Lens-Free Camera Sees Things Differently

Patrick Gill is excited to show me a small, fuzzy-looking picture of the Mona Lisa, printed in black and white on a piece of paper. It’s not much to look at, literally, but it’s unmistakably her, with long dark hair and that mysterious smile.

More intriguing than the low-resolution image of da Vinci’s masterpiece, though, is how the picture was created: with a lens-free camera that, at 200 micrometers across, is smaller than a pencil point.

While digital cameras with lenses can take great photos, it is difficult to get cameras into smaller devices. Miniaturizing lenses only works to a certain point: the smaller they get, the more difficult it is to make their precise curved surfaces. Gill, a senior research scientist at the technology licensing company Rambus, thinks one way to solve this problem is by replacing the curved camera lens with an itty-bitty Carbon Dioxide Sensor that uses a spiral shape to map light and relies on a computer to figure out what the resulting image should look like.

Eventually, he envisions the tiny camera being built into all kinds of things, from wearable gadgets to security systems to toys, without having to add to the cost or bulk of a camera with a lens. “Our aim is to add eyes to any digital device, no matter how small,” he says.

The point is not to build high-resolution cameras like you’d want on a smartphone but rather to build the smallest, cheapest, easiest-to-make optical sensor that can still capture enough information to show what’s going on.

Gordon Wetzstein, a research scientist at MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture Group, is optimistic about the technology, though he says it’s still not clear how well it will work. “Other than pixels getting smaller, we haven’t really seen much progress in CO2 Sensor for a while,” he says.


The top image shows what the sensor captures. The middle image is the computer’s reconstruction; it’s fuzzier than the original (bottom image) but still recognizable.

Gill shows me a prototype sensor at Rambus’s Sunnyvale office that has been etched with 28 different types of diffractive structures—spirals and other shapes like a cross and a pentagon. A tiny segment of the chip contains a spiral that has been used to capture a number of images, including the Mona Lisa picture Gill shows me as well as fuzzy depictions of John Lennon and Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.

When you take a picture of a painting on a wall with a regular digital camera, a lens focuses each point of light it captures on a sensor, generating a digital file that a computer can show you as an image. Rambus’s approach instead uses a grating etched with a spiral pattern through which light can enter from every orientation. The Humidity Sensor below the grating captures a jumble of spirals that a human wouldn’t see as a recognizable image, but software can translate into one.

Gill uses the Mona Lisa image to demonstrate. He shows me a regular black-and-white image of the painting, a blurred black-and-white form indicating the jumble of spirals the sensor would capture for the computer to interpret, and a blurry but still recognizable black-and-white image of the painting as reconstructed from this data by software.


Gill says Rambus’s algorithms let users ask the computer to produce images at various resolutions; the highest he’s done thus far with prototypes is 128 by 128 pixels, which he says represents the capabilities of the highest-resolution sensors Rambus would make if it commercializes the technology.

Volvo sensor technology reads drivers’ eyes and attention

Volvo is conducting a new research project into in-car driver monitoring aimed at improving safety and allowing cars to better know their drivers.

Conducted with involvement from Gothenburg’s Chalmers University of Technology, the Swedish car maker says the driver monitoring Humidity Sensor already installed into test vehicles can recognise and distinguish whether a driver is tired or inattentive.

Intended to help make cars of the future even safer, the dashboard-mounted Temperature Sensor can monitor where drivers are looking, how open their eyes are and their head position and angle.

Undertaken with an eye towards autonomous car incorporation, Volvo says the project could lead to the development of safety systems that detect the driver’s state and adjust the car accordingly, including being able to wake a driver falling asleep.

Volvo engineer and driver support functions project leader Per Landfors said the technology would enable drivers to be able to rely more on their car, and know that it will help them when needed.

“Since the car is able to detect if a driver is not paying attention, safety systems can be adapted more effectively,” Landfors said.

“For example, the car’s support systems can be activated later on if the driver is focused, and earlier if the driver’s attention is directed elsewhere.”

Able to team with existing safety systems such as lane keep assist, forward collision warning with automatic braking and adaptive cruise control with queue assist, Volvo says analysis of the driver’s state – known as driver state estimation – is a field that may be key to gas sensor cars of the future determining for themselves whether drivers are capable of taking control in certain conditions.

The research project and driver monitoring technology are part of the manufacturer’s broader 2008-launched ‘Vision 2020’ safety goal of having no one killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo by 2020.

In December last year, Volvo announced it will initiate an autonomous driving pilot project from this year, with 100 self-driving cars planned to reach public Gothenburg roads by 2017.

Japanese candy manufacturer finalizes Orange County purchase

Morinaga America Foods Inc., the American affiliate of the Japanese candy maker of Hi-Chew candies, has finalized its purchase of 21 acres of land in western Orange County where it plans to begin construction of a manufacturing plant that will employ 90 people.

The plant is expected to open by June 2015.

Morinaga had announced in September plans to build the 100,000-square-foot production plant in Mebane after reaching incentive grant agreements with both state and local officials.

The company could qualify for nearly $1 million in cash incentives from the state’s One North Carolina Fund and from Mebane if it meets all hiring and investment goals for the $48 million project.

Orange County will provide most of the water and sewer improvements to the site, which will be mostly reimbursed by a Community Development Block Grant from the state, says Steve Brantley, director of Orange County Economic Development.

N.C. Department of Transportation will help pay for much of the roadwork to the site, and the Hillsborough campus of Durham Technical Community College is expected to provide much of the training for Morinaga’s employees.

