From the breakout success of the Pebble smartwatch to the emergence of the OUYA gaming console, Kickstarter has certainly brought legitimacy to the hardware crowdfunding movement. Join us as editor-in-chief Tim Stevens speaks to Kickstarter co-founder and head of community Yancey Strickler about various Kickstarter successes and the potential struggles candidates have to face to get the crowd on their side. Our chat begins at 12:30PM ET.
Filed under: Misc
What’s a spacecraft need wings for? Packaging, of course. The James Webb Space telescope relies on a 21 foot diameter backplane mirror to steady it, but the assembly needs to fit inside of a 16.5 foot fairing to ride the rocket to the stars. A tight fit, to say the least. Fortunately, NASA technicians have just finished the mirror backplate support structure, a folding wing assembly designed with to safely collapse the beryllium mirror during flight, and expand it again in orbit. “This is another milestone that helps move Webb closer to its launch date in 2018,” remarked Geoff Yoder, the program’s director. Now that the wing assembly is finished, the team can focus on the support fixture for the instrument model, which will complete major construction and allow technicians to connect the finished pieces. We’ll miss old Hubble, sure, but we’re happy to see its successor pulling things together all the same.
Filed under: Misc, Science, Alt
Source: PhysOrg
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In this edition of our weekly question and answer, Ford’s director of electrical and electronics systems Jim Buczkowski chats about increasingly tiny tech and his 007-style dream car. To take a gander at the full rundown of responses, head on past the break.
Filed under: Misc
We honestly hadn’t given it much thought, but now that it’s been brought to our attention, Makerbot and Adafruit really do make an awesome duo. Think about it: one makes 3D printers, the other sells Arduino boards and pretty much everything else a tinkerer could possibly want. So it makes sense that the two companies are teaming up on something: we just heard they’ve started selling a limited edition version of Makerbot’s Replicator 2 3D printer, which will come bundled with three DIY kits you’d normally buy on a site like Adafruit. These include the Raspberry Pi, which you all know very well, along with the Timesquare DIY Watch Kit and MintyBoost, the open-source hardware charger.
You might wonder why someone might need all that in one box, but the idea is that you can use the printer to create the sorts of custom parts that don’t necessarily come with the kits — something like a band to go with your Timesquare watch, or a case for the MintyBoost. All told, you’ll need $2,296 before you can make this your next impulse buy. Don’t get too put off by the price, though — the Replicator 2 by itself would cost $2,199 without any kits included.
Filed under: Misc
Source: Adafruit
Is the next Mos Def or Azealia Banks languishing in a region where there’s no way to get his or her talent across? The producer who’s laid down beats for those stars, ‘Apple Juice Kid’ (aka Stephen Levitin) along with fellow UNC prof Pierce Freelon aim to find out with a new PBS series called Beat Making Lab. In it, the pair take their talent, teaching skills and crates of audio gear to underserved communities in nations like Panama, Senegal and Fiji. The first episode (below the break) takes place in the Congo, where they’re shown setting up a permanent recording studio at the Yole!Africa non-profit community center, then giving a crash course in beat-making tech to six highly motivated students. The Congalese artists use that know-how to lay down tracks that reflect their unique personalities and culture, which are showcased at the culmination of the episode. The series covets more than just a nice performance, though, as one student put it: “When the instructors return to the US, it won’t be the end, but a beginning for us — because we’ll be able to teach others how to create their own beats.”
Filed under: Misc, Home Entertainment, HD, Alt
You can play Fruit Ninja with your fingertips, you can play it with your eyes, so it’s reasonable enough that hand waving should control it too. And while gesture-sensing technology is hardly new, Teutonic outfit pmdtechnologies has been teasing a miniaturized edition of its depth camera that’s ripe for embedding into small consumer electronics devices. All we’ve got so far is a short video (after the break) outlining its potential, but that’s enough to hope someone can go head-to-head with Microsoft in the space.
Filed under: Misc
Via: TechCrunch
And they’re off! Devs, engineers and the simply curious are, right now, pounding away at their keyboards trying to secure themselves a spot at Google’s big I/O event for 2013. The $900 tickets ($300 for a limited number of “academic” passes) are on sale as of 7AM PT / 10AM ET at the source link. Of course, as usual, these babies probably won’t last more than a few minutes so act fast. Though, if you miss out on your chance to attend, you can always live vicariously through us.
Update: Well, that was quick. All those tickets were snatched up in about 50 minutes. So, if you didn’t secure your spot, you’re sadly out of luck. But don’t worry, we’ll be there and will make sure to tell you all about it. With as little gloating as possible, of course.
Filed under: Misc, Internet, Software, Mobile, Google
Source: Google I/O
Mountain View has just picked up some experts on deep neural networks with their acquisition of DNNresearch, which was founded last year by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. The group is being brought into the fold after developing a solution that vastly improves object recognition. As a whole, advances in neural nets could lead to the development of improved computer vision, language understanding and speech recognition systems. We reckon that Page and Co. have a few projects in mind that would benefit from such things. Both students will be transitioning to Google, while Hinton will split his attention between teaching and working with the search giant.
Filed under: Misc, Internet, Google
Via: TechCrunch
Source: University of Toronto
The new Digital Public Library of America (or DPLA) will be kicking off its first big pilot project at the Boston Public Library next month, and it’s now gotten a big shot in the arm courtesy of the US National Archives. It announced today that it’s donating some 1.2 million digital objects to the effort, which range from founding documents to Civil War photos to World War II posters. That initial effort from the DPLA, dubbed the Digital Hubs Pilot Project, aims to stitch together a number of individual digital libraries now spread across the US into one network, and make the items from the National Archives and other institutions freely available to the public. In a statement, US Archivist David S. Ferriero says “the ability to seamlessly search across the collections of major cultural, historical, and research institutions improves democracy through education, and furthers the principles of Open Government.” You can find the full announcement, and more on the DPLA at the source link.
Filed under: Misc
Source: DPLA
If you’re still recovering from losing an hour of sleep this past weekend, you may have forgotten that registration for Google’s annual I/O conference opens tomorrow at 7AM PT. General admission is $900, while full-time students or faculty members of high schools and colleges can score a discounted Academic pass for $300. In order to attend Google’s three-day shindig, you’ll need to be at least 16 years old, have a Google+ profile to sign into the registration process and a Google Wallet account to purchase your ticket. While it remains uncertain if the company will be serving up slices of Key Lime Pie at this year’s conference, we wouldn’t be surprised if some type of dessert-flavored software is announced along with a few other goodies. Google warns that tickets will be limited, so if you plan on attending you’ll definitely want to set yourself a reminder and make sure that all of your ducks are in a row in order to increase your odds of securing a spot.
Filed under: Misc, Software, Google
Via: Droid-Life
Source: Google
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