But what if the remote controls, the buttons and even the weather stations didn't need batteries to send their signals ? What if they worked with WiFi waves? And if, in addition, could we print them in 3D with a printer? Vikram Iver, Justin Chan and Shyamnath Gollakota, researchers at the University of Washington, are working on this related idea. Related
Buttons that work without energy
A team of researchers from the University of Washington has developed a type of 3D printing that, helped by a chip that does not consume energy from a battery or a cable (that is, it is not connected to any power source), it is capable of sending useful information as soon as it is printed.They do so by bouncing WiFi waves.
Thanks to this chip, the different buttons and configurations that we see below send radio signals to the router, without the need for electricity! In the next section we show how it works, but let's first see some examples of what has been achieved.
They have already managed to print punctual buttons (bottom left) like those of the remote control, circular dials (center) like the ones found on the thermostat and horizontal regulators (right) such as those that control the light intensity of a room.
But they have not stopped there.They have taken another step.Actually, nobody is too worried about running out of batteries to watch TV, so that innovation, by itself, would have been a mere curiosity., the inventions that we present below have a great importance in different areas of knowledge, since we do not always have a nearby power line or space to pass a cable.
Anemometer .The anemometers (top left) are devices that measure the wind speed.This affects the spoon-shaped cups and rotates the arm The more you turn, the more speed the wind has.The challenge here was to transform rotational movement into point impulses and they have achieved it thanks to a cogwheel and a spring.The following video shows how it works:
Flowmeter .A flowmeter (image above, center) is a device that measures the flow through a pipeline.Obviously, in this case it is open for let's look at the pieces, since otherwise the water would come out (as in the video).The mechanism is similar to that of the anemometer mentioned.
Linear balance .It works just like the scales we have at home: the iron on which the heavy object is held pushes a vertical rod downwards, which at its He folds himself to a dock, the more he folds, the heavier and, therefore, the more mass he has.
The images belong to prototypes printed quickly and with a type of conventional 3D printer.Industrial 3D printers and with a better finish could design objects that surpass different approvals in terms of sensors.
«Our goal was to create something that just came out of your 3D printer and could send useful information to other devices...But the big challenge is: how do we communicate signals via WiFi using plastic? That's something nobody had done before, ”says PhD engineer Vikram Iyer, project leader.
like a mirror in front of the WiFi
Have you thought about how a mirror works? It is a silver foil or other material that reflects the light, that is, bounces this when it comes.That way we can see ourselves: the photons bounce in us, then in the mirror and finally reach our eyes.
The mechanisms devised at the University of Washington work in a similar way: the router sends a constant signal to the environment and 3D printed plastic objects modify that signal in its path, which makes the bounced wave look different to the one issued.
In the image above we appreciate the backscatter data (backscatter data), which is something like a frequency variation that we observe when, when the wave bounces, the button has been pressed.
To try to imagine it, let's visualize the portal of a house shouting Ecooo! .When there is a lot of space on the stairs, we hear our own bounced voice, what we call "normal behavior of a portal" However, if we were blindfolded and someone closed a door reducing the distance from the stairs, shouting again Ecooo !, we would notice a variation in the sound back.Even without being sure of that someone has closed a door, we would know that something has changed.
The router works in a similar way: It is constantly sending Tx signals waiting for Rx (bounced signals) to have unusual behavior.
To value this invention as it deserves, think that it would be as if we lived in a universe in which the mirror did not exist but the digital video camera and the projectors did.To see us We would use a camera that would record us and a screen.And accustomed to it, someone would surprise us with the creation of the mirror, an invention whose magic lies in simplicity.
These types of IoT objects add to the list of objects that we would never expect to see connected, as well as to the connected vehicles that travel through our cities and to that cloud of objects that we already have at home.For a technical explanation and without metaphors , the 3D Printing Wireless Connected Objects paper shows us the advances with a more serious and scientific tone.
contact lenses of the future
Although the idea of 3D printed IoT buttons belongs to Vikram Iver, Justin Chan and Shyamnath Gollakota, they rely on a previous 2016 study, also from the University of Washington and commanded by Vikram Iver, titled Inter-Technology Backscatter: Towards Internet Connectivity for Implanted Devices , which aims to work wonders such as send signals to our lenses without the need for these carry batteries.
Vikram Iyer is the link between both projects.He is currently working on the aforementioned area of backscatter data , which has applications in any field of technology, but especially in the IoT coverage and replacement cyborguism .
The latter is especially interesting, since the lenses could, for example, inform us of the level of blood glucose or make an analysis of different compounds in our body; you just have to wait for the WiFi wave to bounce so that our cell phone receives the information.
But we can go further, to extension cyberbullying like the one we presented some time ago with the North Sense, and design focal lenses that, by means of a rotation induced by a WiFi signal, allow us to graduate the view, for example, to go from watching a book to watching television.
Images | Mark Stone/University of Washington
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