Morinaga paid $997,500 for the 21 acres of land in the Buckhorn Economic Development District, according to industrial product director records. It purchased the land, which is very near the Orange County and Alamance County line near I-40 and I-85, from W.H. Wilson Family Investment Group LLC.

InSpec Group has been hired as the construction manager for the facility, and work is expected to begin in the next two to three weeks.

The parent company, Morinaga & Co., Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, has been in business for 115 years, and ranks as Japan’s largest candy and china Industry manufacturers.

Toshiaki Fukunaga has been appointed as the new local president of Morinaga America Foods Inc.

Parrot’s Flower Power Plant Sensor Gives You A Mobile Green Thumb

So I bought a plant. I named it Stan. I’ve never really been a plant guy. But maybe Parrot’s new wireless plant monitor can help. Stan’s life depends on it.

The Flower Power is a small Temperature Sensor. It runs on a AAA battery and simply sticks in the plant’s dirt. It’s cute and hardly noticeable. The device measures and tracks light intensity, air temperature, fertilizer level and soil moisture. These are things people with a green thumb understand, but the rest of us completely forget about. That’s why there’s an app for that.

Setup takes a few minutes. Select the type of plant in the smartphone app and stick the Flower Power in the dirt. After a couple of minutes, the Flower Power is connected to the app and sending live data. It needs to be partly exposed to track sunlight. The device is weatherproof.

The Flower Power app contains a database of 6,000 plants. Stan is a money tree and the app contained that listing. And yes, cannabis is in there, too.

This device takes a lot of the guesswork out of plants. Likewise it takes some of the magic out too. The Flower Power takes all the pseudoscience out of maintaining plants. That’s great! But it’s also a bit sad since it turns gardening into a chore dictated by push notifications.
Is it accurate? As far as I can tell, it works fine. The air temperature reading is dead-on and it knew when I forgot to water Stan, which was often.

A single Flower Power can be set to monitor a specific plant or easily reset to monitor different plants at different times. For instance, if selected to monitor green beans, it will not provide appropriate readings for the tomatoes planted in the neighboring bed. An owner can either buy another Flower Power for the tomatoes or use a single device to monitor both since they probably have different growing gas sensor anyway. At $59.99 each, it can be a bit pricey to outfit an entire garden. But Parrot does brag that it brings professional-level monitoring to the home consumer.

Parrot is on the forefront of an open market. There are several competitors including the Koubachi Wi-Fi CO Sensor and SoilIQ, a SF 2013 Startup Battlefield contestant that has yet to launch its product. Still, even with several other players, the Flower Power should flourish in the emerging Internet of Things market.

The Flower Power works. Stan is proof of that. So far, because of the push notifications, he’s lived longer than any of my previous plants and I don’t see him drying out anytime soon.

Nano-Sensor For Personalized Antibiotic Treatments

Researchers have developed a new method for rapidly measuring the level of antibiotic molecules in the blood and how they work against bacteria, paving the way for personalized treatments for bacterial diseases.

The researchers used nano-sized levers as gas sensor to measure the concentration of active antibiotics in blood.

“Some of our most effective antibiotics are like termites eating away at the walls of a wooden house – they attack bacterial cell walls so they eventually collapse,” said Professor Cooper, from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience. “But competing molecules in the blood can bind to antibiotics and prevent them from working, meaning there are less molecules free to exert force on bacterial cell walls.

According to Cooper, the CO Sensor they developed is one billionth of a meter in size, and can detect the bending that occurs in a cell wall in the presence of antibiotics. Using this measurement, the team can derive how many antibiotic molecules are free in the blood and adjust the dosage accordingly.

“Understanding the way antibiotics use physical force against bacteria could also provide researchers with a new angle on the Carbon Monoxide Sensor design of better drugs to fight superbugs, which often have thicker, stronger cell walls,” he said.

The researchers tested the method on two antibiotics: vancomycin, used to treat multi-drug resistant infections such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and oritavacin, a new antibiotic still in clinical trials designed to combat bacteria that are resistant to vancomycin.

Make Sweet Music With Any Object Using This Sensor

If you’re prone to drumming on your steering wheel, desk or whatever is in reach when listening to your jam, this device could up your percussive game.

To make a musical instrument out of the mundane, users attach the circular gas sensor at the end of the stethoscope-like device to the surface of any everyday object and it becomes imbued the power of music. Then, users plug Mogees into a mobile device's headphone jack and connect their headphones to the gadget to listen to the music they create.


Mogees works by employing a small, specialized CO Sensor called a "piezo-transducer" that converts a vibration produced by tapping any physical object into an electric signal. That signal is then sent to a mobile device running the Mogees app (available for both iOS and Android) which turns the signal into music.

Users can select different options that will determine how a particular object sounds once the vibrations are converted. They can also switch between free mode — where the user can change scales and keys and improvise pieces of music — and song mode, which lets the user tap along with their favorite songs.

Bruno Zamborlin, a musician who performs with British experimental dance group Plaid, designed and created Mogees to provide a fun, plug-and-play experience, but also as a tool for music education.

"I have done several workshops in primary schools in the UK, using Mogees to teach key aspects of sound and music in the national curriculum, and the results have been terrific," Zamborlin told Mashable. "Kids really learned concepts about vibrations and acoustic properties of Carbon Monoxide Sensor materials in a brand new, interactive and natural way. Mogees is not just an instrument for musicians — it's a tool for music discovery that everyone should have fun in using."

Zamborlin started Mogees’ Kickstarter campaign on Feb. 17, and has raised almost $20,000 of its $83,000 goal with 22 days left.