Maker Voice: The original tofu material can now do solar power

Maker Voice is a column for friends who are interested in new hardware, the initial form is an article every day, combing the summary of the day down the new hardware industry's essence, may be an interesting product, it may be a thought-provoking point of view, the goal is to let friends in the shortest time here to look at the real worth of attention to the content. so,enjoy!

The original tofu material can now be made into solar cells

What can tofu do besides eating? You might not expect it to inspire scientists to find new materials to make solar cells. Liverpool scientists in Britain have recently found a new material for making solar energy, which is used to make tofu and bath salts, which can significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing solar cells today.

The most commonly used method is to convert the solar energy into electricity through large and thick silicon plates, and the cost of the silicon plate will be very high. There are a small number of thin film solar cells are made of cadmium telluride, although the material is cheap, but in the manufacturing process need to add a toxic chemical cadmium chloride, so this method is not safe, but also must spend a lot of human resources to deal with the cleaning of cadmium chloride water, to prevent the use of water pollution

This time, Liverpool experts have found a cheap and safe way to use magnesium chloride instead of chlorinated cadmium in the production of thin-film solar cells. The experimental results show that the use of magnesium chloride is also very good. Magnesium chloride can be extracted from seawater, is inexhaustible, the price is also lower, each gram cost about 0.001 dollars (cadmium chloride is about 0.3 dollars/grams). If the technology can be popularized on a large scale, the cost of future solar cells will be greatly reduced.

The Magic Glove helps you finish the stain in a second.

Coffee drops on clothes, stains on new clothes, such annoying things happen every day but helpless. Recently, the Electrolux Laboratory recently released an instant cleaning glove, combining nanotechnology and ultrasonic technology, just to put gloves on the stain, can be any stain from the fibrous tissue collapse.

The glove is fitted with a flexible screen to indicate working status, to be recharged wirelessly, to use degradable materials, and to be replaced when worn. The glove also supports a variety of gesture operations, switching to different clothing and stains of the decontamination mode. For example, clenched fist is to open the power supply, the index finger will scan stains and so on.

Use "wool" to control electrical appliances, human feelings are full

A student at the Royal College of Art recently thought of a creative way to replace cold glass, metal and plastic buttons with objects such as knitting. He used 80% polyester and 20% stainless steel to make conductive yarn (similar to fabric and touch-screen gloves), woven into a series of lovely knitted fabrics, can be squeezed, pushed, beat the way to control the device.

He used this idea to invent a small lamp, can adjust the intensity of light with a rope. Although such a product is not very intelligent, such as making a small juicer requires two people to control the ball, but this interactive creative is still very fun.

Adidas Product family will add new ding, release Micoach fit Smart

According to Mobilehealthnews, a smart wristband will soon be added to Adidas ' product line, MiCoach fit Smart. The product, which is basically a combination of Nike FuelBand and Adidas ' own MiCoach Smart Run, will carry a similar LED-dot-matrix display, which is generally more designed for watches.

Functionally, it allows the user to track heart rate, calorie consumption, time, length of motion, step frequency, step speed, distance, and step count. In addition, it supports Bluetooth 4.0, which interacts with adaptive mobile applications to further provide "visual and tactile feedback." ”

XDi of socket rotation with adjustable 360° angle

Rotary XDi is a "not intelligent" creative outlet, each plug into a separate module, each module can be unlimited rotation 360°, users can arbitrarily increase or decrease the module according to the need. Each socket can be paired with a different color, the left and right two bracket also has the line function, you can collect the line.

Next month the XDI will join the USB charging module, then will add WiFi control, infrared forwarding remote control, wireless AP, power monitoring, such as different single module products, the future toward smart home direction. Although the concept of intelligent hardware is now very hot, but the market has not been nurtured, the rotation of the xdi from the user's needs, not to emphasize whether intelligent, but focus on solving a user's pain point (Jack is not enough or the existing Jack can not fully use), but also a small and medium-sized team can be considered in the direction.