Here is an interview with Steve Sammartino (Australia) and Raul Oaida (Romania) on their efforts to build the car. The project built a fullsize car out of lego ($60,000 worth of legos) with a lego engine that works on air. It really is an interesting interview.
Posts about entrepreneurship
Super Awesome Micro Project – Full Size Lego Car
Categories: Engineering, Technology
Tags: cars, cool, Engineering, engineers, entrepreneurship, home engineering
Wristband Thermometer Can Save Many Babies’ Lives
As I have mentioned many times before, I really love the use of appropriate technology to make a significant contribution to our lives. It is hard to do much better than saving our babies from death.
Hypothermia and infection are among the top causes of newborn deaths for the poor around the world. Regular temperature monitoring can enable early intervention.
Bempu is a new startup based in India that is developing a wrist-band for newborns that monitors their temperature and gives an audio-alarm if the temperature is unsafe. This isn’t an Apple-watch but it is just as worthy of publicity.

These wristbands can save the lives of newborns.
The Gates Foundation, and others, have contributed money to bring this product to market.
From an article on the new wristband:
…
We know what the problems are, we know what to do about it and it’s not happening,” says Karsten Lunze, a doctor and expert in newborn hypothermia at Boston University. If Bempu, which is still in prototype and will likely get to market by the end of 2015, succeeds, “it would be a miraculous catalyzer that everyone has been looking for over a decade,” he says. It’s testing well so far: A prototype, used on 25 newborns this year, detected a temperature drop a full 24 hours before hospital workers noticed.
…
Bempu was born after Narain followed his nose to the global south at 27, where he worked as an engineering fellow at Embrace, a nonprofit that makes a cheap, portable and rechargeable incubator for newborns. He noticed something clear: No one was really watching closely. Nurses lacked thermometers; some couldn’t even read them and mothers didn’t know the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Related: Manufacturing Biological Sensors Using Silk and Looms in India – Cheap vinegar test cut cervical cancer deaths in India; could help many poor countries – Using Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies in Roadless Areas – Appropriate Technology and Focus on Improving Lives at MIT – Water Wheel
Categories: Engineering, Health Care
Tags: appropriate technology, Engineering, entrepreneurship, Funding, gadgets, human health, India, Products
3D Printing at Home: Today, Challenges and Opportunities
Guest post by Noah Hornberger
The State of 3D Printing at Home
Rapid prototyping is very rewarding. Moving from an idea that you had during breakfast to an object you can hold in your hands by lunchtime feels like magic or science fiction.
Modeling tools are getting easier to use, making the actual process of designing 3D objects fairly intuitive and dare I say . . . easy. I suspect home 3D printing is empowering a silent revolution that will be more and more apparent in the coming years.

Taco Shell Holder, a recent idea I had during breakfast was ready to test the next day.
Even so, there is a lot of quirkiness to the 3D print technology that an average consumer is probably not ready to deal with. In this post I want to give inside information I have learned by running my own home-based 3D print business. I have been there in the trenches, with a queue of orders, a few 3D printers and the drive to make it happen. And let me tell you that without the drive to push past the obstacles, it really would not be possible to run a 3D print-on-demand business this way.
3D printers have enabled me to pull off an impossible task of distributing my own artistic products to an international market. I have shipped to USA, Spain, Australia, Norway, Canada, and the UK. And this May of 2015 marks my first year of owning a 3D printer.

Mini Dodecahedron Planters, my first attempt at designing and printing an idea from scratch. I was hooked.
So there is some magic I would say in being able to move through iterations of your ideas so fast. And magic in being able to post photos of your products that people can understand to be real and tangible things.
I have had ideas for products for many years and even tried to launch them (unsuccessfully). But now things are different. I do not have to convince people that an idea is good, I can show them a real example of finished art they can own.
I would argue that 3D modeling is the easiest part of the process. Getting a spectacular print can take some work and patience, because it can involve re-starting the printer with small changes in settings each time. As an American trained artist, I have a tendency to want things to be fast and easy. I want to press a button and it just works. 3D printers can kind of promise this ability, but most often, I am stepping in to keep the machines on track.
Categories: Engineering, Products, Technology
Tags: 3d-printing, cool, Engineering, entrepreneurship, guest post, Products, Technology
Manufacture Biological Sensors Using Silk and Looms
The fabric chip platform from Achira Labs in India uses looms to manufacture biological sensors.
