Hasta La Gadget!

I’m not writing this post only because the company involved has the awesome name of Schlumpf, but it certainly played a big part. The gadget in question is a new kind of belt-drive for bikes, the Advanced Belt Drive System, or ABDS.

The innovation here isn’t in the belts: the drive uses standard 14mm-pitch belts. It’s in the modular setup that uses a few standardized parts which can be changed around to work with pretty much any bike or belt you like.

Belt drives have a few advantages over chains, the most obvious being cleanliness. The belts require no lubricant, so there’s no dirt-collecting oil to soil your pants. They’re also lighter than chains. But there are disadvantages, too. For regular gearing, the “wrap-angle” around the rear sprocket is not big enough to prevent slippage. The answer has been to tense the belt, making it very tight. This increases wear and also reduces efficiency.

With Schlumpf’s ABDS, the bottom bracket has a gearing system, which means the rear sprocket can be bigger and pre-tensioning isn’t needed. Because of this, a bigger pitch (gap between teeth) can be used. 14mm is the industry-standard, but this is often reduced to 11mm for pre-tensioned systems just to get enough teeth engaged around the small sprocket.

The parts slot together like Meccano, and by combining several thin sprocket “plates”, you can make a kind of laminated sprocket of any width. The “chainline” can also be adjusted by moving around these plates relative to the adapters that hold them in place. And yes, you could even put one on a fixed-gear bike: Schlumpf makes an adapter for track hubs.

Whether belts will ever replace chains is questionable, but they’re getting more and more popular. Hell, even I want to try one out now.

ABDS Advanced Belt Drive System [Schlumpf via Eco Velo]

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• Dura-Ace Bike-Chain Cufflinks
• Confusing Bike-Chain Clock Runs Backwards and Forwards

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Apple claims that its iPhone 4 “retina display” has pixels so small the human eye can’t distinguish one from the other. Researchers at the University of Michigan say they can beat that pixel density by an order of magnitude — and make screens that are simpler to make and more efficient to illuminate too.

The technology — called plasmonic nanophotonics — works a little like the rainbow, if light were refracted through nano-thin metal grates instead of raindrops. Vary the spacing between the grates, and white light appears in different colors. Instead of the multiple layers of glass, metal polarizers, and filter sheets in a conventional LCD, the polarizer is the color filter. The whole color component of the screen is a three-layer all-metal dielectric stack.

The energy savings are potentially tremendous. According to Michigan engineering professor expert Jay Guo, only about 5 percent of the backlight in an LCD screen actually reaches our eyes. This means we could use the technology in optical chip-to-chip communications, or even fiberoptics without the fiber. It could also be used to make high-efficiency, high-resolution projectors, or flexible color screens.

And yes — it does allow for the production of extremely tiny color pixels, less than 10 microns. That U of M logo in the first image above? It’s about 12 x 9 microns, or 1/6 the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan via R&D Magazine. Images courtesy of the University of Michigan and Apple.

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• iPhone 4's 'Retina' Display Claims Are False Marketing
• IPhone 4 'Retina Display' Suffering from Discolored Blobs
• Display Expert: iPhone 4 Resolution 'Significantly Lower' Than …
• Floating Nanosheets Could Be the Plywood of Nanotechnology

A new patent application from Apple aims to remove yet more componentry from its already minimal devices. The invention combines the orifices for microphone and headphone into one, promising a kind of double-penetration for iPhones.

In this design, the microphone would sit at the bottom of the cavity into which slips the headphone jack, and “is coupled to the body such that the plug aperture and the cavity provide an acoustic path to the microphone.”

Not only does this close off an open hole through which dust and dirt may enter, it could actually be used in conjunction with a normal, hole-using mic to provide noise-cancelation for phone-calls and even provide directional recording via something called “beamforming”.

This obsession with stripped-down hardware will clearly never end. We’re down to one main button and a few dedicated switches on the iPad, along with four holes in the edges. I don’t think Apple will be satisfied until it has printed its multi-touch circuitry directly onto our retinas and fingers.

Audio Jack with Included Microphone [USPTO via New Scientist]

See Also:

• Apple Wises Up, Improves iPhone's Headphone Compatibility …

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

After Microsoft’s Surface multitouch table premiered, early implementations were limited: retail stores, hotels, restaurants, bored executives goofing off in board rooms, and university researchers modeling totally kickass Dungeons & Dragons games.

