DIY Jet Engine

There are some days that I wish I had a garage with all sorts of tools in it to build projects like...umm...my own home made jet engine!!! I could use it to do all sorts of neat things like...uhh...cool beer! or...uhh...cook a hot dog!

Seriously now though, I know about jet engines because I worked in aerospace for a while as a mechanical engineer and thought they were really neat. I wanted to go work for Pratt & Whitney for a while.

A jet engine is a type of turbine engine. Essentially, it's two fans on a common shaft rotating inside a tube. The first fan compresses the air into the combustion chamber where fuel is added and ignited. The air then suddenly expands rushing out of the compression chamber to drive the second fan, which in turn drives the front fan which compresses more air and so on. The engine reaches a constant speed when the ignited hot air mixture rushing out the back of the engine provides enough power to compress the incoming air and the system reaches an equilibrium state. The air rushing out the back of the engine has lots of power left in it though and provides the thrust force that can enable a plane to take off from the ground. They're complex machines to set up and run and aircraft mechanics get paid a lot of money to keep these engines running without any problems.

I've keep thinking that it is plausible to design a turbine engine that uses concentrate sunlight heat the compressed air rather than fuel. After all, some power generators can concentrate enough sunlight to melt salt. So why not use sunlight to directly power a turbine engine on a smaller scale. Something like this stirling engine.

I started digging around and found a whole wealth of information about using automotive turbochargers. Some good sites are here and here.

I'll keep this project in the back of my mind. Maybe one day when I'm settled in a house I'll give it a whirl.

Urban Farming

A couple of interesting applications could come together in the relatively new future to bring farming to urban centres. The first is the concept of vertical farming talked about here. This globe and mail article also talks about a BC entrepreneur developing urban barns for growing crops.

The second application is the technology that may enable these concepts to take off already exists. From my experience working at a fibre-optics devices company, I thought it might be a good to develop a device that would capture sunlight and divert it indoors using fibre optic cables. Bring outdoor lighting indoors. I did some research and someone's already ahead of the game in this area as described in this article from ecogeek.org.

Indoor growing operations aren't a new idea. Drug dealers have recognized the profit potential for them and it's a big problem as far as Canada's law enforcement is concerned.

The major drawback is electricity consumption. Plants need a lot of light and heat to grow properly. Urban indoor farms will have to consume a lot of energy to grow crops. A technology that allows these farmers to bring sunlight indoors and allow them to grow common vegetables year-round will work towards reducing the energy costs of an operation, especially here in Canada. The initial capital cost for the building, equipment, and lighting technology will be high and I'm not sure that the price point of the vegetables produced in these farms will be palatable for consumers. It would be an interesting pilot study project to examine the profitability of these urban farms. Maybe a single-level warehouse in a suburban industrial zone might be a good spot to start. If you let your mind wander a little bit, the possibility of growing bananas in Canada at some point in the future doesn't seem too implausible.

Electricity from Mud

I came across an interesting article about a scientist working on extracting electricity from mud...yes, mud.

Apparently the Geobacter protebacteria is key to the whole process. The little organism can breakdown metals and conduct electrons. You can read more about the little creature here.

CanadaBrainstorm.ca

Ever since finding about the Brainstorm Ubuntu site, I've had an idea of building a similar website, but for people to exchange ideas on how to improve Canada. I've been watching the news about Canadian politics for a while. I got discouraged at watching elections and how some issues dominate the campaigns. The central campaign issues, like same-sex marriage or public funding for religious schools, have little to do with the national interest of our country, but are really specific. It's a neat marketing/campaign trick by clever strategists to come up with a hot-button issue that everyone has an opinion on and that deals more with belief and cannot really be debated based on logical reasoning. These polarizing issues pretty much divide the voters into for and against sides pulling otherwise undecided voters into one political camp or another. Larger issues such as foreign policy, international competitiveness, inter-provincial trade, and environmental policy get drowned out by the media hype around the single polarizing issue. The end result is that we elect governments based on personal beliefs and ideals rather than a reasoned evaluation of their policies and platforms.

