The Pi portion of the Banana Phone system runs the Asterisk PBX phone software and MySQL database. Ruiz used PHP to write his own software that determines on the fly whether a call is valid. He spent about three months developing the system.
via Robocalls are annoying, so this man is using Raspberry Pi to stop them | Ars Technica.
In a follow-up statement, Entergy said that tests conducted by S&C and Entergy on the two relays at the Superdome showed that one worked as expected, the other did not.
I would hope most devices in the distribution of power are designed to prevent outages.
It may not sound very much, less than three ounces, but in space a little thrust goes a long way. Boeing’s advanced XIPS thruster, which fires out Xenon ions at high speed, generates less than a quarter as much thrust from twice as much power. It’s used to maintain satellites in position, or move them to a slightly different orbit. Crucially, Xips weights about twenty kilos, more than an equivalent EmDrive, and the propellant for prolonged operation can weigh much more.
A research group based at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Seoul, South Korea, has developed a circuit that may get around these problems. The device, described in a paper published on Nature’s website on 30 January, uses magnetism to control the flow of electrons across a minuscule bridge of the semiconducting material indium antimonide (S. Joo et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11817; 2013). It is “a new and interesting twist on how to implement a logic gate”, says Gian Salis, a physicist at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.
via Magnetic logic makes for mutable chips : Nature News & Comment.
This seems like a revolutionary discovery if it can be manufactured relatively easily. And then there’s this:
But Johnson notes that magnetism is already catching on in circuit design: some advanced devices are beginning to use a magnetic version of random access memory, a type of memory that has historically been built only with conventional transistors. “I think a shift is already under way,” he says.
What’s amazing is how quickly the technology is evolving. There’s no second-generation Lytro yet though it’s safe to assume the Mountain View, CA-based company is working on one. But because light field photography is mostly about computation, not optics or electronics, Lytro can make its existing camera more powerful simply by upgrading the software used to process light-field images.
via How Lytro is Shifting Our Perspective on Photography | Xconomy.
The new turbines generate six megawatts of power in good wind. Several companies are designing 10- and even 15-megawatt machines with 100-meter blades. These blades would reach two-thirds of the way to the roof of the Empire State Building. The push to supersize wind turbines is part of an effort to reduce installation and maintenance costs, which can be far higher than the cost of the turbines themselves. The pictures in this slideshow give a sense of just why installation is so costly.
via Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea | MIT Technology Review.
Vine sacrifices pixel resolution for speed and gets away with it because the user experience is primarily, well, mobile: you’re more likely to be watching Vine clips in a tiny square on your smartphone, not blown up on a Retina Macbook Pro.
via Vine’s Great Mobile Design Is All About Its Engineering | MIT Technology Review.
NASA’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars the night of Jan. 24, 2004 PST (just after midnight EST on Jan. 25), three weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down. Spirit stopped operating in 2010, but Opportunity is still going strong, helping scientists better understand the Red Planet’s wetter, warmer past.
via Mars rover Opportunity now in 10th year – Technology & science – Space – Space.com | NBC News.
I love this story because the requirements for these rovers only called for 3 months operation. That is what they call exceeding expectations!
The new inflatable BEAM will be launched to the International Space Station by a Falcon 9 rocket built by another private spaceflight company, California-based SpaceX. The module will be cocooned inside the unpressurized cargo hold of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule atop the Falcon 9. NASA has already purchased the launch of the SpaceX Falcon under a separate Commercial Resupply Services contract.
via Inside NASA’s Deal for Inflatable Space Station Room.
This site is always fascinated with the technology of space. Here’s an interesting tour of the International Space Station.
Some of the most promising battery chemistries—which, in theory, could store several times more energy than today’s lithium-ion batteries and cost much less—have a fatal flaw. They can’t be recharged very often before they stop working, making them useless for applications such as electric vehicles. Now researchers at Stanford have created novel nanostructures that greatly increase the number of times one of these chemistries can be recharged, even to levels high enough for many commercial applications.
via Nanostructures Boost Battery Life Fivefold | MIT Technology Review.