4D Printing: Whatever You Like, Whatever You wish

4D Printing

4D printing, cooler than 3D printing!


4D printing develops materials that can change properties and characteristics based on changes in the environment—like temperature. The changes could let materials self-assemble thus speeding up manufacturing and reducing labour requirements. 4D technology and equipment is expected to grow rapidly in the healthcare, aerospace, defence, and automotive industries after it’s commercialisation.

The healthcare market could use the technology for tissue engineering, self-assembling biomaterials, and creating Nano robots for chemotherapy. For the automotive industry, 4D printing could lead to coatings that adapt to sun, wind, and rain. The aerospace market might benefit from 4D printing by way of self-repairing parts or planes and printed solar panels to power satellites. Potential innovations in the military and defence sector include textiles with camouflage capabilities and self-healing materials for bridges and temporary roads.

We imagine there’s a wide range of applications such as home appliances and products that can adapt to heat or moisture to improve comfort or add functionality. Childcare products that can react to humidity or temperature, for example, or clothes and footwear that optimises their form and function by reacting to changes in the environment.

With 4D printing there’s a lot to play with. Now, that 3D printing captured our imagination, just think what adding time to the equation could do.

Tesla Motors- Taking the technology used in cars to a different level

When talking about technology, something that shouldn’t be overlooked is the technology used in recent cars. Nowadays a lot of high tech gadgets and instruments are being used in order to make cars faster, safer and most importantly eco-friendly.

This post, however, will mainly focus on Tesla Motors, a company which took things to a different level in the automotive world. Elon Musk’s Tesla is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain component. The uniqueness of this automobile company is that they are not mucking around, none of that “hybrid” engine stuff; all their vehicles are pure electric.

The first vehicle that Tesla ever made and gained widespread attention was the Tesla Roadster, the first fully electric sports car. This battery powered sports vehicle made debut around 2008.

However, when Elon Musk revealed the company’s next car, the Model S, popularity of the company went over the roof. The Model S is filled with gismos. Apart from being fully electric, the centre of attraction is a gigantic 17” touchscreen display which controls all most all the function of the car; starting from the climate control, the sunroof controls, lights, and even the ride height. How crazy is that? There are absolutely no buttons in the car, except for the window controls and a couple others mounted on the steering wheel so that the driver's focus is always on the road, everything else is integrated in the massive touch panel. This tech bomb used to come in three variants: 70D, 85, 85D and recently they introduced an insane variant known as the P85D. This new variant comes with features like auto pilot and self-parking, on top of the other features like lane departure warning, blind stop warning, etc.

Nevertheless, some people are worried about its range being an all-electric car. But, from my point of view, Elon Musk has got it covered. These cars can manage up to 502 kilometer of range with a full battery and to be honest, that’s heaps! Charging to maximum capacity may take up to 9 hours in a regular household power point, but that’s when the superchargers come in. If superchargers are used, the car can reach 50% capacity within 30 minutes and it absolutely free of charge! So, if you always use the superchargers to charge, then you can basically drive your Tesla for free; there’s no cost of servicing (engine oil, lubricants, etc.) as there are no liquid substance needed to run the car, in fact the only liquid in the car is the windscreen washer fluid!

Anyhow, amongst all the features they have, a couple mentionable exceptional features are that: i) the car actually improves itself over time via firmware updates, which works just like a mobile phone; so it receives updates over the air and becomes even faster, safer and reliable; ii) the car can be controlled by your smartphone through the Tesla app, which enables you to access information like how much juice is left, how long it’s going to take to reach full charge (when plugged in) and even access the climate control option! Looking at the things they have already made available, it gives me, and pretty  sure other electric car enthusiasts, high hopes for  the things Tesla Motors has in stock for us in the near future.

This thorough video of the Tesla Model S may help you understand what I have written about the car so far, enjoy!

Spider- Robots could help Humanity's expansion throughout the Solar System

This post is ''slightly'' different from the previous post, as this has more to do with the development of the technology used to make our work in space easier and more efficient.
 
I found this article on space.com, about a new kind of technology called SpiderFab, which is a spiderlike robot supposed to be able to build new structures in space one piece at a time, the same way spiders spin their webs. This robot could help build big radio antennas, spacecraft booms and solar arrays in the next decade or so.
Rob Hoyt, CEO of Tethers Unlimite, the company that is currently developing this new technology, says that their long-term objective for all of this work is to eventually enable the use of in-situ resources to construct the infrastructure in space needed to support humanity's expansion throughout the solar system. The payoff could be higher sensitivity and bandwidth for for example NASA missions.




At the heart of the SpiderFab concept is a multiarmed robot that would fabricate structural elements with one "spinneret" and use another one to join these pieces together as it crawls about on the ever-growing "web."
For example, in a project funded by NASA's Small Business Innovation Research program, the company already built a machine that creates lightweight structural trusses from raw carbon-fiber spools, using a process akin to 3D printing.
This machine, which is about the size of a microwave oven, can churn out the type of objects that could be put together to form a spacecraft boom and other systems at the rate of 5 centimeters per minute.

"In a perfect world — if funding flowed and the contracting process didn't drag on forever — we think we could get to be able to build very large support structures for antennas and solar arrays, and those sorts of components, in the early 2020s,"
- Rob Hoyt

Space is a topic people have been obsessed about for decades, and this might be just a tiny step towards knowing what's actually out there, but it could be a huge leap for our future lives on Earth. Imagine, if they could build better antennas and such in space, how that could improve for example our internet- internet connectivity in the near future. And that's not all that would change.

Virtual Reality: The future of virtual experience

Virtual Reality (VR) refers to a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be interacted with by a person. That person becomes part of this virtual world and is able to perform a series of actions within that environment. 

Virtual Reality is mostly used in areas like gaming, military, education and health care for now.
In order to be able to interact with the virtual world, the user needs to put on a set of input devices specially designed for it. The most common combination is a head mounted display (HMD) plus a controller/joystick.
Most Internet users probably are more interested in Virtual Reality gaming. VR could potentially be the future of gaming as it provides a  much more immersing gaming experience than conventional styles of gaming. We have already seen a couple of VR gaming developers entering the market and they have drawn quite some attention.

VR gives people an exciting expectation of future gaming experience, however, it is still facing some real challenges at this current stage. The technology to bring high quality VR experience is still immature. There is a large amount of users don't feel comfortable at all while wearing VR gears. The compatibility issues with current hardware. Overall, Virtual Reality might have a brilliant future ahead but it is a long way to its mature.

Introduction

Welcome to our blog!

Just to start off with the purpose of this blog - we're four students from Macquarie University currently doing the subject ISYS100. Finding a topic for this blog was not the easiest part, we had to figure out something we were all interested in, that might be interesting for other people as well and that's not too mainstream. Eventually we found a topic that (probably) everyone that owns a computer could be interested in- technology.
Because of the diversity in backgrounds and personalities of the members in our group, the posts will vary quite a bit, from new technology on cars to tiny mobile devices and holograms. But they will all be technological, mainly focusing on some of the devices that has been invented quite recently, or devices that might make a change in our everyday lives in the future.

We'll be updating this blog quite frequently, with a few days in between each post.

Edit: Better late than never, the subject also requires us to upload pictures of the group members. Instead of taking individual pictures, we chose do one together.

From the left; Sakib, Claire, Nina and Alex!

Enjoy!

-Nina