Author Archives: Pronobis-Szczylik Juliusz

Seakeeper – The ultimate yacht gadget

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The Seakeeper Revolution | Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Boating is without a doubt a very fun activity. Is there anything better than being on a boat during a sunny day, enjoying your life? I doubt it.

but like always, everything has it’s flaws. So does boating. One of those issues is sea sickness. Due to the fact that the boat is rocking it can cause sickness to some people. Also, during tough weather it can be unpleasant or dangerous. That is a very unwanted experience on a boat, especially on luxury boats, which are the main target of the Seakeeper company.

There is a solution to that problem. And no, it’s not magic, it’s simple physics.

So, how does it work?

the Seakeeper machine has a vacuum-enclosed capsule, in which a heavy steel flywheel spins at very high speeds (up to 10 000 rpm.) During the rocking of the boat, the machine is capable of tilting back and forth, left and right, which produces a very powerful gyroscopic torque that can almost fully counteract the bodyroll of the vessle. It’s very clear that luxury demands such convenience, thanks to what this piece of technology became popular very quickly.

Not only does this tool come in very handy, but it also looks spectacular, just take a look!

A bit of conspiration theory – electric cars

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Toyota Invests $624 Million to Make Electric Vehicle Parts | CIO Africa

Electric cars – a huge boom and trend in the automotive industry. Everybody knows that. Everybody began hating internal combustion engines. Everybody wants to switch to EV.

But this whole trend has some flaws.

The first issue with electric cars are the batteries. an average lifespan of such a battery is more or less 10 years. After that time they need to be recycled. But unfortunately recycling of such equipment is far from perfect. Matter of fact, there is yet no perfect solution for recycling them so far. And as we know, battery decomposition is highly pollutive for earth’s environment.

Another issue connected to the batteries is the fabrication process – making of the battery is very pollutive as well. Study found that in order to compensate the use of a tradititional gas car with an electric car, the EV needs to be used for over 10 years. This is a big problem, because nowadays people are living a very consumable lifestyle. Also, most of the cars nowadays are not owned by it’s users, but they are leased – this leads to a car change of every 3 years. So every 3 years a new car has to be made for a customer that is already bored with his “old” 3 year old car and needs to get himself a new one. It’s not hard to figure out that manufacturing a new car is a very bad move in terms of being eco-friendly. And EV’s are all about being eco-friendly, aren’t they?

I’m not saying that electric transport is bad or has no future, without a doubt it is a good alternative, but the worlds is not ready for it yet. The infrastructure needed to run this business is not ready for it yet, so is the mindset of it’s users who are easily misled with whatever car makers feed them with.

Audi and it’s ideas to improve safety

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Audi A8 w luksusowej wersji Horch przed premierą - oficjalne zdjęcia

These days car manufacturers are putting most of their attention to safety, especially when it comes to luxury models. These cars are stuffed with such a big amount of safety features that it’s becoming to be hard to keep the track on. And Audi’s new flagship model is no exception.

We’re talking about the Audi A8 in this case. Among many safety features that this car is fitted with, there is this one that stands out compared to it’s rivals, the BMW 7 series and Mercedes S-class. It is the advanced pre-collision system which purpose is to step up the game in the safety race with other car brands.

This particular system is responsible for improving safety during side impact accidents.

Due to the type of suspension that this model is fitted with, new possibilities in terms of safety are now open. thanks to that, Audi came up with an idea that during an event of the side impact the side of the car that is going to take the hit is going to raise with the blink of an eye. Why? because in case of cars that are of a regular height, unlike SUV’s, the passenger is going to be hit into his upper body zone. As we all know, human chest contains much more important organs than the lower partition of the body. So when the side of the car raises when being crashed into, the car minimizes the risk of health loss, because a human is rather going to survive with broken legs then with collapsed lungs or fractured chest.

Not Only does this feature improve safety, but also this is a very good marketing move, because such attribute is very catchy and surely will attract some clients due to the fact, that the competition has not come up with such a feature yet

The first art exhibition created by AI

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Ai-Da: Portrait of the Robot - Design Museum

The future exhibition, consisting of images, drawings and sculptures created by a humanoid robot, can be seen at ST. John’s College, University of Oxford.

The main star of the exhibition is a robot based on artificial intelligence and is resembling a woman. The concept was created by the director of the art gallery, Aidan Meller. The robot’s name Ai-Da, is a tribute to Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British mathematician and innovator. it is known from publications on the so-called analytical machine, considered to be the first general-purpose programmable computer.

