BotGadget

Here’s how Columbus is getting more people to switch to electric cars

Part of the Smart Columbus initiative is increasing the rate of electric vehicle adoption in the area. [credit: Smart Columbus ]

In 2016, the city of Columbus, Ohio beat out nearly 80 other metropolises to win the Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge. The title is more than just bragging rights: there's a $40 million DOT grant—with another $10 million coming from Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Inc.—to help the city put together a holistic approach to using technology to make getting around Columbus safer and more sustainable. I've been keeping an eye on Smart Columbus, as it's known, for a while now. But as is the way with these kinds of large multidisciplinary programs, the first couple of years aren't particularly newsworthy unless you really love hearing about planning meetings. Now, that's starting to change.

Among the projects underway are the Smart Columbus Operating System, an open data platform which will become the backbone of the smart city strategy; a multimodal trip planning app, which is the kind of Fifth Element multipass for which Alex Roy often evangelizes; and various programs to provide mobility solutions to residents needing prenatal care or those with cognitive disabilities. While all of those things are still in relatively early stages of development, Smart Columbus' plan to spur the adoption of electric vehicles has been underway for a bit now.

Since the beginning of 2017, the city has seen an uptick in people choosing battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs that's outstripped both the national and midwest regional average. Specifically, the increase in new EVs since January 2017 has been 121 percent in Columbus, 94 percent for the US as a whole, and just 82 percent for the Midwest.

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[Caleb Kraft] Brings us the Moon, on a Budget

As you might expect from one of our most illustrious alumni, [Caleb Kraft] is a rather creative fellow. Over the years he’s created some absolutely phenomenal projects using CNC routers, 3D printers, laser cutters, and all the other cool toys the modern hacker has access to. But for his latest project, a celebration of the full Moon, he challenged himself to go low-tech. The Moon is something that anyone on Earth can look up and enjoy, so it seemed only fitting that this project should be as accessible to others as possible.

[Caleb] started this project by looking for high-resolution images of the Moon, which was easy enough. He was even able to find sign shops that were more than happy to print a giant version for him. Unfortunately, the prices he was quoted were equally gargantuan. To really be something that anyone could do, this project needed to not only be easy, but as affordable as possible. But where do you get a giant picture of the Moon for cheap?

He eventually found a source for Moon shower curtains (we told you he was creative), which fit the bill perfectly. [Caleb] says they aren’t nearly as detailed as the original images he found, but unless you’ve got your face pressed up against it you’ll never notice anyway. To make the round frame, he used PEX tubing from the hardware store and simply stapled the curtain directly to the soft plastic. The hardest part of the whole project is arguably getting the curtain flat and taut on the PEX ring.

Technically you could stop now and have a pretty slick piece of art to hang on your wall, but [Caleb] took the idea a bit farther and put a strip of RGB LEDs along the inside of the ring. The shower curtain material does a decent enough job of diffusing the light of the LEDs to make it look pretty good, though there’s certainly some room for improvement if you want to get a more even effect over the entire surface. While you’re at it, you might as well add in some additional electronics so the lighting matches the current phase of the real-life Moon.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to settle for a far more diminutive version of Luna and don’t mind using those highfalutin hacker tools that [Caleb] decided to avoid for the good of mankind, we’ve got a project you might be interested in.

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Teardown Of A 50 Year Old Modem

ULA has started to fabricate flight hardware for its Vulcan rocket

The Sights and Sounds of Maker Faire Tokyo

There's something about Japan and electronics that go hand and hand, and there may be no better showcase of that than Maker Faire Tokyo.

Boston Dynamics’ latest robot is a mechanical ostrich that loads pallets

Boston Dynamics has a new YouTube video showing off its newest robot design. This one is a reimagining of the "Handle" robot that the company originally showed off in 2017. Back then the robot could jump four feet in the air and do all kinds of tricks; now its purpose is to load pallets.

Back in 2017 Handle was the company's first public "wheel-legged" robot—that is, the robot is a bipedal design that stands on two legs, but instead of feet at the bottom, the design opts for a set of wheels. Boston Dynamics described the design decision on its website, saying "Wheels are fast and efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs, Handle has the best of both worlds." Wheel legs allowed the original Handle design to have a roughly human form factor (albeit with backward knees) and a top speed of 9 MPH, just by rolling its wheel feet.

The new Handle is no longer humanoid. While it still has wheel-legs with backward-bending knees, it's now more bird-like than human. The two arms have been replaced with a single arm mounted at the top of the bot, making it look like a long neck. The original Handle's top-heavy design has been changed, and now a lot of the robot's mass lives in a large, wildly swinging rear (butt? tail?) that acts a counterweight as the robot lifts things and moves around.

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Friday, March 29