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Hey people, I had figured some of you might be interested in how your pitch fork's are made. It is interesting to know how your tools are made. *Now stick'em up your ass. *

From the interwebs:
"Nixie isn’t going to be on this Christmas’ shopping list and is simply a concept at this stage."
and
"The Nixie prototype, as it is now, looks like it could break at a moment’s notice, and resembles more a school science project than the next big wearable."
and
"Nixie is currently in prototype stage and as an idea, was born only ten days before the deadline for the competition. But despite having a lot of work to do, the team's pitch convinced the judges not only that the product is brilliant, but that the team has a viable business plan and can make the product, quite literally, take off. Prize money will be used for improving the propellers, motors and object navigation, as well as miniaturisation of the whole product."

I still think Intel got conned.

What this tells me is that everybody sees potential but that what they showed in the video was pure concept design. They have a very long road ahead of them still. My key issues are and remain:
Getting the booms to bend around the wrist so as to bring the motor pods back together.
Fitting the electronics into a format that will fit onto a wrist.
Maintain an acceptable level of performance for an acceptable level of time.

Funny thing is that they mention all of the things I've commented on:
Propellers, miniaturization, and navigation.

I would add form factor and battery life. But Props will be a key issue as getting efficient props at this size is very difficult and maintain tolerances in production.

The young guy was on his heels and leaning back, that's a sure sign of the untrained. Old guy was pitched forward with his head down like a pro.

Reminds me of this:
http://videosift.com/video/Stark-Industries-Presents-the-BLU-108
(sales pitch starts at 0:51)

The slap bands don't work because the arms are at angles to each other. Slap bands can only rotate in a straight direction (They are basically tape measure metal), so they wouldn't be able to come back to meet in the center like they illustrate. Also they have the motors all prettily lined up and facing directly off the wrist, that would require the material to be able to twist.

For the rotor size, these are fixed pitch rotors. You can change the pitch of the rotor to give you different flight characteristics and in general you have to match the pitch to the motor to be the most efficient. I may have this reversed, but a lower pitch prop gives you more torque and less overall speed, but a higher pitch prop gives more top speed, less torque. Making a prop that can be injection molded at that size that even works is difficult, making one that is super efficient would be even more so. QC would have to be incredibly exacting. As a gauge, the 2" x 2" quad has 1" props. They can lift it and buzz it around pretty well. Those things were a pain to get correct and I have a hard time imagining anyone making them more efficient than they are. In the case of the 2" quad, we didn't even paint the body because we want to limit the impact on flight time from added weight. All molded in color. That's how sensitive these things can be. There are better motors if you are willing to pay, but even then it may not be enough.
Go Pro records in HD, but doesn't actually broadcast anything (plus it is big enough to keep this thing from flying anywhere). If you want to broadcast video you have to do it in 640x480 tops. To do that you need something like an FPV system that broadcasts on a spread spectrum. If you went bluetooth you have an effect range that is pretty small. Wifi requires more power to get a longer range. A video transmitter system would require a separate device to attach to your phone to receive the signal and translate it to a PPM signal for through the headphone jack. But a VTX is pretty heavy as well.
And things may drain just a little bit of power, but it stacks up. At most you have a 250mAh Lipo battery that can fit in there. That isn't going to buy you a bunch of flight/video time.
Video on the phone is going to be subject to interference, so you would want to record on the quad. this would get you HD quality, but also adds weight, which means more battery draw, which means less flight time.
-B

What I find fascinating about the Dunning-Kruger Effect is that it implies that the root cause of an individual's stupidity (their lack of talent in a particular field) is due primarily to their refusal to acknowledge their own incompetence, rather than any particular lack of ability itself.

Which is to say: If one can not hear that they are singing out of tune, they do not see the need to correct their pitch in order to improve their singing. As far as they are concerned, they sound wonderful!

It's actually a pretty horrifying conclusion. ><

it's not silent. It's actually louder than a regular car. But it's not a combustion engine sound obviously. It's that high pitch noise of an electric engine.

edit: by regular car, I mean a road car. not a formula 1 car.

On PITCH BLACK the birds did this with people

there not violin strings... most violin string are to short to string onto a viola. and given the range of pitches he is using there would be no point. if you want to play higher pitches you can your hand up towards the body of viola/violin. what your hearing is him playing in 3rd or 4th pos. on the A string which gives him the same range of pitch a violin would have with the left hand at the end of the neck on an e string in 1st pos. The range of the two overlaps in this way with the exception of the 5 lowest notes a viola can play and the 5 highest a violin can.

I saw this on the news last night, but like here, they never showed the propulsion method. It looked way too much like a baseball pitching machine for me to be comfortable with this yet.

Having just run two companies, this is an enjoyable listen but makes me realize just how much corporate jargon I can stammer out in an elevator pitch.

This sort of thing is just a function of knowing what components of vocal tone you can manipulate, how to manipulate them, and engaging in careful, recorded practice until you can routinely reproduce the correct mix. Some vocal strengthening also has to occur over time, much like a singer gradually extending his or her range. The average female voice is only an octave higher in pitch than the average male voice, i.e. a pitch which with practice can easily be reached and maintained by nearly all men. The bigger problem is that men's voices are far more resonant, i.e. rumbly and full, than women's voices. What a man would need to do to reproduce a "girl voice" would be to raise his pitch, and then partially pinch his upper throat and palate, while simultaneously keeping a relaxed throat through which breath can easily flow. If you just pinch the throat without raising pitch, you sound like a nasally drag queen. If you raise the pitch and overly pinch the throat, then you get an artificially thin voice. Merely raising the pitch would just sound like a guy whose voice didn't deepen terribly.

Finally, all of the above would just produce female tone. Much of what we identify as "female" about a voice, isn't tone, but cadence, word choice, and inflection.

I don't think that's auto-tune. You can still hear Shania's voice in that. I think what you're hearing is a backup singer who's at just the right pitch to combine with Twain's voice to sound like it's auto-tuned. Having said that, though, I can't say for sure because I could only listen to it for so long before I had to stop the video.

The pitches played at 4:20 don't match what's written!!! Also, Pachelbel's canon sucks the donkey. Other than that I like it