Pedal Power - Charge your gadgets while cycling

Siva Cycle Atom Uses Your Bike To Charge Your Phone

click here to watch kickstarter page and video

In recent years, cycling has become less of a transportation choice and more of a passionate lifestyle, something people wear as a badge of honor and extoll like a religion. These cyclists already have all the reasons they need to choose a bike over any other mode of transport, and one new Kickstarter campaign is giving them another reason to choose pedal power. As smartphones and other devices become more integrated into our daily lives, it has become important to keep them fully charged at all times. This is rarely a problem for those who drive instead of ride, but diehard cyclists have had to look for other power options. The idea of transforming a turning wheel into power isn’t new, but Aaron Latzke and David Delcourt have fine tuned this approach with the easy-to-install Siva Cycle Atom, a bicycle-powered generator for the modern city dweller. Like other generators, the Atom uses a turning wheel to capture energy and hold it for later use. Unlike most others, however, it stores this energy in a removable and waterproof battery pack. As shown off in their Kickstarter video, cyclists ride to their local coffee shop, remove the Atom battery pack and charge their iPhones as they enjoy a morning cup of joe. The Atom can be plugged back into the generator afterwards and gather even more energy from the wheels.

A step forward in Mimicking Natural skin.

New research shows how arrays of tiny electronic devices can achieve human-skin-like sensitivity to mechanical force.
    

Arrays of transistors made of nanowires could form the basis of a new class of devices nearly as sensitive to mechanical force as human skin is. The inventor of the technology, Zhong Lin Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech, says it has immediate applications in human-machine interfaces. For example, it could be used to capture electronic signatures by recording the distinctive force an individual applies while signing. Down the road, says Wang, his group’s pressure sensor arrays could equip robotics and prosthetics with a human-like sense of touch.
    Electronically replicating the sensitivity of the human sense of touch has proved extremely challenging. Recently, some research groups have demonstrated that micro- or nanoelectronics assembled on flexible, bendable substrates could monitor pressure changes at a fairly high level of detail and thus could potentially act as a kind of “artificial skin.” In the new research, Wang’s group demonstrates nanoelectronics that offer at least a 15-fold enhancement in sensor density and spatial resolution compared to the previous approaches. Further, the electronic properties of the nanowires allowed the researchers to demonstrate through high-resolution imaging an improvement in sensitivity of two to three orders of magnitude. The density, resolution, and sensitivity of the sensors, says Wang, is comparable to that of the skin of a human finger.