So one way to combat this problem is to define the issues ourselves in some sort of grassroots movement independent of any political party. So during campaigns, when political parties talk about what they think Canadians want, we have some sort of record that contains ideas brainstormed by the population for the kind of country that we want to live in. Political parties can then be evaluated based on how closely they match with the idea repository. These ideas also need not be limited to the realm of public policy. Private industry leaders can also take notice and work to fill a demand in an area that they see an opportunity in.

In any case, looking for a job is a time-consuming process and I need some other way to feel like I accomplished something. So I built CanadaBrainstorm.ca using Drupal and the IdeaTorrent package from the Ubuntu people. The basic premise of the site is as follows:

Great innovative ideas for improving Canada are exchanged between people everyday. However, the majority of these ideas never reach public policy makers and industry executive-level decision makers.

A method for storing and evaluating these ideas is needed so that the best ideas can be accessed by political and industry leaders. These ideas can then be acted upon and brought to reality.


Anyone can create an account, log in, and contribute an idea or vote on one. I'm trying to publicize the site through facebook and personal emails. I'm hoping that some people will be keen on the idea and the site will generate some momentum. I have a section about me with links to my resume and this blog. Hopefully, some sort of job lead will come out of it as well.

I've included a link in the side bar. Please spread the word about the site and get involved!

Cool Knee Brace from SFU Research

I saw this browsing around the news today. It's a really neat idea...power small devices using power generated from walking. It's a shame that the military application is the one that will likely be first to be implemented, but I guess that's how they'll generate the revenue to make a commercial product. In any case, check it out here.

About Biodiesel...

I've been reading a lot about Biodiesel lately in terms of an alternative energy source. It's attractive since it's a closed loop cycle type of fuel. Vegetable oil from plants like Rapeseed (Canola), Peanut, and Soybean can be converted into a fuel suitable for running in diesel engines. Rudolph Diesel, the German inventor of the engine, initially ran his engine on peanut oil in the very early 1900s. With the advent of cheap petroleum, diesel fuel extracted from crude oil was more cost effective to run in these engines.

You can read about the benefits of a diesel engine here.

Biodiesel seems to be gaining in popularity with the current rise in gasoline prices (As of today, crude oil goes for about US$120 per barrel). There seems to be a grassroots movement for home made biodiesel fuel, a Youtube search for biodiesel shows a lot of instructional videos on how to make it.

CBC Marketplace has a good article about the fuel. Canada Clean Fuels is a Canadian company that distributes biodiesel and their website has a lot of good information about the benefits and drawbacks of using the fuel. Other good resources can be found here, here, and here.

As I understand it the main benefits and drawbacks are as follows:

Benefits

• The carbon contained within the fuel is extracted from the atmosphere by the plants harvested for the fuel. No carbon is transferred from underground storage (petroluem) to the atmosphere.


• Pure bisdiesel (B100) burned in a diesel engine has significantly lower CO2 emissions that current gasoline engines.


• Engines run with biodiesel run cleaner and more efficiently. They also last longer and require less maintenance than when run with petro-diesel. Biodiesel does not contain the substances that can gum up an engine.


• Lower cost fuel.

Drawbacks

• Increased NOx emissions. These can be offset with good catalytic converters.


• Poor cold weather performance. Biodiesel becomes very viscous and can freeze at the cold temperatures that Canada experiences in the winter. Blending biodiesel with petro-diesel can alleviate this problem.


• Large areas of agricultural land will need to be devoted to growing the plants needed for large scale fuel production.


• Not readily available at gas pumps


• There aren't a lot of passenger vehicles that have diesel engines. Volkswagen is at the forefront with the Turbo Diesel Injection engines (TDI)

In a previous post about Tim Flannery, I mentioned a Canadian company called Dynamotive and their process for producing Bio-oil through pyrolysis. I started wondering if the Bio-oil could be used to make Biodiesel. That way the process has a double effect on removing CO2 from the atmosphere: carbon sequestration and reduced tailpipe emissions. Maybe that was their original intent with their business idea.

