Although not related directly to engineering, I thought that I’d include some posts to a favorite personal site, chessgames.com, particularly in light of the recent passing of the last site founder. Chess games do have bearing on the state and nature of game theory and artificial intelligence, particularly when humans are playing computers. The top computers have been beating the top Grandmasters in chess for a while now, but there are often illustrative games that beautifully demonstrate the difference between men and machine. Here, beauty can transcend computation. Check out the position at move 26.
Wireless Without Batteries — The Introduction
In the Spring term of 2017, I taught a graduate-level class at the Georgia Tech campus in Shenzhen, China. I have a set of rough videos for 19 lectures related to the topics of low-powered sensing, radio communications, and energy-harvesting. Below is the introductory lesson, along with the corresponding readings.
WWB01: Introduction; Computation and Power Trends
Paper: J.G. Koomey, S. Berard, M. Sanchez, H. Wong. “Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Jul-Aug 2011. pp 46-54.
Reading: WWB Introductory Notes and Perspectives
FemtoSats Project
If you would like to orient yourself to the ever-shrinking world of small satellite missions, here is an excellent class project by Alex Akins on the design of a femtosatellite mission. From the report:
While every satellite mission begins with a different idea, all of them share a common con- straint: cost. As the mass of the satellite increases with more instruments and larger struc- tures, the cost of ferrying the mission from Earth to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) increases. Cost also increases with semimajor axis of the operating orbit. While private companies such as SpaceX strive to reduce launch expenses, the fact remains that it costs multiple thousands of dollars per kilogram to insert satellites into orbit. For certain mission profiles, small, lighter satellites may be an appealing option.
Download and view the report here.
NNU Planning to Launch RFsat in early 2019
If all goes well, the NNU team that brought us MakerSat will be launching a new satellite mission early next year as part of a new NASA-funded project. The new satellite experiment, called RFsat, will have a unique RF energy-harvesting radio designed and built by the Georgia Tech Propagation Group. PhD student researcher Cheng Qi has built a one-of-a-kind microwave backscatter reader and tag-sensor combo that will drive the mission package.
The low-powered reader designed by our team deploys a sensor that unfurls a distance away from the spacecraft. The reader then energizes and receives backscatter information from the device using a 5.8 GHz transmission. Complete with generator, retrodirective antenna, and rectenna harvester, the radio package qualifies as the first microwave space-based solar power satellite ever tested — despite the somewhat limited 1m range. You have to start somewhere.
Check out the story of the November 2017 MakerSat launch by the NNU team here.
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