Yarn coated with appropriate biological reagents like antibodies or enzymes is woven into a piece of fabric at the desired location. Strips of fabric are then cut out, packaged and can form the substrate for dierent biological assays. Even a simple handloom could produce thousands of these sensors at very low cost.
The resulting fabrics can be used to test for pregnancy, diabetes, chronic diseases, etc.. Achira Labs, an Indian start-up, received $100,000 in Canadian funding in 2013 to develop a silk strip that can diagnose rotavirus, a common cause of diarrhea and can be used in diapers.
The company is planing to start selling silk diabetes test strips using there process this year and expects costs to be about 1/3 of the existing test strips using conventional manufacturing processes.
Related: Appropriate Technology Health Care Solution Could Save 72,000 Lives a Year – Water Wheel – Using Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies in Roadless Areas – Appropriate Technology: Self Adjusting Glasses
Categories: Economics, Engineering, Funding, Health Care, Life Science, Products, Research, Science, Technology
Tags: appropriate technology, cool, Engineering, entrepreneurship, Funding, Health Care, human health, India, manufacturing, Products, Science
Appropriate Technology and Focus on Improving Lives at MIT
I have written about the D-lab at MIT founded by Amy Smith. This is just a reminder of all the good stuff they are doing. The D-Lab is building a global network of innovators to design and disseminate technologies that meaningfully improve the lives of people living in poverty. The program’s mission is pursued through interdisciplinary courses, technology development, and community initiatives, all of which emphasize experiential learning, real-world projects, community-led development, and scalability.
Another of their initiatives, the International Development Innovators Network seeks to create low-cost, high-impact technologies and ventures, while simultaneously documenting and evaluating approaches to international development that value local ingenuity and innovation. This effort includes design summits, innovation centers, business incubators, and a growing network of over 400 innovators in 50 countries.
D-Lab’s Youth Outreach Program focuses on Hands-on Invention Education and works with primary and secondary school teachers to develop curricular materials that build the confidence and skills needed by the next generation of innovators from around the world. Together with students and educators from around the world, D-Lab is developing and delivering hands-on curricula aimed at youth that utilize affordable locally available resources.
The program continues to help develop and deploy great products that are meeting the needs to people around the world.
The Leveraged Freedom Chair, is an all-terrain wheelchair designed for the harsh terrain faced by people with disabilities in developing countries.
Categories: Engineering, Products
Tags: appropriate technology, Engineering, entrepreneurship, MIT, Products, university business collaboration
DIY Air Filters for Your House
In January 2013 PhD student Thomas Talhelm, was living in Bejing, China with very bad air pollution and wondered why air purifiers cost so much. He bought a HEPA filter on Taobao, strapped it to a simple fan, bought a particle counter, ran some tests, and published the results.
As the effort gained publicity and people said they had trouble finding the right type of fan and a trustworthy HEPA, Thomas and his friends Gus and Anna decided to launch Smart Air in September 2013 to ship fans and the best HEPAs they could find to people all over China.
Smart Air believes that if more people saw their open source data and testing, more people would know that clean air doesn’t have to cost thousands of RMB (hundred of USD). The simplest solution (a fan, filter and strap to hold the filter to a fan) costs 200 RMB (under US $35).
I love simple solutions. And I love entrepreneurship combined with engineering to provide customers value.
Related: Air Pollution Resulted in 223,000 Cancer Deaths in 2010 – Extremely Bad Haze in Johor Bahru and Singapore – Using Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies in Roadless Areas – Pay as You Go Solar in India
It is also great that they provide useful data including: HEPAs lasted 90 days without any drop in effectiveness, then effectiveness dropped by 4% between days 100-130. It’s up to you to decide whether that 4% is enough to warrant changing your filter after 3 months of nightly use.
Categories: Engineering, Products
Tags: appropriate technology, China, DIY, entrepreneurship, home engineering, pollution, Products
Using Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies in Roadless Areas
This is an awesome use of technology to tackle important problems. Engineers are great.
Humanitarian drones to deliver medical supplies to roadless areas
[Andreas] Raptopoulos said the new system would be used to leapfrog the building of infrastructure, in the same way mobile networks have overtaken fixed lines in poorly connected countries.
