Friday, April 21, 2017

Dear all InfoComm Club members!

Do sign up an account with:
https://www.tynker.com/

This is cool!

Saturday, April 15, 2017

How 3D Printing is making Drones Affordable and Accessible

How 3D Printing is making Drones Affordable and Accessible

How 3D Printing is making Drones Affordable and Accessible

How 3D Printing is making Drones Affordable and Accessible

Image credit: Pixabay

Guest Writer

Founder, Morphedo

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

The dawn of the Drone Age has already begun. We hear about these aerial vehicles quite often now. These unmanned flyers have proven themselves to be efficient workers, capable of carrying out precise jobs and are expected to change our world in the most interesting ways.

Drones in the sky, in the sea and on the land are now setting examples of how the technology is going to improve our everyday life. So far these unmanned vehicles have been widely used for purposes like journalism, aerial photography, military transport, disaster aid and spraying crops with fertilizers or pesticides. Are you excited about the future where drones will be an integral part of possibly every field? Then, you also deserve to know about another game changer technology; 3D Printing. Also termed as additive manufacturing, the technology is considered to be a genie that creates 3-dimensional physical objects directly from the 3D design. Almost every industry has started evaluating and adopting the technology to reap its benefits. Let's talk about how 3D Printing is making Drones affordable and accessible.

Benefits of using 3D Printing for Drone Making

  • Customized Drones: 3D Printing allows you to manufacture personalized products according to an individual's needs and requirements. This increases the feasibility of making customized drones. Any specific part of a store-bought drone can also be tailored to suit your needs.
  • Easy Upgradation: 3D Printing supports upgradation of drone's parts to make it more efficient. Design iterations are very economical with the technology as compared to the traditional ways. This brings in the scope of making many modifications in the 3D design, 3D Printing them and testing the 3D Printed parts till the desired result is achieved. Flexibility and speed do not stand in the way of the experiment.
  • Improved Performance: The weight of a drone affects its flight time. The lighter the drone is, the longer it flies. A light drone has improved battery life, is more responsive and agile during the flight. It also remains stable in case of hard landings or crashes. The 3D Printed parts are made lighter by optimizing the design structures to carry the required weight. The choice of raw material used for 3D Printing also plays an important role in making the parts light.
  • Saves Downtime: You can 3D Print the hard to find spare parts of your drones rather than running in search for them every time they break off in a crash. This would save you from a lot of downtime.

Drone Parts that can be 3D Printed

Almost everything apart from the electronic components in a drone can be 3D Printed. Following is the list of a few components that I can think of right now:

  • Frame
  • Landing gear
  • Propellers
  • Camera mount
  • Antenna holder
  • Protective equipment like prop guards

The possibilities of 3D Printing are limited just by imagination. You can add many more functional as well as non-functional accessories to the list.

Companies using 3D Printing to manufacture drones

Following is the list of a few companies that have deployed 3D Printing in the process of drone manufacturing.

Blue  Robotics: This Company based in Southern California adopted 3D Printing for developing their submarine drones. The technology was used for prototyping as well as for manufacturing certain parts of their underwater drone at a low cost without affecting the quality. This helped them test their product in a shorter time, without having to order parts in bulk, which usually happens in other manufacturing processes like injection molding. With the help of 3D designing and 3D Printing the company was able to make a unique product that allowed their underwater drone to operate fully even when submerged in salt water.

  • This Italian company uses 3D Printing to make lightweight components for their drones. It helps them in maximizing the battery power and in increasing the unmanned aerial vehicle's flying time. They use Laser Sintering 3D Printing technique, which allows them to create complex parts even in small quantities. Soleon produces a number of on demand customized drones, made to serve distinct purposes. Recently, they came up with their 3D Printed agricultural pest control drone called SoleonAgro. It is a useful agricultural tool with the look of a wasp.
  •  The Netherlands based company Aerialtronics makes drones for applications like livestock monitoring, infrastructure inspection and creative filming. It offers customizable drones with several tailoring options like number of motors, variations of software systems, motor housings, and custom enclosures for hardware and software. Making limited versions via traditional manufacturing options would have been slow and very expensive. Whereas the usage of 3D Printing allows them to go for many design iterations, reducing their R&D cost by approximately 50%.

3D Printing has been able to pave way for many expensive industries to thrive. Drone making companies should definitely welcome this technology to take their product development to the next level. Being able to create the right 3D Design and chose the right material is the key. 

