Category Archives: New technology

Electrathon of Tampa Bay Comes to TBMMF!

Posted on February 10, 2012 | 1 Comment

King High School Electrathon is coming to Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire on March 31, to represent Electrathon of Tampa Bay and showcase their competitive electric race car.

An electrathon is a race of custom built three or four wheeled electric vehicles, somewhat similar in overall appearance to a Go-Kart, but powered by an electric motor and batteries. Electrathon class vehicles are principally defined and constrained by length and width (12 feet long and 4 feet wide maximum) and by battery weight and chemistry (73 lbs, sealed lead acid). The basic format is to determine which car can travel the furthest distance in one hour’s time within the limitations of battery weight and other factors mentioned above.

King High School’s Electrathon Car will be at our event, and they may have their second care, currently under construction, on hand as well. We’re delighted to welcome King High School and Electrathon of Tampa Bay to Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire!

 

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Posted in Craftspeople, DIY, Hobbysts, New technology, Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire, Young Makers

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“Get on the Shelf” at Walmart

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 4 Comments

Less shark tank and more koi pond, Walmart’s new inventor’s contest, Get on the Shelf, invites anyone in the U.S. to submit a video of a self-developed product between now and February 22 for a chance to “Get on the Shelf” , at Walmart – at least an online shelf , and in some select stores. Winners will be chosen by popular vote  at the website starting March 7.

According  to the Huffington Post, “The initiative is headed by @WalmartLabs, the company’s e-commerce and social development platform. “We know there are some great undiscovered products that have not yet reached our shelves,” Venky Harinarayan, senior VP of global e-commerce and co-head of @WalmartLabs, said in a statement. “We are removing these barriers by giving anyone a chance to launch their product at Walmart and reach millions of shoppers nationwide.”"

Want to be the next hot Walmart item? Get your “must have” creation on video and head over to http://www.getontheshelf.com/

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Posted in Contests, Entrepreneurs, Inventions, Makers, New technology

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Potato Grower Grows Inventive with E-Sorter

Posted on January 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Agsort founder and veteran potato farmer Greg Jones, of St. Augustine, at one time laid claim to being the largest, daily-volume, chip potato shipper in North America,  harvesting, washing, sorting, and loading as many as 4,600,000 pounds of potatoes per day, enough to fill 92  tractor-trailer loads.

These days he’s shipping out high-tech farming equipment, principally his potato sorting invention called the E-sorter, which he debuted at the 2012 Potato Expo in Orlando earlier this month (yes, farmers have expos, too!)

Jones created the E-Sorter, he told the trade magazine, The Packer,  because he wanted to give growers a better option at a better price, noting that there many of the current high-tech sorting and grading machines are designed with the process in mind, but not the grower.

“If the growers can’t afford to buy the machine, it’s no good to anyone,” he told the Packer.

“I started working on this idea while I was still farming,” Jones said at his booth on the Potato Expo trade show floor. “I worked on it for three years then and another five after I got out of growing.”

According to the Agsorter website, “The core of the system is the scanner module. The sealed enclosure of this is approximately the size of a short file drawer and installs/uninstalls in the same way. Inside there is a clear plastic tube, fastened in a vertical position to the top and bottom of the enclosure, with matching holes to allowing the product to pass through, falling straight down from top to bottom. This is where the scanning takes place.”

The machine uses nearly 1,500  infra-red, red, green, and blue LEDs which flash on and off independently 100,000 times per second, enabling it to sort 8-9 potatoes per second per lane – about a large truckload every 30 minutes.

You can see the E-sorter in action in the rather mesmerizing video below.

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Posted in Entrepreneurs, Florida Inventors, Inventions, New technology

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Retooling Public Libraries as Hackerspaces

Posted on December 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

In Libraries make Room for High Tech Hackerspaces, NPR reports this weekend on a promising trend in the redefinition of libraries, or perhaps more accurately, in the growing realization of the amazing and wonderful potential of public libraries not only as pivotal centers of learning and discovery, but also of creation!

Learning is for Everyone (LI4E) , the community learning organization organizing Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire, has long believed libraries and museums  can and should be  key learning centers  in our communities.   We wholeheartedly agree with Thomas Gokey,  who teaches a course in Innovation in Public Libraries and narrates the film below,  that libraries are “democracy engines… places where people go to inform themselves and inform their own lives…” , where we “learn to hack the social codes we live in.”