…
In sub-Saharan Africa, 85% of roads are inaccessible during the wet season, cutting off huge swaths of the population and hindering the transport of medical supplies, he said.
There are three parts to the system delivering medical goods: the UAVs themselves, landing stations where packages can be dropped off and transferred, and the software that ensures vehicles get securely from point to point. Because of their short battery life, networks of drones are needed to work together, shuttling between ground stations
…
Approximate costings from Matternet put the price of unmanned aerial vehicles at £6,000 each and ground stations at £3,000 each. A network of five ground stations and 10 UAVs, as well as setup and training, would cost a charity in the region of £90,000, according to Raptopoulos. An eight-propeller drone can carry 2kg and travel 10km in good weather. Batteries need to be replaced every 600 cycles.
They are hiring: software engineer and avionic engineering [the broken link has been removed] right now. They are Palo Alto, California.
Related: Appropriate Technology Health Care Solution Could Save 72,000 Lives a Year – Cellphone Microscope – Pay as You Go Solar in India – Water and Electricity for All
Categories: Products
Tags: appropriate technology, California, charity, entrepreneurship, gadgets, Health Care, human health, Products, software engineering, TED
Appropriate Technology Brings a $1.30/month Cell Phone Plan to Remote Village
I love this kind of stuff: smart use of engineering provides cell phone service to remote Mexican village, with 9,000 residents, for $1.30/month (1/13 of the price charge by traditional cell phone service in Mexico City).
The town that Carlos Slim forgot
The U.S. and European experts working with Mexican engineers got the network set up by March of this year. At first, they ruled that phone calls were not to be longer than five minutes each to keep the small network from getting saturated.
By May, local numbers in Mexico City, Los Angeles and Seattle were set up, meaning that Oaxacans in Villa Talea could call relatives in the capital or in California as if it were practically a local call, a few cents a minute.
Given the success they are buying equipment that can handle the volume and will donate the existing equipment to setup a new village (a smaller one, I imagine). This was the first village they setup.
This is one of so many great efforts to use appropriate technology to improve people’s lives. It is easy for me to get frustrated at the cash for votes mentality of the USA politicians which creates policies against improvement for society and for protection of obsolete business models (until the bought-and-paid-for politicians make the business models sustainable by legislating against better options). It is great to see these kind of examples for the good work being done outside of the political sphere.
Related: Pay as You Go Solar in India – Providing Computer to Remote Students in Nepal – Reducing Poverty Using Entrepreneurship – Monopolies and Oligopolies do not a Free Market Make
Categories: Economics, Engineering, Products
Tags: appropriate technology, communication, Engineering, entrepreneurship, Funding, Mexico, Products
Hyperloop – Fast Transportation Using a Better Engineering Solution Than We Do Now
Elon Musk (the engineer and entrepreneur behind Tesla electric cars and before that he helped create PayPal) has a very cool idea of how to provide fast long distance transportation (faster than a plane). Essentially it is a big version of pneumatic tubes that used to be used to send small packages around a building, as seen in the movie – Brazil 🙂 Details are scheduled to be released August 12th.
This Is How Elon Musk Can Build the Hyperloop for a Tenth the Cost of High-Speed Rail
- The crossing of other right-of-ways, like roads and railways, will be a breeze.
- Rivers and other terrain obstacles will only be a 10th the problem of rail construction.
- Hyperloop can avoid tunnels completely by having more flexible choices of right-of-way.
- An elevated right-of-way opens up new route options, like leasing farmer’s fields using contracts similar to what wind-power companies sign.
- That could be paid for by leasing Hyperloop’s right-of-way to communications companies for fiber optic cables, cell phone towers, etc.
- …and let’s not forget the solar power that a couple of square miles of surface area can generate!
Hype Builds Before Elon Musk’s August Alpha Plan for Hyperloop
…
Travelers ride in pods magnetically accelerated and decelerated into the main tube (like a rail gun) where the air circulates at speed. The air between pods acts as a cushion, preventing crashes, while more air injected through perforations in the tube levitates the pods and reduces friction, much as it might on an air hockey table.
Elon Musk has some very good ideas but what really sets him apart is turning them into functioning enterprises. Great ideas are wonderful but a huge number never go anywhere. Those people that can actually get ideas into the marketplace are the people that provide a much greater standard of living for all of us. And many of them are engineers.