Manya Jha is one of the founders at Morphedo, a 3D Printing product and services startup.  Aspiring to be a serial entrepreneur she is a firm be...

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Friday, April 14, 2017

Pocket-size gadget for 100,000 potential coders, Singapore News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

Pocket-size gadget for 100,000 potential coders, Singapore News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

Pocket-size gadget for 100,000 potential coders

To the children in the classroom, it is a toy.

To the Government, it is a device that could help nurture Singapore's future army of coders.

A pocket-size, codeable computer called the micro:bit is being targeted to reach some 100,000 school-going children and adults over the next two years.

The idea is to let the children tinker with it, while they learn to code and, perhaps, develop a love for technology.

Announcing the move yesterday, Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim said: "Who knows, one day we may be nurturing Singapore's own generation of Steve Jobs."

The $30 micro:bit contains a programmable array of LED lights, sensors, a Bluetooth chip and an accelerometer. Users can write codes to turn the micro:bit into a locator tool, for instance, by detecting the presence of another micro:bit tagged to their belongings.

The device is already in use in schools in Britain to help teach coding and inspire interest in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.

At his ministry's annual workplan seminar yesterday, Dr Yaacob said Singaporeans need a curious mind and the passion to tinker and create things with their hands.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) will work with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to roll out micro:bit as part of its new Digital Maker Programme to interested primary and secondary schools over the next two years.

Microsoft Singapore will provide training for the MOE teachers and absorb the cost. The whole exercise is estimated to cost up to $3 million.

The devices will be distributed by Home-Fix DIY to schools, and by the end of this month, it will also be on sale at Home-Fix's retail stores islandwide.

The initiative complements existing enrichment programmes such as Code@SG's Code for Fun, introduced in June 2015 in MOE schools to give children a brush with computing through robotic kits such as Leo Wedo and MoWay, and microcontrollers such as Arduino.

It is part of a larger strategy by the Government to plug the technology manpower gap in Singapore.

Since then, 128 primary and secondary schools have rolled out the Code for Fun scheme, and 56,000 students - some as young as seven years old - have signed up.

The Digital Maker Programme will also be rolled out to the community via the People's Association, the Science Centre Singapore and self-help groups.

In IMDA's early trials at Tanjong Pagar and Toa Payoh East community centres, residents there had used the micro:bit to create an automated watering system for the community garden.

Dr Yaacob said seed funding will be provided to local companies that develop products like the micro:bit.

CHIJ Kellock Primary pupil Darina Daud, 12, said: "I thought computing was going to be boring - until I tried making a digital greeting card with micro:bit."

VIDEO

Tea-maker and other devices made using micro:bit http://str.sg/4XEm



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Thursday, April 6, 2017

Scratch Curriculum Guide Draft | ScratchEd

Scratch Curriculum Guide Draft | ScratchEd

Scratch Curriculum Guide Draft

A design-based introduction to computational thinking with Scratch

  • Original Author: Karen Brennan, Michelle Chung (contributor, editor), Jeff Hawson (editor)
  • Education Level: Preschool and Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, College and University, Professional Development, Other
  • Content Types: Activity, Assessment, Audio and Video, Curriculum, Handout, Lesson Plan
  • Curricular Areas: Computer Science, Engineering, Language Arts, Mathematics, Music, Science, Social Studies, Teacher Education, Technology, Visual Arts, Other
  • Keywords: beginner, introduction, getting started, guide

This Scratch curriculum guide provides an introduction to creative computing with Scratch, using a design-based learning approach.

The guide is organized as a series of twenty 60-minute sessions, and includes session plans, handouts, projects, and videos. The 20 sessions presented in this guide are organized into 5 topics:

  • introduction
  • arts
  • stories
  • games
  • final project

You can download the full, current draft of the curriculum guide below - available in both pdf and doc formats.

The guide was developed to be both subject-neutral and grade-neutral to accommodate different settings for any teacher who wants to support students' development of computational thinking through explorations with Scratch. The content for the guide is based on four years of Scratch educator workshops, particularly the Google-funded 2009-2011 Creative Computing workshops and more recently, NSF-funded ScratchEd workshops and meetups.

We are currently conducting a pilot of the curriculum guide with 11 educators. But we hope that a wide range of educators will try out the curriculum guide and provide us with feedback.

Now that the guide is launched, we'd love to hear your thoughts on it! Please share any feedback you have about the guide by posting comments in the Curriculum Guide Draft discussion space. We'd love to hear any reactions on what works, what doesn't work, and what it looks like in your classroom.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Resource Files



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