Infi-Zeal's Blog

Deciwatt, which is a part of the design company, Therefore in London, UK has developed a technology that will revolutionise the way light bulbs work. Called GravityLight, the project which was co-invented by Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves, manufactures light bulbs that are powered by gravity. Wondering how it works? Well, as a part of this technique, a sack of sand is used to gradually pull a piece of rope through a dynamo mechanism that generated electricity, which ultimately powers the LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). This is not it! The most startling fact of this technique is that a total of three-second pull on this rope can keep the LED bulb running for up to 30 minutes. Such applications are viable for countries that do not have a stable and reliable electricity access. The team of the project shares that this project will distribute light bulbs for free to billions of poor people who currently rely on biomass fuels like kerosene, which can be really hazardous to health....

Google has launched a new effort to warn its users that they could be the victims of cyberattacks from hostile governments. Account-holders working in international relations, development and other sensitive areas have received messages from the search giant informing them of recent efforts to spy on their online history. The move comes after the company started detecting 'tens of thousands' of new hacking attacks originating in the Middle East. Warning: Google has sent this message to a number of at-risk users Google is a tempting target for hackers, as it is not focussed solely on search but also offers its users services such as email, mapping and Chrome, one of the most popular web browsers. This week, according to the  New York Times , users thought to have been targeted saw a message attached to their accounts saying, 'Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer.' This is not the first t...

Robots may be the handymen of future space missions, according to researchers at MIT. Instead of sending astronauts out to examine and repair broken satellites and spacecraft, robots may be dispatched as intelligent fix-it swarms, communicating with each other as they circle and inspect a target.  Although such a scenario is years down the road, researchers in MIT’s Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) are developing software that may eventually control such robotic inspectors in space. The group has been testing algorithms on robotic platforms called SPHERES, volleyball-sized droids built at MIT, which are now onboard the International Space Station (ISS). In the microgravity environment aboard the ISS, the robots hover in midair, much like they would in outer space. Researchers have been programming the robots to cooperate with each other as they explore and inspect their environment.  In the next few months, SPHERES (which stands for Synchronized Position Hold, Engag...

 It is possible for an adversary or a group of hackers to cripple India's power grids through a cyber-attack, although this is an unlikely reason for the recent power outages that crippled much of north, east and north-eastern India.  Since the first power trip up on Monday, there have been discussions within the security establishment about the possibility of entities trying to carry out a sophisticated cyber-attack to cripple the grids.  Officials who carried out an audit of critical information infrastructure admit it is "theoretically possible" to cripple India's power grids through a cyber-attack.  Despite such a possibility, the shutdown did not seem to have led to a crisis management procedure that aimed at ruling out or confirming a cyber-attack.  "Given the fact that our grids are vulnerable to a cyber-attack, those responsible for managing grids should have a proactive policy to rule out cyber-attack as part of their crisis management procedures,...

Canon begins selling a next-generation form of virtual reality technology known as  mixed reality (MR)  this month. The company suggests its version of MR is an enhanced, more grown-up version of the augmented reality provided by some smartphone apps and things like  Google’s Project Glass . In contrast to  augmented reality , which typically adds text or simple graphics to what the user sees, Canon’s MR adds computer-generated virtual objects to the real world in real time, at full scale, and in three dimensions. In a further contrast to consumer-oriented augmented-reality schemes, the technology is initially targeted at engineering groups involved in designing and building new products. Canon claims that not only will it cut down on prototyping, it will also speed up concurrent engineering by allowing those involved on the manufacturing side to get a faster look at what is coming down the new-product pipeline. The key technologies making this possible are...

South Korean police have arrested two hackers who stole personal data of 8.7 million customers of the nation's second-biggest mobile operator, the company said Sunday. KT said the hackers -- formally arrested on Sunday -- had stolen data such as customers' names, phone numbers and residential registration numbers for five months since February and sold the information to telemarketing firms. "The number of affected people account for nearly a half of about 17 million customers of ours," a KT spokesman told AFP, adding the company had alerted police on July 13 after detecting traces of hacking attacks. Yonhap news agency, citing police, said the duo -- including a former veteran programmer at a local IT company -- had earned at least 1 billion won (about $880,000) by selling the stolen data. Seven other people were also booked for buying the leaked data for telemarketing purposes, Yonhap said. "We deeply bow our head in apology for having your precious ...

The first bio-inspired microrobot capable of not just walking on water like the water strider -- but continuously jumping up and down like a real water strider -- now is a reality. Scientists reported development of the agile microrobot, which could use its jumping ability to avoid obstacles on reconnaissance or other missions, in   ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Qinmin Pan and colleagues explain that scientists have reported a number of advances toward tiny robots that can walk on water. Such robots could skim across lakes and other bodies of water to monitor water quality or act as tiny spies. However, even the most advanced designs -- including one from Pan's team last year -- can only walk on water. Pan notes that real water striders actually leap. Making a jumping robot is difficult because the downward force needed to propel it into the air usually pushes the legs through the water's surface. Pan's group looked for novel mechanisms and materials to build ...

As it is stated in previous post that we aren’t going to start will all those repeating basic programs but still here are some most important commands that will be used throughout our tutorial series. Serial.println(value); Prints the value to the Serial Monitor on your computer pinMode(pin, mode); Configures a digital pin to read (input) or write (output) a digital value digitalRead(pin); Reads a digital value (HIGH or LOW) on a pin set for input digitalWrite(pin, value); Writes the digital value (HIGH or LOW) to a pin set for output Now all of you know how to turn on a led using arduino. But if I want to use decimal number for our program then. We will use float number, here suppose we want to add some decimal numbers and want to print them. float value = 1.1; void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); // open the serial port to send data back to the computer at  9600 bits per //second } void loop() { value = value + 0.1;  // increase...