I also started thinking that a series hybrid vehicle with a small efficient diesel engine generator would be a relatively simple car to develop. This sort of solution has already been implemented for locomotive engines and buses (see here and here).

Maybe it's just a matter of time before this type of solution is implemented economically for passenger cars. I guess we just have to be a little more patient...

Linux Coolness

If you think Windows Vista or Mac OS X is cool, check this out. Considering that linux is free, it's pretty amazing compared to the other two operating systems.

It's not without problems though. The guy who made that video posted his Ubuntu 7.10 installation procedure for the Thinkpad R61.

Some vendors are starting to offer linux pre-installed on their hardware. I read somewhere recently that Lenovo will be offering them with Novell Suse Linux (don't remember where I read that though...). Dell now offers systems in Canada with Ubuntu already installed (They offered it in the US for a while now, but just recently made them available in Canada. Not sure why the delay...). System76 sells Ubuntu systems on what looks like Lenovo hardware...the laptops do anyway.

You can always buy an Apple machine and run Linux on it too.

laptops of the future

I'm looking to get a laptop computer and I've been doing a ton of research about them lately. I'm not keen on buying a new laptop with Windows Vista on it. It seems like such a bloated OS to me with a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles. The cheap deals on some of the newer laptops are hard to beat though. I'd buy an apple macbook but they're too expensive for what you get. Nice machines but so what. Anyways, enough about that nerdy topic and onto some cool nerdy things.

I came across a computerworld article about laptops of the future. Not too distant future...more like 2015. They concept renderings look amazing. Not too rugged looking though, except maybe the solar powered one. Check them out for yourself.

Ruby on Rails

I started playing with Ruby on Rails. It's a combination of an easy programming language and a web application framework with database linking that allows you to quickly develop web applications. I started looking into it a little deeper because I was interested in knowing how to make e-commerce sites (online catalogues and the like).

A friend of mine in Ottawa had initially told me about and my brother piqued my interest after he explained how it worked. I went out and bought a couple of books (RoR for Dummies and RailsSpace)

In hindsight, the Dummies book may have been a bit of a waste of money, but it may prove useful down the road. RailsSpace, on the other hand is pretty neat. The book has an online portion to it were you can look at the code a little easier and copy/paste to save you the typing.

The Ruby syntax is pretty easy to learn so far. It's fairly intuitive and a lot of the coding is not cryptic at all...you kind of write down what you have in mind. Have a look for yourself: this site lets you try it out.

The person who wrote that tutorial definitely has a unique brain. Obviously and out-of-the-box thinker. He/She wrote the strangest guide book. I'm not sure how useful it is for learning code, but the pictures are pretty entertaining.

Anyways, I'll slowly be chipping away at the RoR stuff. My interest in it got me thinking about what it would be like to be a programmer for a living. I decided to try a programming course to get a better taste for it.

New Scanner: CanoScan 4400F

I finally picked a new scanner. I had my mind set on this one by Canon but was overwhelmed by its size when I finally checked out. It has the capacity to scan 35mm film, slides, and 120 size film.

I'd originally thought about getting into medium format photography using my Yashica 12 TLR. The large negative format offers the ability for some really detailed pictures as this page shows, but it's also more expensive than 35mm film. Working life and living in Toronto means that I have less time to walk around and take pictures so I haven't really done much in terms of photography.

I decided to scale back and settled for this smaller scanner. It's limited to 35mm negatives and slides but offers the same resolution. I also like the film holder that comes with it. It's easy to load and it holds the film pretty flat.

The scanner also automatically scans each frame individually and shows a preview. You can then select the frames that you want scanned and have them saved to a directory. It works pretty well and the scanning speed is reasonable.

I haven't really looked into using it with linux so I have to boot into Windows to scan photos. The one thing that I don't like about the system is that you have to select an application to load the pictures into after scanning. The system comes with ArcSoft photo editing software so I selected it just to get it to work. I didn't use the software really because I'm used to editing photos in GIMP now. I tried getting the Canon scanning toolbox to load the scanned images into gimp directly but kept getting a .dll error. It's annoying but not that big of a deal.

