#Nest Thermostats Now Link Up to Products From LG Philips Whirlpool and Others Last June, Nest announced some big names in the first round of integration with its thermostat,
which acts as the hub for its smart home platform. This week at the Consumer electronics Show 2015, the list of names has gotten bigger.
LG, Whirlpool, Lutron, Osram and Philips are just some of the companies that have announced integration available now
when the Nest thermostat senses that the house is occupied. Door locks such as Chamberlain garage doors or the August Smart Lock can set the Nest thermostat to its"home"setting as soon as the doors are unlocked.
Safety features are also part of the integration for devices such as Philips'LED Hue bulbs and Beep, a Wi-fi-connected music dial.
thermostats, pool pumps and water heaters), the savings could be considerable for many regions like Texas,
Chargepoint is one of the companies that also announced it is integrating its residential EV charger with the Nest thermostat h
which its inverters will trip offline, as well as extending how long each inverter waits for disruptions to correct themselves before switching off,
Enphase CEO Paul Nahi said in a Monday interview. This is the kind of basic mart inverterfunctionality that Germany has introduced already for its solar-impacted grid.
In the United states, Hawaii and California are the furthest along in putting together advanced inverter features to be included in new solar installations.
But Enphase already has nearly 8 million inverters worldwide, all designed with software-defined functionality to provide flexibility in how theye used,
and ask inverters to provide reactive power or ramping mitigation as a irtual power plant, all from the company Petaluma, Calif. headquarters,
Enphase is far from the only player in the distributed solar universe that had the foresight to connect its inverters to a two-way communications network.
and Department of energy researchers to show that smart inverter technologies can allow more solar per circuit--an important concession for HECO,
theye likely to look to the inverters already installed as possible tools for managing the resulting disruptions,
and grid sensors out to all kinds of remote devices--including those that aren plugged into the power grid.
and more processing power and memory for its Silverlink Sensor Network-enabled devices. All of these networking advances are built on Silver Spring use of the IEEE 802.15. 4g specification,
Adding low-power sensors to the mesh also allows Silver Spring to potentially get its network into areas that point-to-point wireless systems might have a hard time reaching,
trash bins and traffic detectors, or air or water pollution sensors, to name a few of the systems most often talked about in the context of networking municipal assets and services.
Silver Spring is just one of the many smart meter players targeting this nascent field, of course.
and cameras, parking sensors and other devices that do need them, Reeves said. Silver Spring says its Milli 5 platform can achieve decades of operation in the field without sacrificing network security
SMA launched its Sunny Boy Smart energy PV inverter and battery system. Sharp followed suit at the end of last year by offering a solar-and-storage device that uses Samsung batteries.
Bosch is hoping for certification of a solar-storage inverter next month and various other solar players, such as Renesola of China, seem to be clamoring to enter the U k. market.
These companies could be looking to cash in on growth in U k. solar installations. While much of the European solar market has suffered from a slowdown last year,
a connected thermostat company that has been selling the devices since 2007, and announced a Homekit certified thermostat last week.
Christian science monitor: Not All Call Dealers Hate Tesla's Direct Sales Several large car-dealer groups are"quietly supporting"Tesla, according to Marketwatch.
the battery will also use other inexpensive elements, such as carbon electrodes. He also cites the fact that quinones are natural
semisolid electrode material into a revolution in how lithium-ion batteries are designed and built. Back then, cofounder and Massachusetts institute of technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang described a lean sheet of paperapproach, combining concepts from flow batteries and fuel cells,
And by using a fluid-like set of electrodes that can be formed into a working cell in one step,
as well as established battery giants like Samsung, Panasonic and LG Chem. Breakthroughs being promised by startups with new nano-structured materials and designs, such as Amprius, Nanosys,
During 24m early days, Chiang and startup cofounder and fellow MIT professor W. Craig Carter saw its semisolid electrode material--dubbed ambridge crudefor its MIT roots--as a material to be used in flow batteries,
The startup received early funding from the Department of energy ARPA-E program to explore the potential uses for this material. e originally conceived of using this type of electrode in a flow battery,
he said. ut what we realized upon forming the company was that this semisolid electrode capability had a much better home--reinventing how lithium-ion batteries are made.