But why waste your time controlling virtual armies of NPC henchmen when you can control REAL armies of tiny robots? Or giant ones? That’s the Doctor Doom move. You don’t even need to peek at your WWDDD? bracelet from inside your hideous metal mask.

Nobody at the UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab (as far as I know) has a hideous metal mask. And they haven’t even built the robots yet — so this is still at the D&D level of virtual awesomeness/villainy, not cartoonish super-villainy.

But there’s important, amazing, yet simple tech at work in this proof-of-concept demo. The researchers use multitouch to send the robots scurrying around to execute commands, but also to pan and zoom a map of where they’re operating, create virtual subcontrollers, and display text and video data, all within the same interface.

The lab’s work focuses (among other things) on human-robot interaction, robot vision, interactive learning, and disaster response. The ease-of-use of multitouch controls is clearly valuable in all of those scenarios. As Evan Ackerman gushes at BotJunkie, “It’s not even that there’s anything that innovative going on here, strictly… It’s just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.” Ackerman also notes that very little innovation in robotics research is happening at the UI level; the fact that a consumer/commercial product can be introduced on this end solves a slew of practical problems for existing robotics, not to mention potentially putting control of the technology in the hands/fingertips of many more people.

Now imagine if this research merged with the retail applications of Surface already in use. You go to a bar, touch a table, order a drink — and a robot navigates the room and brings it to you.

From UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab via the Microsoft Robotics Blog and BotJunkie.

See Also:

• D&D + Microsoft Surface = Unheard-of Levels of Radness
• First Look: Microsoft Milan Surface Computer — A Table That Knows What’s On It
• Microsoft to Install Surface Systems in AT&T Stores
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• Quadrocopters Work Together to Lift Loads, Destroy Mankind
• Robo Spiders Are Multilegged Mechanical Marvels
• Gallery: Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based Drinkers

Follow us for real-time tech news: Tim Carmody and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

There’s an app for almost everything. Now add one that can run calculations from a supercomputer on a Nexus One phone in real time and without the need for internet connectivity.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center have created an Android app that can take simulations from the powerful Ranger supercomputer and solve them further on the mobile phone.

“The idea of using a phone is to show we can take a device with one chip and low power to compute a solution so it comes as close to the one solved on a supercomputer,” John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told Wired.com.

Many researchers depend heavily on supercomputers capable of millions of calculations per second to simulate problems and advance their studies. Texas Computing Center’s Ranger supercomputer went live in 2008 with 62,976 CPU cores, 123 terabytes of memory, 1.73 petabytes of disk space and 579.4 teraflops of performance.

But massive machines such as the Ranger are not easily available. Researchers have to book time on them and they aren’t available for computations that need to be done quickly. Supercomputers also can’t be carried into field experiments. Having a device in hand that could help solve a problem quickly can be handy.

That’s where a technique called “certified reduced basis approximation” comes into play. The method lets researchers take a complex problem, define the values that are most relevant to the problem and set the upper and lower bounds. David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and Anthony Patera, a professor at the school, refined the technique to make it work on a smartphone. They did it by including strong error bounds that show how close they are to an actual supercomputer solution.

“It’s demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,” says Peterson.

The app is just one half of the solution, though. A supercomputer still has to create the reduced model that can be transferred to the phone as an app. When outside the office, researchers can enter values into the app to find answers quickly or visualize data.

For instance, for a problem in fluid dynamics, researchers will spend a day or two simulating a model using a supercomputer like Ranger. Of that computation, they will take a small amount of data and store it on a server as a reduced model.

This reduced model can be used to perform simulations on a cellphone, offering answers near instantaneously for use in real-world applications.

“The payoff for model reduction is large when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone,” Knezevic told a writer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “That’s a speed up of orders of magnitude.”

There’s one disadvantage though. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not universal.

“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone,” says Peterson. “What he would develop would be specific to the problem.”

For now, the researchers have made their app available through files on SourceForge.

Check out their video showing how the app works:

See Also:

• Sony’s PS3 Update Could Affect Supercomputer Users
• Personal Supercomputers Promise Teraflops on Your Desk
• Record Amount of Supercomputer Time Means New Science
• How to Upgrade a Supercomputer, 37376 Chips at a Time

Photo: Texas Advanced Computing Center