Hasta La Gadget!

The Solar-Breeze robot is the perfect companion to the Roomba, Scooba, and any other robot you have cleaning your house.

An intelligent swimming pool surface skimmer with an attached chlorine dispenser, this robot removes surface debris, including leaves, organic material, pollens, dust, and even suntan oils. As the name states, this robot runs on solar power. Just leave the robot in the pool and it will continuously swim around, cleaning, while the sun shines.

The internal Lithium Ion batteries are charged by the sun during the day, so it can run at night and cloudy days for several hours, as well.

The rear paddle wheel propels the robot through the water while the front paddle wheel scoops the surface debris and film into the collection tray, located underneath. Bumper wheels on the corners rotate the Solar Breeze to a new direction whenever it bumps into the wall. It is designed to stay near the edges of the pool where dirt and debris generally accummulate. It changes directions to get around obstacles or to get to the other end of the pool.

Removing the junk from the pool before it sinks to the pool means no bottom cleaning or filtering. That’s a savings because the pump doesn’t need to be run as much. It’s also a time-saver over the manual pool skimmer.

Tagged with a $500 price tag from Solar Pool Technologies, it’s a little pricey, but you don’t want to deny your cleaning robots a new friend, do you?

In a new demonstration, the nouveau style of high dynamic range photography meets the frontier of SLR video for a dreamy look at San Francisco. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20016044-264.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Deep Tech/a/p

Can’t have your NAS being held back by a wimpy processor, eh? QNAP, a long-standing name in the networked storage biz, just announced a revision in its Turbo NAS lineup, placing Intel’s hot-off-the-fab-line Atom D525 into four Turbo NAS products. The 2-drive TS-259 Pro+, 4-drive TS-459 Pro+, 5-drive TS-559 Pro+ and 6-drive TS-659 Pro+ are all seeing the aforesaid 1.8GHz chip fall into place, enabling transfer speeds as high as 116MB/sec while maintaining low power consumption. Outside of that, it looks as if these guys are the same as they ever were, boasting compatibility with 2.5- and 3.5-inch hard drives, v3.3 of the QNAP NAS management software and support for more RAID variations than you can shake a decently sized stick at. Pricing is all hush-hush at the moment, but we’re sure someone would talk dollars if you dial up the right dealer.

QNAP pops Intel’s 1.8GHz Atom D525 into refreshed Turbo NAS family originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hot Hardware  |  QNAP  | Email this | Comments

Graphic by Christine Daniloff, via MIT News Office

Sometimes when one of my remotes is missing, I interrogate the others: “Where’s your friend? I know you know something!” In the future, with wireless positioning systems, a version of that method might actually almost work.

Researchers at MIT’s Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group think networks of devices that communicate their positions to each other will work better than all of the devices transmitting to a single receiver. The latter is how GPS works, and if you’ve used it, you know it isn’t always very precise. In the lab, MIT’s robots can spot a wireless transmitter within a millimeter.

This seems almost intuitive: the more “eyes” you have on an object, the easier it is to triangulate — the robot version of “the wisdom of crowds.” But the key conceptual breakthrough here isn’t actually the number of transmitters or their network arrangement, but what they’re transmitting. MIT News’s Larry Hardesty writes:

Among [the research group’s] insights is that networks of wireless devices can improve the precision of their location estimates if they share information about their imprecision. Traditionally, a device broadcasting information about its location would simply offer up its best guess. But if, instead, it sent a probability distribution — a range of possible positions and their likelihood — the entire network would perform better as a whole. The problem is that sending the probability distribution requires more power and causes more interference than simply sending a guess, so it degrades the network’s performance. [The] group is currently working to understand the trade-off between broadcasting full-blown distributions and broadcasting sparser information about distributions.

Much of this research is still theoretical, or has only been deployed in lab settings. But Princeton’s H. Vincent Poor is optimistic about the MIT group’s approach: “I don’t see any major obstacles for transferring their basic research to practical applications. In fact, their research was motivated by the real-world need for high-accuracy location-awareness.” Like precisely which cushion my remote control is underneath.

Warning: Very Dry Flash Video Of Robots Finding Things Follows

See Also:

• Viruses Might Help Make Better Batteries
• Nike+ App Ditches Dongle, Gains GPS
• Man Scrawls World's Biggest Message With GPS 'Pen'
• Spime Watch: Shipping Containers and the Future Internet of Things …
• Spime Watch: why the Internet of Things is a fiasco
• New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes

Digg Now this is what you call a juicy standoff. Intel has announced that Paul Otellini will grace the stage at IDF next week with a demo of his company’s next-gen CPU/GPU chip, codenamed Sandy Bridge, and not to be outdone, AMD has immediately retorted with plans to put its own Zacate competitor up on display — at the same time, in the same city, but at a slightly different location. Both Zacate and Sandy Bridge meld general-purpose and graphical processing duties into one slice of silicon, consolidating the traditionally discrete CPU and GPU into a power-efficient do-it-all chip. You’ll find details of where AMD’s impromptu demo will be taking place after the break, whereas the Intel Developer Forum will probably be discoverable by the masses of bespectacled engineers trudging in its general direction. Boy, San Fran’s gonna be one happening place next week!

Continue reading Intel to show off Sandy Bridge at IDF next week, AMD counters with Zacate demo nearby

Intel to show off Sandy Bridge at IDF next week, AMD counters with Zacate demo nearby originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  BusinessWeek  | Email this | Comments