Last week I was at the 2017 ACM CHI conference in Denver. The conference covered human-computer interaction topics ranging from accessibility, to education, to new hardware and materials for interacting with computers. When it comes to analyzing what people are doing with input devices, machine learning turned up more often than not. People presented all kinds of outputs …
Category Archives: Lab News
Moving water without moving parts
Jaz captured a video of his membrane pump moving water from left to right. The metallized membrane is a disc of about 1 cm diameter sandwiched between the pink layers of plastic, while metal tubes on either side supply an AC electric field. The voltage applied at the red and black clips is similar to …
Signs of life in the lab
Our projects are about integrating “functional” materials into larger structures, without damaging the material or the structure. Some examples of functions we want the materials to have are exerting forces, absorbing specific wavelengths, or turning a mechanical stress into an electronic signal. That won’t happen if we melted the material during installation (a real danger …
Bring it
Group meeting nearly overwhelmed this table at FirstBuild. Jaz brought new data and Shaf had a couple of new microfluidic devices; both projects involve membranes. Brian demoed his system for routing fiber actuators using a laser-cut template. Added to the pile: hollow fiber membranes from our collaborator at UK and a mechanism designed to work with an …
A Lot Of Strands
We continue to explore how fibers can get into the computer-controlled fabrication process. 3D printing takes the spotlight, but each year about 10x more sewing machines are sold in the US than desktop 3D printers worldwide. If we can combine some of their capabilities with 3D printing, a lot of exciting materials can join the party – whether …