Scientists from Oxford, who are responsible for writing the algorythm used by him, helped to construct the robot artist. Thanks to the built-in camera and mechanical arms (constructed with the help of the university of Leeds), Ai-Da can recreate still life and posing models in real time.

a humanoid robot does not simply recreate previously photographed images. It’s works are created in a way unprecended in a machine, with the use of “sight” and other tools. The cameras in the eyes record objects in front of it and then create a virtual pattern embedded in the coordinate system. These coordinates are used by an advanced mechanical arm that holds a pencil or a brush. In the same way-based on the map it creates and using implemented algorithms-Ai-Da can also create abstract works of art.

The exhibition questions our relationship with technology and the natural world, showing how artificial intelligence and new technologies can be both a progressive and destructive force in our society. Ai-Da as a humanoid robot is itself a work of art that further raises questions related to biotechnology and transhumanism in the gallery statement

Drone Police

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Or to be more precise, Japanese drone police

As we all know, drones became very popular in the recent year. they begun as one off custom builds, hand made by model freaks. Not long later, people realized that drone’s are really cool and can be used not only to fly around the garden.

As always, whenever something becomes trendy, big companies have to lay their hand on it as soon as possible – this is how drones entered mass production and started to be used for various purposes such as filming, shipping cargo, competition etc.

So, when something gets popular, a new law has to be created – a law that would regulate the use of a given product. Drones couldn’t dodge that and nowadays a regular drone user has to obey strict rules. For example, flying a drone is prohibited in most big cities. Of course, rules are made to be broken, so various cities come up with new solutions.

Japan, which is the topic of the article came up with a pretty spectacular solution – they invented the drone police.

The drone police unit is armed with big drones that are equipped with special nets made for catching other drones that are breaking the law. The way it works is very simple. Police drone simply approaches the criminal drone and attempts to catch it into its net, preventing it from further activities.

It may sound silly, but hey, if it looks stupid but it works – it works

Car metro – Tesla underground tunnels

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Elon Musk proposes North Miami Beach Loop transit tunnel system

Historic moment for Elon Musk: The Boring Company has received approval for a plan to build a network of tunnels under the streets of Las Vegas. The project will be an extended version of the nearly 3-kilometer long tunnel that already serves the visitors of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

-The Boring Company, the largest of its projects, enters a new phase
 
-Elon Musk’s company intends to build a 46 km long network of car tunnels under the Las Vegas Strip

-As part of the underground infrastructure, 51 stations serviced by Tesla vehicles will be built

Tunneling company Elon Muska has been given the green light to implement its largest project to date. Clark County government has approved a plan to build the Vegas Loop, a 46 km long network of tunnels located beneath the Las Vegas Strip. The basis for the project is the first 2.7 km long tunnel built by The Boring Company. It is currently used to transport visitors to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Elon Musk’s goal is to reduce traffic congestion in cities using a network of underground tunnels served by Tesla vehicles. Initially, it was assumed that autonomous Tesla the size of a van would move in the tunnels. Currently, the company plans to use human-controlled cars in its plans. According to critics, this project is nothing more than a less effective version of the metro.

The new version of Las Vegas Loop will consist of 51 stations, which will ultimately serve 57k passengers within an hour, the company said. Stops will be located near the most famous casinos and next to the new city stadium. The project aims to enable travel from station to station without stopping at intermediate stops, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal. The implementation of Musk’s project will not require any funding from the public fund. The Boring Company is expected to cover all construction costs, and once the tunnel network is operational, it will pay a quarterly toll to the city depending on how much it earns in tolls.

Tesla’s ad:
 The next step in the implementation of the project that has been going on for years is a breakthrough event for the company. The Boring Company initiatives to build a tunnel system in Los Angeles and Chicago were never realized. Tesla may also turn out to be the beneficiary of the investment, because a large fleet of vehicles will be needed to operate the Las Vegas Loop. Moreover, it is a great way to showcase the capabilities of Tesla cars to people potentially interested in purchasing an electric car. The Boring Company is currently talking about building a tunnel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

What is Big Data?

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To all us gathered here it sounds like a silly question. But is it?

