Raj Agrawal – Page 44

The Ambitious $35 Tablet From India Will Launch This June, For $50

June 15, 2011 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

The HRD ministry recently announced the availability of 10,000 Sakshat tablets to IIT Rajasthan this June and will deliver additional 90,000 units to other areas. All priced at Rs. 2,200 per device. (appx $50)

India-35-dollar-tablet — Preview of Sakshat tablet

Few months ago, the ambitious and much talked about tablet computer from the Indian Govt had slipped out of focus due to unforeseen circumstances.

What happened?

The Indian Government had allocated $6.5 million to this project and initially chose HCL Infosystems to launch the tablet. The company failed to provide evidence of having enough bank guarantee funds and resultantly, the Government were forced to play out the project for bidding again.

Finally, the project is back on track and by the end of June, the students of IIT Rajasthan will be the first to experience the Sakshat tablet.

Expected functionality and features –

Android Operating System
Rugged casing with a rubberized feel
7 inch touch screen
Wi-Fi
Fixed Ethernet ability
Mini and full USB
miniSD card slot
SIM card slot
Video out
Headphone jack
32 GB of memory capacity
2 GB RAM
2 Watts of power consumption with solar charging option

The project’s priority is to spread education and enable every student in India have affordable access to interactive educational resources with the Sakshat tablet. The Government also plans to subsidize the tablet by 50%, which will bring down the price to Rs. 1,100 per device.

The tablet will primarily be distributed at the educational institutions, any plans for retail consumption in future will cause the tablet to be priced higher, in the retail market.

VIA [pluggd.in]

Building Electronics Out Of ‘Paper And Fabrics’

June 10, 2011 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Nano technology will play the lead. Researchers at the North Carolina State University are working on ways to apply nano-coatings to cheap, flexible materials like textiles which have conventionally been applied and confined to inorganic materials like silicon, used for the construction of microelectronics.

conductive nanocoatings — Conductive nanocoatings

It is intended to improve the cost efficiency and flexibility of the electronic devices, well suited for application in health monitoring mechanisms. This was justified by the statements of Dr. Jesse Jur, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science, and lead author of a paper describing the research.

We’re not expecting to make complex transistors with cotton, but there are simple electronic devices that could benefit by using the lightweight flexibility that some textile materials provide,” Jur explains.

Research like this has potential health and monitoring applications since we could potentially create a uniform with cloth sensors embedded in the actual material that could track heart rate, body temperature, movement and more in real time. To do this now, you would need to stick a bunch of wires throughout the fabric – which would make it bulky and uncomfortable.

The research has been recently published in the Advanced Functional Materials issue and is funded by the Department of energy and the Nonwovens Cooperative Research Center.

Flashing Electronic Ink Displays On “Clothes”

June 7, 2011 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

It won’t be long enough when we begin seeing T-shirt apparel or even tyvex cloths enclosing our postal envelopes, being fully embedded with animated messages and icons. This upcoming technology is pushing the capabilities of the existing electronic inks to a bright new level.

We’ve witnessed the invasion of Electronic readers packed in super thin plastic case and even proper e-papers that can easily store and display written content at our convenience, consider Amazon’s Kindle which is powered by E-Ink’s ‘virtual ink’ technology.

Now, this concept of virtual ink has been taken a step ahead to place them onto cloths, and we know that cloths can easily be crumpled and folded owing to it’s physical nature. So let’s say, sometime in the future, we may actually see status updates from Twitter and Facebook on our apparel, or worse, advertisements! As pointed out by FastCompany.

Watch the video demonstrations of how the display works when embedded onto cloths, and yes, it works perfectly even with the crumpling and folding efforts!

These screens are powered by SURF which defines a Segmented, Ultra-thin, Rugged and Flexible display. An interesting aspect of this futuristic display is that the screens are easily viewable in open light as opposed to many flat display ones, allowing the content to be easily readable even in bright sunlight. This is possible because of a reason that E-Ink products display reflected light just as a regular paper does.

E-Ink is ready with this technology and could commercialize their electronic ink displays on such cloths anytime soon. They just need an interested party who may fund the production overheads.