openMaterials

SMART TEXTILES SALON September 25, 2009, Ghent, Belgium The programme is organised together with 80th Anniversary of the Department of Textiles at Ghent University and 6th International Conference on Textile and Polymer Biotechnology. The exhibition introduces the latest demonstrator and prototype developments in the field of smart textiles and intelligent wearable systems. The displayed items will [...]

Understanding how we got ‘here’ plays an important role on our efforts to imagine and project the future. In that spirit here’s a lecture given by Michael Riordan at the Computer History Museum addressing the broad efforts toward microminiaturization of the early 1950s. The computer chip we know today initially emerged from Cold War demands for [...]

Still on the subject of printed and flexible electronics, here’s another interesting article by the Technology Review. It describes what its creators call a “dirt-cheap technology” for producing printed supercapacitors by spraying mats of carbon nanotubes onto two pieces of plastic and sandwiching a polymer gel in between. The process seems simple enough to be [...]

In my quest for DIY production techniques for flexible electronics and display technologies, I hit upon this article on Technology Review. It addresses a new technique, devised by researchers at Stanford University and Samsung, to position organic microwires on a substrate and build complex flexible circuits with greater ease. It doesn’t seem to be exactly [...]

hardhack is a hands-on hardware event in berlin, germany. this will be the 2nd incarnation of hardhack. last year it had about 40 participants, this year about 150 participants are expected . the main deal with hardhack is that it consists of all hands on hardware hacking, no powerpoint presentations! no blah blah! there will [...]

Until recently no one could explain why superconducting LEDs are brighter. The question arose last year when Japanese researchers were working on a device to study how Cooper pairs in superconducting niobium would emit light when combined with holes generated in a PN junction. Surprisingly, these researchers realized that their superconducting LED was much brighter [...]