Overall, I find the scanner works pretty well. I'm going to get a lot of use out of it since I have two bulk rolls of 35mm Kodak Tri-X to use...once I get around to taking some pictures on a regular basis.

Google Tools

I've been reading about Google's Adsense and wanting to give it a try in the hopes of making some money off of this blog. I applied for it the other night and the application went through. I think pretty much any site will get accepted unless there are a bunch broken links or the site content is pretty foul. There's a ton of fine print to go through. I skimmed through it and basically I'm not allowed to click on the ads on my page and I'm not allowed to direct page viewers to the ads visually (through fancy flashing arrows and the like), verbally (asking people to click on them), or through the code (forcing viewers to click on something before viewing content).

I'm not sure exactly how Google picks out the ads to display. I tried looking for a setting where it would only display ads for canadian outfits, but couldn't figure it out. I'll have to do a little more research some other time.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works. Who knows ? Hopefully I'll make some pocket money for a coule pints here or there...

Another neat little Google tool is Google Analytics. I recently signed on the other night and am starting to see the results roll in. It's pretty amazing. All you really do is insert some javascript code in you blog template and Google uses it to track interaction with your page. Again, I'm not sure how it all works, but the numbers it collects are neat. Here's a sample of my dashboard:



There's a lot of data in the underlying layers and it's presented in a neat fashion. It could be pretty useful for some web designers, but I have it mainly because I'm interested in how my blog is being viewed. Again, who knows where this will end up, but it's a neat piece of technology.

Compressed Air Engines

I've been really interested in compressed air engines lately. They're interesting pieces of technology. They're basically similar to a regular internal combustion engine, but without the internal combustion part. The air is compressed externally to high pressures and the release of that pressure drives a piston, which then turns a crankshaft. In an internal combustion engine, the air pressure is created by the ignition of a fuel/air mixture.

Here's an interesting video from Australia:



You can read about the MDI engine here. I still haven't gotten my head wrapped around how the Engineair motor works, but you can read about it here.

This seems like a far simpler way to reduce emissions produced from cars. There are no expensive electric motors or heavy batteries. The fuel infrastructure could be very easily and inexpensively put in place...almost all gas stations have an air compressor now. It wouldn't take much to install bigger capacity compressors. You don't need any fuel to be trucked in on a regular basis. The power needed to drive to compressors could come from several clean sources...solar/wind/wave.

City transit authorities such as the TTC could save a lot in terms of fuel costs by having their buses running on compressed air. They could easily refill at the bus stations every time they cycle through their routes.

Anyways, you can read about some homemade projects here and here. These guys make it seems so easy. Spinmaster Airhogs toys have been powered by pneumatic engines for a while. You can read about how their tiny engines work here.

Neat Technology

My friend Todd send me this link about some really neat technology going on in the software world. What they show in the presentation is pretty amazing. It's easy to think of a bunch of new spin off applications. I think a new kind of desktop interface is coming up. I also think browsing the web will change pretty fast too. Really cool stuff.

Manufacturing in China

Someone had this video at work so I copied it to put on here. Have a look at this:



It's hard to imagine being in this kind of work environment. It seems like a scene from the beginning of the industrial revolution where Europe and North America had child labourers and all sorts of poor conditions for workers. Wages were also pretty low.

A lot has happened in the west in terms of workers rights since then. Some would argue that unionized workers have it too good and point to examples in GM or Chrysler where the unions have pretty much choked companies through fat pensions and high wages. Beyond that, however, there are a lot of safety regulations, inspections, quality assurance auditing, paid vacation, minimum wage, and other basic benefits that are a given for people working here in Canada. The cost for all of these, along with taxes, electricity, water, building maintenance, and other administrative departments, are carried by any company in the form of overhead costs. They work to increase the cost of any product or service being sold.

In the video, apart from the obvious lack of safety measures, there are 6 people running a single machine. No North American company producing similar products can afford to put that many people on a single machine. The hourly wages of the people alone would make the parts too expensive. Instead, automation and other methods are used to reduce the manpower hours on a production line to produce parts at a lower cost. Machines are significantly cheaper than people in the long run.

