Technabob » ge

1960s Walking Truck: The First AT-AT?

Technabob — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:51:41 +0000

I always wondered how practical a giant manned walking robot like the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back would really be. Well a long, long time ago, at a General Electric factory far, far away, it turns out an actual quadruped manned robot was in development.

Back in the late 1960s, GE created the Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine (CAM). The so-called “Walking Truck” robot was controlled directly by an operator inside a cage, who used a series of levers not dissimilar from those you’d find in construction equipment to control the ‘bot’s movements, and mimicking his own movements. Apparently, driving the CAM was so challenging for the operator, that he’d have to take a break after about 15 minutes. I wonder if those Imperial Walker pilots had to stop every 15 minutes too.

Check out CAM in action in the archival footage below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Developed for a U.S. Army experiment, the CAM never saw the light of day, but at least at the time the footage was shot – it was sitting in an Army warehouse in Detroit. I wonder if it’s still there, or if some lucky sucker picked it up at an auction at some point.

[via VideoSift]

Eco-Friendly LED Light Bulb Cooled With Jet Engine Tech

Shane McGlaun — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:17:21 +0000

Going green is all fine and good for the environment and it will help you a bit when it comes time to pay those utility bills too. I have tried some of the green florescent bulbs in my normal light fixtures before, but the weird colored light bothered me so I tossed them out. I like the idea of LED lighting since the light color can be adjusted, but there are few LED bulbs on the market and those aren’t that bright.

Researchers at GE have revealed a new LED light bulb prototype that has 1500 lumens of light output, which is equivalent to a 100W halogen bulb. The LED bulb has to deal with lots of heat and to keep the thing cool and small the researchers used from tech that GE developed for jet engines to cool the bulb.

The tech uses tiny micro-fluidic bellows type devices that provide high-velocity jets of air that hit the LED heat sink. Those jets of air help to cool the heart sink ten times more efficiently than without them. That allows the light to be brighter, with fewer LEDs and saves money.

[Press Release]

The Dude Who Dresses Michelle Obama Designs a Camera

Shane McGlaun — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:00:47 +0000

I didn’t vote for Obama, mostly because his ears were too big and he reminded me of Ross Perot. As it turns out my irrational fear of leaders with big ears worked out in my favor, you can’t blame me for the huge deficit and the fact that our tax money paid bonuses for banking executives. Michelle Obama has thus far been known for being married to the leader of the free world and for being a snappy dresser.

Apparently, the dude responsible for at least some of her duds is designer Jason Wu. Wu has branched out from dressing Michelle and is now designing digital cameras, which is apparently what all designers aspire to after Vivienne Tam broke into the lucrative gadget design market and opened the doors for designers of all kinds. Wu’s line of cameras is called Create by Jason Wu and will be GE branded though they are produced by a company called General Imaging.

The cams come in enough colors to make a bag of Skittles jealous or you can get them clad in leather. All of them share the same features and price. The cams come with 4GB of storage built-in, 12-megapixel resolution, 3x zoom, and a 2.7-inch LCD for $179.99 (USD). You can also get the cams in 8GB capacity for $229.99. You can get both of the cams on HSN on March 16.

Ge Working on OLED Lighting

Technabob — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:49:29 +0000

OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology has been gradually gaining momentum as a display medium for everything cell phones, portable media players and even some upcoming computer monitors. But did you know OLED can be amped up enough to generate a meaningful source of illumination?

GE Global Research has been working on a prototype of an OLED light source that could be the shape of things to come. The research project started out by building a small 1-inch square prototype, but GE engineers gradually ramped up the technology to the point where they had a large 2-foot square panel generating a significant amount of white light.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

GE is now working on ways to drive the production cost of OLED technology down to a point where it could become a practical substitute for other sources of illumination. Since OLED technologies are flexible and can be engineered to change colors, there is potential for all sorts of unique lighting and display applications.