He referring to the inactive material that layered between the super-thin electrodes that allow today lithium-ion batteries to charge
and discharge quickly. aving a thin electrode means that the distance the lithium ion has to travel is short--and in the beginning,
he said. ut our semisolid electrode design allows you to get around this problem, and to create a battery that has much thicker electrodes,
and thus much less inactive materials. p until now, it has not been possible to create electrodes that are this thick
and still allow the lithium to be transported fast enoughto provide fast charge-discharge characteristics, he said. 24m seeks to solve that problem through combination of the physical arrangement of the charge material within these electrodes,
and the material we actually use, he said. he key technical concept is reducing something called tortuosity,
like the semisolid materials that 24m forms into anodes and cathodes. hat we do is provide more line of sight paths for the lithium ions to get out of the electrode,
but it also permeates both of the electrodes. It infused into both the cathode and the anode.
and then layers liquid nk or painton it to form its electrodes, he said. That coated metal foil then has to be dried in a series of ovens,
including the use of solvents that have to be recovered for reuse on the next round of products. e bypass all that by starting with a wet electrode that has need everything you in it,
At the same time, hese electrodes do not have any exotic costly components in them, he said. verything they use is already in the lithium-ion supply chain.
That in contrast to 24m process, in which hat goes into the electrodes is just
much simpler than the processes used to make lithium-ion batteries today. he formulation process for making these electrodes is spent exacting,
are less expensive data carriers than RFID chips. And RFID chips have higher read-failure rates than bar codes."
"Proximity reads are an advantage when I want to read everything that is in a kit, as opposed to handling
In other words, they can read the chip through the sheets, for example. However, if two patients are side-by-side
if RFID chips will ever displace barcodes on drug packages any more than on cereal boxes in grocery stores.
"A universal shift from bar codes to chips seems as likely to me as the US converting to the metric system,
But I think people are going to continue to push the envelope to see how the chips could be leveraged.
found that use of vital signs alone led to false-positive identification of serious events 46 percent of the time.
#Tunable voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna North carolina State university (NCSU) researchers have created, using electrochemistry, a reconfigurable,
voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna that may play a role in future mobile devices and the coming Internet of things.
and indium that can change its shape allows us to modify antenna properties such as frequency more dramatically than is possible with a fixed conductor,
Although antenna properties can be reconfigured to some extent by using solid conductors with electronic switches,
which the antenna operating frequency can be tuned. ur antenna prototype using liquid metal can tune over a range of at least two times greater than systems using electronic switches,
Previous liquid-metal designs typically required external pumps that can be integrated easily into electronic systems. Extending frequencies for mobile devicesobile device sizes are continuing to shrink
which the antenna and RF front-end must operate. This combination will create a real antenna design challenge for mobile systems
because antenna size and operating bandwidth tend to be conflicting tradeoffs. his is why tunable antennas are highly desirable:
they can be miniaturized and adapted to correct for near-field loading problems such as the iphone 4 well-publicized eath gripissue of dropped calls
Liquid metal systems ield a larger range of tuning than conventional reconfigurable antennas, and the same approach can be applied to other components such as tunable filters,
In the long term, Adams and colleagues hope to gain greater control of the shape of the liquid metal in two-dimensional surfaces to obtain nearly any desired antenna shape. his would enable enormous flexibility in the electromagnetic properties of the antenna
and allow a single adaptive antenna to perform many functions, he added. Image and article via Kurzweila o
a feature that many stretchable electronics do not possess. What more, the ultralight material they created to build the devices,
enabling us to fit more electronics in a smaller device. And cramming more in means that more power can be stored
a hybrid battery and a supercapacitor, which is a rapidly charging and discharging device capable of storing huge amounts of electrical charge.
and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) that have demonstrated for the first time ever an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon,
They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate,
Wang Fon-Jen Professor of Mechanical engineering at Columbia Engineering and co-author of the study. his new type of roadbandlight emitter can be integrated into chips
and graphene-based on-chip optical communications. Creating light in small structures on the surface of a chip is crucial for developing fully integrated hotoniccircuits that do with light
what is now done with electric currents in semiconductor integrated circuits. Researchers have developed many approaches to do this but have not yet been able to put the oldest and simplest artificial light sourcehe incandescent light bulbnto a chip.
