Viewing profile — MechSkep

Looks good for robotics applications. The power density is comparable to the low end of brushless motors, and it can use hydro-carbon fuels which are about 25 times more energy den…

You've made some good points in this thread about actuation. Can you point me to more info on SCHAFT's actuation strategy? I've been trying to turn up info, but haven't found anyth…

I have a plan for overhauling/replacing Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing. The way it's done now consumes way too much design time, and honestly is a bit silly considering the…

Yep, and it makes sense for Tesla to do this. It's a new product, and the information they collect from maintenance and inspections is going to be invaluable for future revs.

There was no difference between the control experiment and fish exposed to parts made with FDM. Read the article to see how FDM could become toxic/harmful, turns out it didn't.

Very hype heavy article. No mention of Form Labs who is already on the market with a similar product.

So there was a DARPA initiative to do stuff like this back in the 90's/early 2000's: http://archive.darpa.mil/darpatech99/Presentations/dsopdf/ds... Turns out it's easy in controll…

After the single lethal attack in 1945: "Several Japanese civilians have visited ... to offer their apologies for the deaths that took place here, and several cherry trees have bee…

I was looking for this workflow for my research, and ended up going with an ipython notebook.

Ah, well here is where I could use some advice. I disagree with the way they have gone about their hardware both in the sensing electronics and the hive box itself. I don't want to…

Weight is another good one, it drives our complexity and cost up but is hugely important. Most extant hive monitoring tools record weight. NASA uses some of these measures to track…

It's hard to say with CCD being so large and varied. One thing we know is that beehives exposed to certain pesticides [1] are much more likely to collapse. [1] http://www.hsph.harv…

We certainly have a microphone. There is such a richness in the sounds a colony produces. Our minimal sensing package also contains temperature and humidity sensing. We're shooting…

One of my side projects is building a sensing electronics package to monitor the health and activity of beehives. The idea is to make it easier for someone just starting to maintai…

Okay... but actual animals do way better: http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_the_secrets_of_nature_s... As a rule of thumb, any walking robot that uses servos can't approach the …

Neat. Looking forward to it.

This looks great! I'd like to use it to ease up the tech overhead for some mobile robotics applications. Is there anyway that the user's position in the world frame can be accessed…

So this has popped up on HN before, and again I would caution that this is snake oil. The sparse technical details they give are misleading, and they still haven't shown that their…

Kinda disappointed the total emphasis is on him being a "hell of a good pilot" instead of the control engineers who allowed the plane to compensate for losing a wing. There's no wa…

Where did you get that yield stress number? Is it from that graph with Aluminum and the plastics? Because that graph shows modulus(stiffness), not strength. Which is pretty hinky w…

I'm skeptical too, but don't count it out because the fibers aren't woven together. The weaving is not where the strength comes from, and it's usually not omnidirectional. If this …

Does this even work? It's just an IR detector, and you can be pretty sure that the sun is a bigger emitter than security spotlights...

I did my undergrad with Jon Clark! Great guy. It's cool to see a few bio-robotics people on HN

Great! How far does the book go in terms of advanced approaches? Up to the current state of research?

What about convolutional neural nets? They weren't mentioned, but that's really what most of the deep learning approaches use...