Big data - Co to jest? - Integral Solutions

According to data from 2018, over 3,7 billion of people are using the internet. That’s almost half of the world’s population. We can obviously tell from the very beginning, that this internet thing is kind of a big deal. For example, Google has to process (answer) over 40 thousand questions per second, which is around 40 trillion bytes of data (yes, 40 000 000 000 000 bytes which is equivalent to 40 000 gigabytes). No wonder that Google is running over 3 million servers located mainly in the US, Asia and Europe.

Big Data is just big, variable data. Processing and analysing the data is hard and takes a lot of effort to be extracted, but companies who gather all this information are using very fast servers (computers) to manage and store such a big amount of evidence. Also, data, in general, is very valuable – it’s easy to say, that it’s the most valuable thing in the whole world because it leads to gaining a new collection of pieces of information about clients (internet users). The concept of Big Data was created or expanded with the rise of the internet because the speed and ability of processing of data have picked up very drastically.

The value of Big Data basically depends on how you manage them and not only by leaning on their amount. The data which are generated by various sources can be easily used in an IT trade company in order of lowering the costs, reducing time, producing a new commercial offer or creating new, better strategical decisions.

Mass data connected with highly advanced analysis in the company of new high tech tools also support business processes  such as evaluating the causes of some errors, faulty work, generating various coupons in all kinds of web stores, calculating the risk of many transactions or detecting a behaviour which could bare the abuse of certain company/organization.

So, summarizing and generally speaking, big data is all the data which is available to gather by the usage of the internet about everything – people, companies, shares, transactions, conversations, preferences, any kind of goods, history etc.

Now on to the second part of the topic, what is 5V? This abbreviation stands for Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity and Value – these are the crucial keys which make big data such a big deal.

Volume – it is the general amount of all the gathered and stored data during the usage of the world wide web. The size of the data determines the value and potential insight, and whether it can be considered big data or not.

Variety – The type and personality of the data. This helps people who analyze it to effectively use the resulting insight. Big data draws from text, images, audio, video; plus it completes missing pieces through data fusion.

Velocity – this term stands for the speed of harvesting the data throughout the internet. As mentioned above, the velocity of data processing is painstaking but crucial. This forces the companies which are interested in collecting big data to invest bulk amounts of money into the hardware which is going to be able to extract all the demanded information on time. In order to increase the velocity, a process called sampling is widely used.

Veracity – this is sort of an extended definition for big data, which refers to both the quality and value of the data. The quality of data can is very variable, so it is very important to squeeze everything valuable from the product and store it in the correct order

Value – The value of the end product which is important specifically for the user himself. All the data itself has no value at all, but there are a lot of people, and especially companies/enterprises who are willing to pay unbelievable amounts of money for the final product. Take a look at Facebook, for example, just look around it and you’ll quickly realize, that there’s a suspiciously big amount of advertisements which are actually connected to what you are interested in, what you have recently talked about or what you just googled. All these ads are basing on big data which tells them who likes what kind of product

Big data seems to be a ground-breaking invention when speaking of technological progress, but in my opinion, this is too much to handle for such a simple creature, a human. The process of raising Big Data was like a domino, something that couldn’t be stopped once it was launched. The demand for this product became so high, that it couldn’t be undone at this point. In these days, Instagram knows nearly everything about its users. Study shows, that an average user of Instagram has his own profile which has over 900 pages of information gathered about them – this is how Big Data works. It’s something brilliant, but also the level of invigilation is simply scary. Big Data to me is just very controversial, it helps in many situations such as predicting terrorist acts, prevent environmental crisis or a crash of the market, but also can violate or privacy – because what else is important to us if not privacy?

  “they” just know literally everything about us. A movie called “Snowden” is a great visualization of what I mean – because what else is important to us if not privacy?

A car capable of changing its own color

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BMW Color Changing Car: This BMW car will change color like a chameleon! As  soon as you press the button, the color scheme starts … BMW iX Flow World's  First Color Changing

Electrophoretic technology was used to enable the color change function of the BMW IX Flow. – this car dresses and expresses the mood of the driver or its passengers. That is why we tried to create the appropriate technology to enable new experiences – said Christopher Grote, vice president of the bavarian company responsible for electronic solutions during the press conference. Changing the color is also possible while driving, e.g. when we are driving in hot weather and the black color becomes hotter. Then we press the appropriate button, pop… and we change che color of our car to white. In the implementation of this project, BMW cooperated with E-link, which has Sony and Amazon among its customers, and the technology was previously used in Kindle readers. The BMW E-link application works thanks to a special foil containing colored pigments, which covers the entire car. Through stimulation with electrical stimuli, the pigments float to the surface, and as a result, its color changes. “the challenge is not so much the technology as applying to the car”, admitted Christopher Grote.