This is primarily because light bulb filaments must be extremely hothousands of degrees Celsiusn order to glow in the visible range
and micro-scale metal wires cannot withstand such temperatures. In addition, heat transfer from the hot filament to its surroundings is extremely efficient at the microscale,
making such structures impractical and leading to damage of the surrounding chip. By measuring the spectrum of the light emitted from the graphene,
or the metal electrodes is due to another interesting property: as it heats up, graphene becomes a much poorer conductor of heat.
Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECOG)) for their neurological treatment.
and Projects group (ATAP), provides an enticing example of the type of powerful motion controller that could actually change how we interact with everything from smartwatches and tablets to appliances and other everyday objects.
Since Soli sensors can capture motion at up to 10,000 frames per second, it is much more accurate than camera-based systems,
he talked about Project Soli mainly in the context of smartwatches. As displays shrink, he said,
Even the most responsive smartwatch displays can be difficult to navigate in some situations. But Soli utility isn limited to wearables at all.
In its current form, its radar tech lives in a single tiny chip that can be embedded in about any type of device,
even objects that don have a traditional display. t in chip form, since there are no moving parts involved it can be embedded inside devices,
Soli sensors can detect motion at a range of about two to three feet, Schwesig says,
But the size and flexibility of the chip itself leaves many, many more possibilities open. In hands-on demos at Google I/O, ATAP focused more on displaying Soli gesture-recognizing capabilities rather than specific implementations.
A prototype I saw used visualizations to show how the chip was able to detect
#Researchers invent super-elastic conducting fibers to make artificial muscles, sensors, and capacitors A University of Texas at Dallas research team has made electrically conducting fibers that can be stretched reversibly to more than 14 times their initial length and
whose electrical conductivity increases 200-fold when stretched. The research team is using the new fibers to make artificial muscles,
as well as capacitors with energy storage capacity that increases about tenfold when the fibers are stretched. Fibers and cables derived from the invention might one day be used as interconnects for super-elastic electronic circuits
robots and exoskeletons having great reach, morphing aircraft, giant-range strain sensors, failure-free pacemaker leads,
and super-stretchy charger cords for electronic devices. Wrapping carbon nanotube sheets into fibers In a study published in the July 24 issue of the journal Science,
the scientists describe how they constructed the fibers by wrapping lighter-than-air, electrically conductive sheets of tiny carbon nanotubes to form a jellyroll-like sheath around a long rubber core.
the researchers made strain sensors and artificial muscles in which the buckled nanotube sheaths serve as electrodes
and the thin rubber layer is a dielectric, resulting in a fiber capacitor. These fiber capacitors exhibited the unrivaled capacitance change of 860 percent
when the fiber was stretched 950 percent. Adding twist to these double-sheath fibers resulted in fast,
electrically powered torsional or rotating artificial muscles that could be used to rotate mirrors in optical circuits
And now the company has added self-driving capabilities that use a range of sensors to drive safely and more efficiently.
But the company has added now an array of sensors, including a laser scanner, several video cameras and ultrasonic and radar sensors.
All of that data is fed into he central driver assistance control unit (zfas), a compact central computer
In the monkey experiment, the three animals were attached together using special sensors that were implanted in their brain
IBM has announced that it has produced an integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will allow the bulk manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
Research into ways of boosting the speeds of both processors and interconnects is looking at many different technologies.
while other avenues being explored include server on a chip and IBM Openpower initiative as discussed in Robert Roe second article on Future processing technologies.
and tested a fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will soon enable manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
This will allow datacenters to offer greater data rates and bandwidth for cloud computing and Big data applications.
IBM silicon photonics chips uses four distinct colours of light travelling within an optical fibre to transmit data in and around a computing system.
The critical point is that IBM has integrated the optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using sub-100nm semiconductor technology.
The ability to manufacture the components using conventional electronic industry techniques thus permits mass production and hence lower prices that will ensure more widespread commercial use of silicon photonics.
