Trees And Bushes Are Different
Your understanding of growing plants may be based on agricultural items such as wheat, rice, flowers that:
o Grow in top soil
o Have roots that are under 10 inches deep.
o Have life of few months
o Irrigation by channel, sprinkler, or drip irrigation.
• Vegetables are similar.
• Trees and bushes are different.
To mark the National Science Day on February 28, Thursday, an ‘open day’ exhibition has been organised by the Science Park department at Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) campus. Atleast 150 scientific models will be at display at the exhibition, including one on butterflies of the Western Ghats that I taught two girls to create. The exhibit is in the form of a Calder mobile with two arms. The biggest butterfly is the size of an A4 paper (roughly 8.5" by 11").
Exhibit Venue: First floor, Science Park department, Environmental Science department building, SPPU
Date: Thursday February 28, 2020
Time: 10:30 am to 5 pm
Motivation: At one stage of life, I was left without any vision in my right eye. Fortunately, the best eye surgeon could correct most of it. I have empathy for the blind.
Provocation: Recently I had meet Hugues from Lyon, France. He and his team at Human Kit, have developed a printer for the blind which is like a personal desktop printer that you and I use. I am wanting to take it further.
Price point: IDEO begins all design efforts by keeping the customer in the center of it. I do this with an artifact of figuring out the price range at which 50% of my potential customers would stop thinking about the price of a product and start looking for its features. All buy decisions are a combination of price and features.
Price point aimed at: A desktop printer frees a normal person. His readings are no longer confined to what somebody else has printed. He can print anything available on the net and he can print whatever he writes himself enriching the contents of his writings with contents created by others. The desktop printer for the blind should give them similar freedom, but at a price that is about double of desktop printers for normal people. The double price is a consequence that the volumes of production are going to be very small compared to normal printer. A good quality Canon desktop printer using ink-jet costs about Rs 10,000 or US $150. I am aiming for a desktop printer for blind at about $250.
I had the great privilege of meeting the team at Dee Dee Labs earlier this year in Mumbai. They are working on a low-cost prosthetic arm in a start-up incubator run by Venture Centre at CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory's NCL Innovation Park, Pune.
Dee Dee Labs has an interesting prosthetic arm design and they are doing good work. Today's Indian Express has a great article on their journey so far. Congratulations to everyone at Dee Dee Labs. Keep up the great work!
Pratik Bhalerao, a co-founder at Pune start-up Dee Dee Labs, demonstrates the working of the prosthetic hand. Photo credit: Indian Express.
Does Finite Element Analysis (FEA) need improvement or it is rock solid?
When a young mechanical engineer starts his learning he is quickly taught that the mechanical world is divided into two binary halves. One half is rigid structures where the component parts do not move relative to other parts and that all reactions are local. FEA rules this world. The second half is the world of machines where parts do move in relationship to other parts. Dynamics, kinematics and tribology rule this world but FEA is not far away when it comes to analyzing each individual component of the machine as that component can be seen as a rigid structure in most cases (except for springs and hydraulic devices).
So is FEA the one ring rule to rule them all? Are there structures that do not fit in the neat categories above? If yes, are they worth studying to see if they can be analyzed by FEA, or does FEA need improvement to analyze them?
Here is a short paper that discusses the design considerations for prosthetic hands in a manner that is easy to understand and follow because of clear diagrams.
Today my associates at Vigyan Ashram, Pune fitted a prototype open source 3D printed bionic hand onto Parshuram Takalkar, an amputee who has lost his right forearm.
Kenneth Snelson, Sculptor Who Fused Art, Science and Engineering, Dies at 89
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/arts/design/kenneth-snelson-dead-scul...
Today, along with agriculture scientists from the BAIF Research Institute, I visited a farmer in Uruli Kanchan who had planted 50 pomegranate trees in rocky terrain using Groasis Waterboxxes. Pomegranates are small, drought-tolerant trees that are normally grown in dry areas with rainfall in summer or winter.
Last Friday, August 5, 2016 my associates at Vigyan Ashram, Pune fitted a prototype 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand onto Parshuram Takalkar, an amputee who has lost his right forearm. Mr. Takalkar kindly agreed to meet Ms. Shilpa Saraf and her dedicated team on a rainy afternoon in Pune and seated himself in the back of Ms. Saraf's car to be fitted with the prosthetic hand. After flexing the prosthetic hand a few times, he fitted the palm into the handles of a shopping bag at his feet and lifted the bag to place it on the seat next to him. After letting the handles go for a moment, he picked up the bag by its handles once again and put it back at his feet. Mr. Takalkar was then offered an object that he gripped by its handle and proceeded to lift it to his lips, to mimic a drinking action.