Update: link to his blog post announcement.
More examples of cool extreme engineering: Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel – Transferring Train Passengers Without Stopping – transatlantic tunnel – Webcast on Machine That Bores Subway Tunnels
Categories: Engineering, Products, Technology
Tags: civil engineering, cool, creativity, Economics, Energy, Engineering, entrepreneurship, innovation, transportation
2012 Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education
I have posted on the Olin College of Engineering several times. I really like what they are doing. Innovation in engineering education will pay high dividends, especially providing a focus on the nexus of engineering and entrepreneurship.
Olin College of Engineering’s three founding academic leaders, Richard Miller, David Kerns and Sherra Kerns, received one of engineering’s highest honors – the Bernard M. Gordon Prize. The $500,000 prize is awarded by the National Academy of Engineering to recognize innovation in engineering and technological education.
“This team of educational innovators has had a profound impact on society by improving the way we educate the next generation of engineers,” said NAE President Charles M. Vest. “Olin serves as an exemplar for the rest of the engineering world and a collaborative agent for change.”
Armed with one of the largest gifts in the history of higher education, the F. W. Olin Foundation recruited Richard Miller as Olin’s first employee in 1999. To help build the college from scratch, Miller recruited the founding academic leadership team including David Kerns and Sherra Kerns later that year. Together, they developed a vision for an engaging approach to teaching engineering and a new culture of learning that is intensely student centered.
To insure a fresh approach, Olin does not offer tenure, has no academic departments, offers only degrees in engineering, and provides large merit-based scholarships to all admitted students.
Perhaps the most important contribution the Gordon prize recipients made was the creation of a profoundly inclusive and collaborative process of experimentation and decision-making involving students in every aspect of the invention of the institution. This is illustrated by the decision in 2001 to recruit 30 young students to spend a year as “partners” in residence with the faculty in conducting many experiments together before establishing the first curriculum.
“As entrepreneurs, we learn to listen to our customers. Olin’s innovative approach was co-created by enterprising faculty, inspired students, and a dedicated staff, as well as collecting and integrating innovative approaches from more than 30 other institutions worldwide,” said David Kerns, current faculty at Olin and founding provost and chief academic officer of the college from 1999 to 2007.
With the extensive help of a collaborative team of faculty and students, and the guidance of the late Dr. Michael Moody, a novel academic program emerged. Some of the features include a nearly gender-balanced community, a strong focus on design process throughout all four years, extensive use of team projects, a requirement that students repeatedly “stand and deliver” to the entire community at the end of every semester, an experiential requirement in business and entrepreneurship, a capstone requirement outside of engineering, and a year-long corporate-sponsored design project in which corporations pay $50,000 per project.
Related: Illinois and Olin Aim to Transform Engineering Education – Webcast: Engineering Education in the 21st Century – Improving Engineering Education – How the Practice and Instruction of Engineering Must Change
Categories: Awards, Engineering
Tags: Awards, Education, engineering education, entrepreneurship, NAE, undergraduate students, Universities, university business collaboration
Roominate: Inspiring Artists, Engineers and Visionaries
Roominate is a cool new toy created by 3 engineering students aimed at giving young engineers a way to learn, experiment and create. The 3 women used kickstarter to get the funds needed to launch their product. They raised $85,000 (the goal was $25,000).
Founders:
Bettina Chen: CalTech BS in Electrical Engineering, masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.
Alice Brooks: MIT BS in Mechanical Engineering, currently at Stanford pursuing masters in Mechanical Engineering design.
Jennifer Kessler: Bachelor degree from University of Pennsylvania, currently an MBA student at Stanford.
This is yet another example of entrepreneurship shown by Standford students. The USA is hugely benefited by Stanford (along with a few other schools: MIT, Caltech, etc.). There is little a country can do that is as helpful economically as encouraging the type of entrepreneurship Standford does.
Related: Awesome Gifts for the Maker in Your Life – Footballs Providing Light to Those Without Electricity at Home – Girls Sweep Top Honors at Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology – Fix it Goo
Categories: Engineering, K-12, Products, Technology
Tags: business, design, electical engineering, Engineering, entrepreneurship, Funding, gadgets, gifts, girls, graduate students, kids, Products, Stanford, toys