Dan is wearing a button-up shirt while on the video call. The Rice University mechanical engineer is here to tell me about his new fashion design, but he may lean towards the conventional. His team made a jacket that works without electronics. The jacket has a simple 1-bit memory that stores the state of the hood, and it can be raised and lowered at the push of a button. It is a non-electronicdurable logic in a textile based device.
The wildness of this design needs to be emphasized here. The hoodie doesn't have any electronics. There are no batteries in it. Preston and his team have cut pieces of nylon fabric and glue them together to make a small pouch that is half the size of a business card. They have put the pouch into the jacket. The air from the canister of carbon dioxide can be controlled by pressing buttons on the jacket. The pouch can either be inflated or deflated to make the car rise and fall.
It was courtesy of DanPreston.
The jacket looks like a bike tire. The air-filled pouch on the jacket is similar to electronic transistors. The flow of electrons is controlled by transistors in an electronic circuit. He says that they are just replacing the current with the flow of a fluid.
The not gate was created by the team. A NOT gate is used in an electronic circuit to receive input and change it to a low or high voltages. The hoodie has a pouch that can convert the air going into it into either high or low pressure. Cold War defense applications led to the invention of air-based logic devices that could not be interfered with by microwaves.
Michael Wehner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was not involved in the work. The pneumatic logic used by the team is novel. Wearables, like the Apple Watch, are usually small changes to traditional devices.
Softrobots are machines made of flexible materials such as rubber, Silicone, or fabric and are automated. Soft robot designs have begun to work with humans. They have a softer touch than their hard metal brethren. If you're lucky, you'll go to the hospital if you get hit by a hard robot. Everyone laughs if a soft robot hits you.
It was courtesy of Dan.
Soft robot integration should be easier and safer. The intelligent jacket is made of fabric and feels like a regular jacket. According to a mechanical engineer who was not involved with the work, it is easy for humans to adapt to it.
A fabric computer is more resistant than a Semiconductor based computer. The team put the component in a mesh bag and ran it through a washing machine 20 times. "You might expect a traditional piece of clothing to encounter at some of the extremes in its lifetime." The pouch worked. It's possible to do that to an Apple watch.
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