What can we do to compete with Chinese labour then? That's too big a topic to write about now. In the meantime, please consider that India has close to a billion people right now and, like China, has a large pool of cheap labour to draw on. Also consider that they are growing rapidly in the IT industry and now have the 5th largest steel company in Tata Steel. So the question now becomes, how do we compete against both India and China ?

As a final note, here's a little example on the reality of cheap Chinese labour:
During one interview that I had in Kitchener, Ontario, the company was having welded metal carts manufactured in China. I asked them why, since it was a pretty basic item and there are plenty of local companies that could produce these carts. The interviewer said that the cost of having them made in China was 30% of the cost of having them made locally in Canada...and that included the cost of shipping the carts half-way around the world.

Hybrid Car from 1969 !

I was digging around the web looking for stuff about electric cars in terms of motors, battery technology, and other general info. I came across this site about a hybrid car from 1969 !

I've already watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" and knew about GM's EV1 car. The whole issue is still puzzling as to why the car was discontinued, but know finding out that a plug-in hybrid car was developed almost 40 years ago is troubling.

With hybrid cars only now being produced by car manufacturers, one can't help but wonder what 40 years of production and development would have produced. Would big city smog be as bad as it is now ? Would the demand for oil be as high as it is now?

In any case, have a look at the Tesla Roadster for an interesting electric car.

There are tons of sites out there about building your own electric car. You can start here, here, here, and here.

Interested in racing your EV ? Have a look here.

I like this idea...probably has lots of appeal for students and big city residents. Not really practical in the Canadian winter though.

It seems like our government could be a little more agressive in giving car companies more incentives to produce hybrids and electric cars. They could set up a contest scenario like what Richard Branson does and the X Prize. You think a struggling car company like GM would benefit from a 2-year tax free status from being the first company offering a production electric vehicle with a 300km range per charge ?

Tech News

A couple of interesting articles from the cbc site...

The first is an article about linux from one of the regular contributors of the technology news section. He talks about Ubuntu and linux in general.

The other article is about some amazing new technology...think Star Wars holographic projections. Pretty wild...

Web Design

Over the last couple of weeks or so, I've been busy designing a website for my friend Michele. She took a cake baking/decorating course a while ago and has been making cakes for people as a hobby/side job.

She does a really nice job and the cakes look better in person than in pictures. Have a look at the site and let me know what you think of it:

http://www.sweetnuniquecakes.com

It was a good learning experience for me. I've definitely enhanced my html programming skills and learned some javascript along the way.

Here are some really good resources for learning, if you're interested:

http://www.w3schools.com
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/myfirstsite/basicwebdesign.html
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/1924/

I was working in linux for the most part and used the Quanta Plus web development software. It was good for the most part. Any text editor in linux also doubles as an html editor as well, so there's no real need to use specialized software. However, Bluefish is also an excellent package to use.

For windows users, I did some research and am telling people to use Alleycode. It's fairly simple and has all the features you really need.

Anyways, as I was finishing up the website, it dawned on me that this would be a good format for a web album. I may develop a template for a web album, but it's easy enough to replicate.

Incidentally, in doing research for the project, I came across some neat sites:

Dynamic Drive
Hoverbox

There are lots of internet resources for web design and it's not that hard at all. It just takes a little time and patience to learn it.

Linux and Digital Photo Management

I started using linux about a year ago and slowly began moving over from using Windows software. If you don't know anything about linux, have a look at this intro from IBM and check out the Distrowatch site for the range of linux "flavours".

Basically, linux is an operating system that's designed to function like Unix but run on consumer PC hardware. It picked up speed in the early 1990's when a software developer named Linus Torvalds came up with the Linux Kernel. The same people who developed the original web browser that eventually became Netscape also got involved and the anti-windows movement began as software geeks began to hate paying high pricess for the microsoft software. You can read about it here and/or watch a movie called "Revolution OS" that talks about the whole story (it isn't all that exciting to watch, but is informative if you like documentaries).

Incidentally, Apple's Mac OS X is based on a similar unix-like operating system called Darwin, which based on something called FreeBSD.

