or less successful samples are here:

 

Really smooth circle!

 

 

The top layer of this knife holder is smooth enough to be used in my kitchen.

 

…but the 2mm letters are illegible:

This 10cm fully jointed skeleton could be better. It looks better in real size (the pictures are bigger than the real thing).

 

 

Conclusion

I highly recommend the kit from disegna3d.com. The email support is great – the guy is really knowledgeable, passionate and willing to help.

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How to fix Hubsan X4 transmiter

My Hubsan X4 (H107) had developed a problem synchronizing with transmitter (tx to rx). Since I had to disassemble it completely and solder broken battery cable I wasn’t optimistic that I could fix it. But I knew the quadcopter was flying after my repairs, so I kept thinking that the problem may lay somewhere else.

I suspected the transmitter. Symptoms below were appearing in random order:
* Hubsan X4 established link to transmitter (LEDs on), but does not react to throttle
* Link is established, but drops immediately – LEDs flashing on quad-copter or LED flashing on transmitter
* Red LED flashing quickly on the transmitter

I tried all the usual IT magic: turn it off and on again, shake, press all buttons in random order and combinations etc. with no result. I tried to do the factory reset and recalibration – the transmitter did not respond to that. I needed to think outside of the box. And then it hit me!

The solution was (drumroll…) to change the batteries in transmitter.

The Hubsan X4 transmitter has a battery status build in, but it seems to be broken – it was showing more the batteries still have 3/5 of the juice while the batteries were clearly dead.

Facepalm

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