With Maker Bots bringing 3D printing capabilities within reach of more people, efforts are already underway at libraries across the country to create public hackerspaces.  The Fayetteville Free Library in upstate New York calls their planned  Fabulous Laboratory, an “evolution of a computer lab”. The “FabLab”  will have about 8,000 square feet and employ computer driven power tools  Allen County Public Library, in Fort Wayne, IN has created a hackerspace portable in a trailer in its parking lot.

We love the notion, proposed in the film,  of “the world as one big public library,” especially if its got 3D printers and power tools!

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Posted in DIY, DIY Fun, Hobbysts, Inventions, Makers, New technology

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Sarah Miller Caldicott@TEDxPeachtree: Inventing the Future, Edison Style

Posted on December 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America  has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation….Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward”  Thomas Alva Edison   

Sarah Miller Caldicott, the great grand niece of Thomas Edison, is on a mission to reignite the spirit of innovation that drove her uncle.

“He looked at what was needed in the world and how he could meet that need,” Caldicott told MyCentralNewJersey, in an article about her new ebook, What Would Thomas Edison Be Doing Today?”.  ”He would look at important trends, the needs in society and the gaps, and how he could meet these needs.”

“He also applied what might be called ‘fanstastical’ thinking or thinking that might be borrowed from science fiction. He was not only inspired by Jules Verne and other science fiction writers, he also wrote science fiction. So then he was inspired by these fantastical ideas that pushed the boundaries of logic — that’s when innovation happens.”

We’re at a critical juncture in society, says Caldicott, that once again requires us to “dig deeply into our innovative DNA.”    Check out Caldicott’s great TEDxPeachtree talk below for an inspiring look at Edison’s inventive process.

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Posted in DIY, Inventions, New technology

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Mobile touch-typing with a simple chord keyboard

Posted on November 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

Tampa Bay Inventors Council president, Wayne Rasanen, of New Port Richey, is hoping for a kick-start for his chord keyboard Input Terminal.

“The “It Types” keyboard has only ten keys, one for each finger and by taping one or by holding one and pressing another, you can create 100 keystrokes. This reduces the footprint of the keyboard to about the size of a credit card, ideal for mobile technology. The design is very versatile & can be used with one hand or two, and for a wide variety of uses.”

Read more at Kick-Starter and at Mr. Rasanen’s website In10did .

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Posted in DIY, Florida Inventors, Inventions, New technology, Tampa Bay inventors

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Bill Gates on Building a Better Battery

Posted on November 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Click on the image to see an interesting discussion between Bill Gates and  MIT Professor Donald Sadoway about the importance of new battery storage technology and Sadoway’s focus on the development of a “liquid metal” battery.

Meeting the world’s energy demands with reliable renewable energy resources is the mother of the necessity of building a better battery.

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Posted in Inventions, New technology

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Adjustable Eyeglass Lenses: A New Way to See the Future

Posted on November 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

A recent news piece about the availability of “world’s first and only electronically-focusing prescription eyewear ” debuting in Tampa Bay brings to the forefront vision technology with the potential to change vision care in a dramatic way, and not just for people who can afford the $1K plus emPower eyewear.

The idea of adjustable focus eyeglasses has been around since Ben Franklin invented the biofocal.  The emPower version uses liquid crystals in the lenses to allow a wearer to turn the “close up” bifocal portion of the lenses on or off as needed.  With the necessary power charger, the eyeglasses run over $1200, out of reach for most folks.  But other efforts are underway to create far more affordable versions.

As Learning is for Everyone readies for our 2nd TEDxYouth@TampaBay event this coming Saturday, there’s probably no more apropos an example of the potential of this new(ish) technology than the great 2009 TED Talk, by  Josh Silver of a mechanical version that he hopes to distribute to a billion people in need by 2020.   Silver is working to get his already low cost version –  less than $20 a pair – down to a dollar a pair!

He began commercially marketing adjustable eyeglasses in the US through his company, TruFocals, for under $900.   But he continues to work on his low cost, version through his foundation, the Centre for Vision in the Developing World. 

(Whoops! We got our facts wrong.  Our apologies to Superfocus – here’s the correct info, with appreciation to Superfocus for their understanding!)

Adjustable focus glasses for presbyopia (aging eyes), called Superfocus, first became commercially available in the US in 2009. Superfocus glasses, developed by Chief Technologist Dr. Stephen Kurtin, mimic the natural focusing action of the youthful human eye. They allow the user to instantly change the focus of their lens to see objects at any length via a slider on the bridge. Unlike bifocals, trifocals or progressive lenses, the region of sharp focus is not limited to a small zone, but instead spans a user’s entire field of vision. You can read more about the science behind these glasses in this NY Times article.

 

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Posted in Inventions, New technology

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