Anyways, the big deal about linux is that it is open source and free. Almost all the distributions on distrowatch are completely free and are readily available for download. Some distros have bootable live cds which you can use to try out the software on your computer without installing anything. It runs from the cd/dvd drive and loads into your RAM memory and leaves your hard drive untouched. After you're done with it you can run your computer as usual. They run on both pc and apple hardware. Viruses aren't much of a problem either since the operating system is more secure in general and the there isn't much of an anti-linux cult of hackers out there tying to bring down a massive corporation.

It's a big topic and I don't want to get into it too much, but there are also different desktop environments like KDE, Gnome, and XFCE. You can read about them yourselves...just google them and you'll get their websites. Have a look at screenshots here, here, and here. I used to use Gnome, but switch to KDE because it seemd to run better to me. XFCE runs well on old machines that used to run Windows 98...I have it running on an old Pentium laptop that I use for web browsing in the living room.

In terms of digital photo mangement, there is a KDE application called Gwenview that I found pretty useful in going through my many pictures. You can browse through your pictures pretty easily and do some quick editing on the fly like rotating, flipping, and mirrorring. There are plugins available that also allow you to do batch operations like resizing, converting, renaming, and applying some image effects. Very usefull when you have a ton of images to process !

There is also an opensource photoshop package called Gimp. Although it's not as slick as Adobe Photoshop, it's pretty good for most people...especially because it's free. There are packages for installing it in Windows and Mac OS X too.

It takes a while to get to know how to use the software, but since it's an opensource project, there are lots of sources on the web for tutorials and help on how to use it. Once source is the Gimpology site where you can learn how to add some neat effects to your pictures like this one about tilt-shift photos like these and these.

The entire opensource and linux movement is kind of a neat phenomenon. It's got a lot of steam in places like Brazil and India where people want access to technology without having to pay a 3 months' wages to pay for a license. Governments are starting to look into it as well.

Personally I use Kubuntu. I've gotten used to how it works and so I've stuck with it. A really good one to look at the is OpenSuse project. Try to download the live dvd first to try it out, although if you don't have broadband it will take a long time.

Thinking ahead...

I've had a lot of time on my hands the last few days so I started thinking a lot about what to do over the coming weeks. Then I started thinking about what I'll do after I get home. Top of the list is looking for work. I have a few ideas but I figured I'd start with posting my resume on here on the blog. The link is now on the top of the blue sidebar.

So if you know anyone who's looking for a Mechanical Engineer with some good design and manufacturing experience, please forward the link to them. Please feel free to pass on the link to this blog as well. So far it looks like I'll be back home in Canada around the first week of February.

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Some geeky techie stuff:

I generated the pdf using a handy little tool called CutePDF Writer combined with a GPL licensed postscript converter called Ghostscript. It behaves as another printer on your machine. To generate a pdf of any document, you just select "CutePDF Writer" in the printer list. A dialogue box will come up asking you for the file name.

I stored the file on online file storage site at www.box.net. You get 1GB free by signing up. The upload time depends on your internet connection, but with broadband it's pretty fast. They have deals for more storage, but for sharing small files like documents the free storage size is more than enough.

Hanging about...

We were supposed to go to Malapasqua on Monday, but the typhoon had stirred up the waters in the area and diving would have been bad. So we decided to wait a couple of days before heading up there.

I spent more time at the gym boxing and swimming, went to see "Casino Royale" with Andrea, and being a mall rat.

I also took Aimee, Jon, and Uncle Geoff out for dinner at a cool japanese place here. The food was really good and the atmosphere was nice. Jon's a bit of a celebrity around here because of his modelling work so some of the girls on the staff were giggling and trying to get a picture of him.

There's a wierd phonomenon here with cell phones. It's kind of like yawning...one person starts and then in a matter of minutes the people around are doing it too. In every conversation there's a moment when everyone is fiddling with their phone. Here's what it looks like:



I stitched two pictures together using
autostitch. It's neat and it works well. The demo version is free, but I don't know if there's a limit on how much you can use it.