Tag: design-jobs

Holy Cow: Christian von Koenigsegg Invents “Free Valve” Engine That Requires No Camshaft

Why won’t the internal combustion engine die? To oversimplify the issue, it’s partly because of its incumbency and partly because it’s very good at what it does. Environmentalists hate it because it’s dirty, and while some engineers pursue alternate energy forms, there are still plenty of smart people tweaking the internal combustion engine to make it less dirty, more efficient, and more powerful. One person in the latter category is Christian von Koenigsegg , the rather brilliant inventor behind the Swedish supercar skunkworks that bears his name. Anyone with a basic understanding of how engines work is bound to be impressed by von Koenigsegg’s latest breakthrough: He’s developed an engine with no cams. With a conventional engine, the valves are driven by cams that are necessarily egg-shaped, with each cam driving its attendant valve stem into its deepest extension at the pointiest part of the egg as the cam rotates on the camshaft. Simple physics dictate this be a gradual process; because of the egg shape the valve gradually opens, maxes out, and gradually closes. If a cam was shaped like an off-center square, for instance, the valve stem would break on the corners. With von Koenigsegg’s radical “Free Valve” engine design, the valves operate independently and electronically to depress/open, while a mechanical spring returns them to the closed position. This means the valves quickly slam open, allowing fuel to flood the combustion chamber, then quickly slam shut. Ditto for the exhaust valves. So fuel is not gradually seeping in and exhaust is not gradually seeping out—it’s going BAM in, BAM out. The benefits? The engine is much smaller, of course, requiring no camshaft or timing belt. On top of that they’re projecting 30% less fuel consumption, 30% more torque, 30% more horsepower, and a staggering 50% less emissions. In the video below, von Koenigsegg walks you through it: (more…)

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Holy Cow: Christian von Koenigsegg Invents “Free Valve” Engine That Requires No Camshaft

The U.S. Army’s Mobile Digital Fabrication Lab

Politically speaking, the war in Afghanistan may be winding down; but technologically speaking, things are ramping up. Earlier this month a shipping container was quietly deployed to a remote outpost in Afghanistan. Kitted out by the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, this particular shipping container is essentially a digital manufacturing lab in a box. Known as the ELM or Expeditionary Lab – Mobile, the unit contains a 3D printer and a CNC mill (as well as more conventional tools like a plasma cutter, welding gear, a circular saw, a router, a jigsaw and a reciprocating saw). Unsurprisingly, troops on the ground are not using the ELMs to print out heart-shaped gears ; rather, the point of the ELMs is to allow last-minute rapid prototyping upgrades to crucial pieces of equipment. As one example, soldiers discovered that the on-button for one standard-issue tactical flashlight had a raised button that could accidentally be pressed, unintentionally turning the flashlight on while the soldier was moving around. Best case scenario, the thing’s in a pocket, you don’t realize it’s on and the batteries drain down. Worst case scenario, the sudden illumination advertises your position to the enemy while you’re sneaking around in the dark. Under normal Army procurement procedures, designing, commissioning, manufacturing and distributing an updated design would take months or years. But with the ELMs, which come with two digital manufacturing technicians, a solution like this clip-on guard to shield the button can be quickly designed and printed. The ELM shipped earlier this month was actually the second; the first was sent to Afghanistan last summer. Following the concept’s success, a third ELM is in the works and will reportedly be deployed later this year. The following video on the ELMs isn’t terribly detailed, and features CG footage that doesn’t quite track with the narrative, but it’s all we’ve got: via 3ders (more…)

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The U.S. Army’s Mobile Digital Fabrication Lab

Must-See Video: Real-Time English-to-Mandarin Speech Translation via Microsoft Research

As you might have noticed, we’ve had quite a bit of Asian design coverage lately (with a few more stories to come): between the second annual Beijing Design Week , a trip to Shanghai for Interior Lifestyle China and last week’s design events in Tokyo , we’re hoping to bring you the best of design from the Eastern Hemisphere this fall. Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that our coverage hasn’t been quite as quick as we’d like, largely due to the speed bump of the language barrier. At least two of your friendly Core77 Editors speak passable Mandarin, but when it comes to parsing large amounts of technical information, the process becomes significantly more labor-intensive than your average blogpost… which is precisely why I was interested to learn that Microsoft Research is on the case. In a recent talk in Tianjin, China, Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid (no relation to Karim) presented their latest breakthrough in speech recognition technology, a significant improvement from the 20–25% error of current software. Working with a team from the University of Toronto, Microsoft Research has “reduced the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.” An abridged transcript of the talk is available on the Microsoft Next blog if you want to follow along: In the late 1970s a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made a significant breakthrough in speech recognition using a technique called hidden Markov modeling which allowed them to use training data from many speakers to build statistical speech models that were much more robust. As a result, over the last 30 years speech systems have gotten better and better. In the last 10 years the combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data has led to many practical uses. Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods. Once Rashid has gotten the audience up to speed, he starts discussing how current technology is implemented in extant translation services (5:03). “It happens in two steps,” he explains. “The first takes my words and finds the Chinese equivalents, and while non-trivial, this is the easy part. The second reorders the words to be appropriate for Chinese, an important step for correct translation between languages.” Short though it may be, the talk is a slow build of relatively dry subject matter until Rashid gets to the topic at hand at 6:45: “Now the last step that I want to take is to be able to speak to you in Chinese.” But listening to him talk for those first seven-and-a-half minutes is exactly the point : the software has extrapolated Rashid’s voice from an hour-long speech sample, and it modulates the translated audio based on his English speech patterns . Thus, I recommend watching (or at least listening) to the video from the beginning to get a sense for Rashid’s inflection and timbre… but here’s the payoff: (more…)

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Must-See Video: Real-Time English-to-Mandarin Speech Translation via Microsoft Research