Arduino is an open source physical computing platform based on a simple input/output (I/O) board and a development environment that implements the Processing language (www.processing.org). Arduino can be used to develop standalone interactive objects or can be connected to software on your computer (such as Flash, Processing, VVVV,or Max/MSP). The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can be downloaded for free from www.arduino.cc .                           What you know that….!?!?! Then what have you been waiting for. You know how to glow LEDs in Arduino UNO board. Great..!! But you don’t know all the programming stuffs of real world like interrupts, timers, I2C etc. That’s why Infizeal Technologies is starting a tutorial series on Physical Computing with Arduino. Every weekend ...

Using piezoelectric materials, researchers have replicated the muscle motion of the human eye to control camera systems in a way designed to improve the operation of robots. This new muscle-like action could help make robotic tools safer and more effective for MRI-guided surgery and robotic rehabilitation. Key to the new control system is a piezoelectric cellular actuator that uses a novel biologically inspired technology that will allow a robot eye to move more like a real eye. This will be useful for research studies on human eye movement as well as making video feeds from robots more intuitive. The research is being conducted by Ph.D. candidate Joshua Schultz under the direction of assistant professor Jun Ueda, both from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "For a robot to be truly bio-inspired, it should possess actuation, or motion generators, with properties in common with the musculature of biological orga...

We have seen the development of a number of technologies that could be used to provide robots with a sense of touch, such as proximity and temperature sensing  hexagonal plates  and  artificial skin  constructed from semiconductor nanowires. However, perhaps none are as impressive as a tactile sensor developed by researchers at the University of California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The group’s BioTac sensor was built to mimic a human fingertip and can outperform humans in identifying a wide range of materials, offering potential use for the technology in robotics and prostheses. The finger-sized BioTac sensor consists of a soft, flexible skin covering a liquid filling. The skin even has fingerprints that enhance the sensor’s sensitivity to vibration, so that as the sensor slides over a textured surface, it vibrates in characteristic ways. A microphone designed to be used underwater – known as a hydrophone – located within the sensor’s bone-like core detec...

Cockroaches are way faster than you and me. Relative to their body weight, they can flee at the equivalent of hundreds of miles per hour and are gone long before your newspaper hits the floor. But researchers from the University of California at Berkeley recently described how cockroaches can also run toward a ledge and then flip around to its underside in the blink of an eye, effectively disappearing from predators. Now they're working on robots that can do the same. Geckos can also perform this escape act, which involves using the hind legs as anchors on the ledge while the body swings under it. "Both species ran rapidly at 12-15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight," Jean-Michel Mongeau of UC Berkeley's biophysics group and coll...

Hackers Have Breached Top Secret Systems of UK Ministry of Defence The UK's military's head of cyber security warned that hackers have breached computer systems containing top secret data, The Guardian reported. Major General Jonathan Shaw told the paper that the number of known breaches to top secret systems was small, but that attacks were "hard to quantify" and that "the likelihood is there are problems in there we don't know about." Shaw spoke with the UK paper about the results of an internal audit of cyber security within the Ministry of Defense that he headed. It was the first public admission by the Ministry of Defence that its own classified systems had been breached. Shaw said the admission should be a wake up call for the UK military and the UK government that it needs to boost public investment in cyber security and embrace a new generation of leaders. "This thing is moving too fast. The only people who spot what is happening...

Canadian Government under Cyber Attack The “Holy Lulz Crusade of Canada” is an operation initiated by the hackers of the  Team Dig7tal  collective, but it’s uncertain if this is a form of protest against the Canadian government or simply a way of showing that websites are highly insecure. The list of targeted sites is considerably long and if in some cases they simply unveiled the presence of cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection  vulnerabilities, in other situations they’ve leaked the information found in the databases. One of the most important websites is the National Defence and Canadian Forces ( corces.gc.ca ). They not only demonstrated that the main domain contains a number of XSS security holes, but they also showed how some of the subdomains could be breached by leveraging SQL Injections. The subdomains include  navy.forces.gc.ca  and  army.forces.gc.ca .  From the systems of the Health Council of Canada they leaked database i...

When most of us think of electronics, we think of the sturdy stability of silicon and plastic. Flexibility is a trait that belongs to the organic world, where materials come in all shapes and stiffness. However, advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. From flexible displays to disposable  RFID tags , these new materials have enabled electronics to end up in places they never have before. They could even, thanks to Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science professor Ana Claudia Arias, end up in our own clothing. Professor Arias is a recent addition to the Berkeley engineering community, having begun her career in materials science at the company  Plastic Logic , developing materials called organic printed electronics. Just as one might print ink onto paper using a desktop printer, these electronics can be printed onto various flexible...

  Four years and $54 million later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is finally ready to launch a surveillance unit capable of spying on Skype conversations and other Internet communications. The Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC) is a collaborative effort between the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Drug Enforcement Agency. All three agencies will build customized hardware to enable wiretapping on wireless and Internet conversations per court order requests. “It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police,”  CNET reported . “The center represents the technological component of the bureau’s ‘ Going Dark ’ Internet wiretapping push, which was allocated $54 million by a Senate committee last month.” The DCAC has been tight-lipped about its purpose. The FBI said in a  statement  that the organization will “not be responsible for the actual execution of any electronic surveillance...