IBM CMOS integrated nanophotonics technology combines the essential parts of an optical transceiver, both electrical and optical, on one silicon chip.
are believed to be the most complex superconductor integrated circuits ever successfully yielded. They are fabricated in part at D-Wave facilities in Palo alto,
CA and at Cypress Semiconductor wafer foundry located in Bloomington, Minnesota. The 1000-qubit milestone is the result of intensive research and development by D-Wave
San diego. His team has built a memcomputing prototype with standard electronics that operate at room temperature. Memcomputing is a novel non-Turing paradigm of computation that uses interacting memory cells (memprocessors for short) to store
information from sensor networks and local weather stations, cloud motion physics derived from sky cameras and satellite observations,
#3 Japanese automakers to jointly work on self-driving car technology TOKYO Japan big three automakers will team up with electronics giants
and for sensors that detect obstacles while driving so that they can cut development and production costs,
Japanese auto parts makers lag behind Bosch in sensors, with the German giant supplying western as well as Japanese carmakers,
#Sony targets beauty market with'Skin View Camera'Sony Corp will release in Mid-march a system that enables to accurately check the texture, blotches, pores and color of skin with a palm-sized device.
said Yasuhiro Ueda, SVP, corporate executive, senior general manager, Image Sensor Business Division, Device Solutions Business Group, Sony.
(2) cloud server using Sony analysis algorithm,(3) Skin Analyzer application software, which runs on a dedicated tablet computer and (4) Skin Viewer smartphone application.
Skin View Camera is a measurement device equipped with a CMOS image sensor, optical lens, LED device and Wifi module. oing forward,
The camera takes images of skin with the CMOS sensor and checks the moisture of the skin with a dedicated sensor.
an algorithm that Sony developed in 2012. The state of skin is analyzed by applying LED LIGHTS with different wavelengths (such as visible light
which is reflected on skin surface, and near-infrared light, which comes back after passing through the inside of the skin) to skin
and measuring reflected lights with the CMOS sensor. Based on multiple image data that indicate the states of the surface and inside of the skin,
Sony said. For example, the texture of skin can be evaluated with a high accuracy by analyzing size
Sony said. he more the data, the higher the measurement accuracy. Skin Analyzer shows analysis results on a tablet computer by using five-grade evaluation
Sony said. Sony is not considering selling the system for general consumers anytime soon. In consideration of the Japanese beauty market
whose scale is about ¥: 650 billion (approx US$5. 5 billion), the company aims to chieve a certain level of presencein the market, it said.
Also, Sony has started a research to apply the new technology to the analysis of scalp e
#Technology IBM unveils'breakthrough'computer chip NEW YORK IBM on Thursday unveiled a powerful new chip
which the company says could boost computing power of verything from smartphones to spacecraft. he company unveiled the industry first seven-nanometer chip that could hold more than 20 billion tiny switches or transistors for improved computing power.
The new chips could help meet demands of future cloud computing and Big data systems, cognitive computing, mobile products and other emerging technologies, according to IBM,
which developed the chip as part of a $3 billion research effort with Samsung and Globalfoundries at the State university of New york at Albany.
Most chips today in PCS and other devices use microprocessors between 14 and 22 nanometers.
Enabling the first 7nm node transistors is a significant milestone for the entire semiconductor industry as we continue to push beyond the limitations of our current capabilities,
and was able to develop silicon-germanium transistors to boost processing power. 2015 AF o
New 3d printers Could Build Implants Electronics Several new 3d printers showcased at CES 2015 in Las vegas earlier this month suggest that the 3d printing industry best known for churning out brightly colored plastic doodads could be turning over a new
and filaments to print quadcopters already embedded with the electronics that allow them to hover in the air.
not just in the lab. Printable electronics OWL wasn't the only progressive 3d printing company hawking its wears at CES.
but a fully functioning electronic device,"said Voxel8 cofounder Daniel Oliver. At CES, Voxel8 showed off a quadcopter printed with its machine.
along with the imbedded electronics, eventually got covered up with more layers of plastic. Of course Voxel8's printer is designed to do more than just print tiny drones.
The company will also be releasing new printing materials in order to try its hand at printing resistors, sensors and, for future models of its printer, even lithium-ion batteries.
in addition to the custom circuit boards that Voxel8's printers have perfected already.""We're talking about printing out a circuit at your desk in less than 30 minutes,
This represents a vast improvement over earlier options for printing custom circuit boards, a process that,
they'll also be able to try out unconventional geometries for their electronics, Oliver said. For example, rather than trying to get a rectangular circuit board to fit inside a curved object,
it will now be possible to customize the shape of a circuit so that it fits inside objects of any shape or size."
