Lifeboat Foundation

What is a smart factory? It is a shop floor that adopts smart manufacturing, manufacturing that uses technologies and solutions—like AI and IoT—arising from Industry 4.0 to optimize the production process…

Industrial revolutions then, and now

To fully grasp what smart factory is and where it’s headed, we must first understand the history of manufacturing.

Continue reading “Smart Factory: What It Is and the Vital Solutions You Need to Build One” »

By harvesting water vapor from the air and condensing it into liquid, atmospheric water generators can essentially pull water from the air.

MIT has developed a $4 solar desalination device that could provide a family of four with all the drinking water it needed to survive.

Airships might seem like a technology from a bygone era, but a startup says their new design could become a crucial cog in the green hydrogen supply chain.

While transitioning away from fossil fuels will prove crucial in our efforts to combat climate change, it’s easier said than done for some industries. While road and rail transport are rapidly electrifying, in aviation, batteries are a long way from being able to provide the weight-to-power ratio required for aviation. And even the largest batteries are still not big enough to power a container ship on long-distance crossings.

Hydrogen is increasingly being seen as a promising alternative for these hard to decarbonize sectors. It has a higher energy density than natural gas and can either be burned in internal combustion engines or combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity.

Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1,600 × 1,200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

Continue reading “IoT-Enabled Mailbox Lets You Check Your Mail Without Leaving Your House” »

A new report claims that Tesla is starting work on building a new factory adjacent to Gigafactory Shanghai in order to double production capacity to two million cars annually.

Tesla currently operates two main factories, Tesla Fremont and Gigafactory Shanghai, and it has Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin slowly starting to ramp up production.

Those four projects alone should push Tesla’s production capacity beyond three million vehicles annually by the end of next year, but the automaker has much greater ambitions for this decade that will require several more factories. The company recently confirmed that it plans to announce a new location for a factory by the end of this year.

Fully organic rechargeable household batteries are an ideal alternative to traditional metal-based batteries, in particular for reducing pollution to landfill and the environment.

Now researchers at Flinders University, with Australian and Chinese collaborators, are developing an all-organic polymer battery that can deliver a cell voltage of 2.8V—a big leap in improving the energy storage capability of organic batteries.

“While starting with small household batteries, we already know organic redox-active materials are typical electroactive alternatives due to their inherently safe, lightweight and structure-tunable features and, most importantly, their sustainable and environmentally friendly,” says senior lecturer in chemistry Dr. Zhongfan Jia, a research leader at Flinders University’s Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

Elon Musk’s back at it again, folks — and this time, his attorney is accusing the federal government of leaking.

Following up on his claim that the Securities and Exchange Commission was trying to harass him into silence, Musk’s attorney accused the commission of “leaking certain information” in an ongoing retaliation campaign against the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.

This alleged campaign supposedly began back in 2018, when the SEC investigated Musk for tweeting about selling Tesla stock at $420 a share and taking the company private, eventually charging him with misleading investors. Though that case was settled in 2018 after Musk and Tesla paid $20 million each in fines, new reporting about the commission subpoenaing the CEO in recent months has reignited the debacle.