Adrian van Hooydonk, head designer of the brand and head of BMW Group design makes no secret that the color change technology in the IX Flow concept is only part of BMW’s plan to develop products that stimulate all the senses and are “human oriented”. BMW intends to spend over 30 billion euro on these innovations by 2025. “For us, digitization is the total experience and emotion it can create”, said van Hooydonk. BMW was going to show the IX Flow at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) taking place in Las Vegas. The company planned a full program there with the participation of partners and media, but eventually abandoned this presentation in favor of an online premiere in Munich. The reason was the increase in the incidence of coronavirus.

The ability to change the color of the car, also while driving, is a technological novelty, but not a revolution. There has been a reflective chameleon varnish on the market from some time. A car painted with it may have different shades depending on how the light shines on the surface of the car. There are also paints that change color under the influence of heat, and soon in Audi cars it will be possible to do this with the use of an on-board computer at any time. Adaptive color change can contribute to additional environmental benefits. According to Audi, cars with black lacquer consume 1-2 percent more energy in the summer, so more energy is needed to cool down the hot air. In its “colorful” strategy, Audi plans to use special foils applied to the base coat. Modifying the displayed shades results in a different color. However, it will not be a change as drastic as in the BMW IX Float, because the color will change, for example, from light blue to darker blue.

3D scanning

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How does 3D scanning work?

SHINING3D EinScan HX 3D scanner

3D scanners, or to be precise Optical Measuring Machines are touchless metrologic systems made to catch data about a geometry of a given object – even those that are most complicated. During the process of 3D scanning, or in other words 3D digitalization, they change real objects into a shape of a precise and sophisticated digital model, in most cases saved as a network of STL triangles, which could easily be put under the process of quality control or reverse engineering.

Optical measuring machines stand out with a very good versatility and agilit. With these undoubtable benefits, there is no lack of quality in terms of measurement, where accuracy is more or less than 0.02mm.

A good example of such a machine is SCANTECH Simscan, which being on 20 cm long and weighs 0,5kg.

Types of 3D scanners

Each scanner  is built out of a projection unit and set of cameras that are angled in a known process of calibration. This is necessary to generate a trustworthy data that are describing the measured object. Calibration is about scanner observing a special plate being put in various positions, so that the system can set the angle between the cameras, that could have changed with the influence of temperature and shocks.

Due to the type of the projection unit, there are two main scanner types:

  • Structural light scanners
  • Laser scanners

Modern structural light scanners mostly use LED projector and two cameras, which are tracking variation of displayed lines. This type of a system requires tripod or a robot on which the head would be mounted. Such a measurement takes place with in a static way. It means, that during a single scan neither the head nor the scanned object cannot move.

Laser scanners use a laser emitter which purpose is to light stipes on the measured object, whereas two cameras are registering their deformations. The process of measurement is carried out in a dynamic way, which means that the system is generating data in a constant way, without any interruption of singular scans, as it would be in structural light scanners. Thanks to that, the “tripod” a human holding the scanner that significantly increases the measurement and mobility features.

Honda Assist-e

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Or in other words, a system that is capable of self-leveling and driving a motorcycle. After a few years since this concept has been introduced, Honda decided to step up their game and introduce a revolutionary system that is capable of doing such stuff, that even an experienced biker is not able to perform.

The system has been introduced first during Consumer Electronics expo in 2017, Las Vegas. It was fitted to an electric motorcycle, which was able to move on it’s own in low speeds. Not long ago, a second presentation of this project has been revealed and it’s easy to tell, that it made a big progress.

The solution is based on actuators that are placed in the rear part of the vehicle, mounted directly to the Axle-this is how the whole structure is being controlled. Frankly speaking, the whole mechanism is far from being compact, but it creates a feeling like it’s a ready to use production unit and would be ready to use with various Honda motorcycles.

Riding Assist-e is based on a system of sensors, that are controlling a gyroscope mechanism that is responsible to prevent the vehicle from tripping. On the presentation, we can see that the bike can stand and drive on it’s own.

Also, in the near future Honda is planning to reduce the risk of road accidents thanks to this system