Light emitting diodes (LEDS) are now everywhere from consumer electronics like smart phones to light bulbs for home lighting.
The key to its success in replicating a sunny sky uses nanostructured materials to scatter light from LEDS in the same way tiny particles scatter sunlight in the atmosphere so-called Rayleigh scattering.
Illuminating research Only recently has the full utility of LEDS been realized for general lighting. While red and green LEDS had been in commercial use for more than a decade,
the missing color for producing white light was blue. Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura cracked the blue conundrum in the early 1990s.
Now, thanks to their work, white light LEDS are ubiquitous. In recognition of this energy saving invention, they received the Nobel prize in Physics last year.
Take LEDS for example. Research in blue LEDS started more than 40 years ago at Radio Corporation of America,
but changes in the company funding structure stymied their development for two decades until last year Nobel prize winners solved the materials problem
That such nanostructures could even be made is because of the decades-long investment by the electronics industry in developing nanofabrication tools to make the tiny components in computers.
In addition to testing out different locations for the machine and communicating with local community members about how it works, the Janicki team's trial run in Senegal will also test out a system of sensors
For instance, Samsung introduced a computer monitor made of 30 percent recycled plastic that runs on less energy
Electronics company LG announced a whole line of"greener"home appliances that use less energy and water than the company's previous models
introducing products from solar-charging stations to pollution sensors that put the environment first. Here are some of the coolest green tech products being showcased at CES.
or Coinstar machine) that allows users to exchange old electronics for cold, hard cash. While it's not exactly new (the first ecoatm launched in 2009),
The electronics that ecoatm reclaims can be mined for the valuable and rare metals they contain.
And by keeping electronics out of the garbage dump, you also prevent the toxic materials found inside these devices (things like mercury and cadmium) from leaking into the ground.
Of course, not all of the electronics that find their way into the ecoatm are taken actually apart and used for parts.
and features a large blue-hued crystal embedded with sensors. Customers can buy a pendant necklace
inexpensive and can employ many different materials used in electronics today to build a wide variety of microscopic structures.
"We feel that the findings have potential relevance to a wide range of microsystems technologies biomedical devices, optoelectronics, photovoltaics, 3d circuits, sensors and so on."
and it is nearly impossible for these printers to produce semiconductors or single crystalline metals,
and antennas for soft electronic devices designed to integrate with the human body, "he said. The scientists detailed their findings online today (Jan 8) in the journal Science n
From sensors that aim to halt asthma in its tracks, to home monitors that warn the family
several new trackers on display at the 2015 Consumer electronics Show are going far beyond older medical alert systems.
three-sensor monitor that will hit the market later this year. It tracks a person's respiration rate
Another device, Onköl, integrates data from several sensors, including a heart-rate monitor, sensors that track when someone got out of bed
or made a phone call. The device then sends text alerts to loved ones. The is useful
The Veta is also full of sensors, and can reassure parents that their kids have the lifesaving device on them
Scientists have wanted long to create a teensy"light bulb"to place on a chip, enabling what is called photonic circuits,
An electrode was attached to the ends of each graphene strip. Just like tungsten, run a current through graphene
"It's also the reason the electrodes at either end of the graphene don't melt.
Whereas conventional microelectronics shuffle electrons around wires, in recent years, scientists have begun developing so-called microfluidic devices that shuffle liquids around pipes.
These devices can theoretically perform any operation a conventional electronic microchip can. Although microfluidic devices are dramatically slower than conventional electronics,
the goal is not to compete with electronic computers on traditional computing tasks such as word processing. Rather
"Current applications for microfluidic chips include serving as miniaturized chemistry and biology laboratories. Instead of performing experiments with dozens of test tubes, each droplet in a lab-on-a-chip can serve as a microscopic test tube,
The core of the new microfluidic chip, which is about half the size of a postage stamp,
The layout of the bars on these new microfluidic chips is analogous to the layout of circuits on microchips, controlling interactions among the droplets.
"Making the droplets smaller will allow the chip to carry out more operations, "Prakash said. The researchers now plan to make a design tool for these droplet circuits available to the public,
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