Thai University Sends Nation's First Indigenous Satellite to Orbit

December 19, 2018 | ProgressTH 

Great things have small beginnings. The launch of Thailand's first indigenous satellite, a cubesat designated KNACKSAT, marks the beginnings of a potential space industry in Thailand.

Accomplishments in space may be taken for granted by some. Watching companies like SpaceX or national space programs like Russia's Roscosmos landing rockets or shuttling cosmonauts and astronauts to and from the International Space Station makes spaceflight seem easy or routine.

But there is nothing easy or routine about accessing space.

For nations like Thailand yet to develop their own space programs and for now contract foreign companies to design and launch satellites, developing the human and technological resources required to make its own advancements in spaceflight requires a solid foundation and incremental first steps from smaller toward larger projects.

Thailand's First Steps Toward the Stars  

KNACKSAT represents this first, small step.

How small? 10x10x10 cm and weighing 1.3 kg. But despite its diminutive size, what Professor Suwat Kuntanapreeda, his colleagues, and a team of about 20 students will learn is extensive.

KNACKSAT will provide experience and a starting point for everything from satellite construction and working with launch providers, to tracking and utilizing data transmitted back to Earth.

IoT and 3D Printing: Introducing Students to New Opportunities

March 28, 2017 ProgressTH 

Around fifty students and lecturers from Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic school recently visited Thailand to get a better idea of not only the tech scene here, but also to introduce the mostly business IT students to new ideas and skills including IoT projects and 3D design and printing.

Jackson Ng, a lecturer at Temasek Polytechnic, recently discussed with us the concept behind the trip, raising many important points about the shift practical education is taking.

For instance, a more interdisciplinary approach to education allows students to see a full set of options not only for helping them determine their future careers, but also to help them understand what is and isn't possible when approaching potentially new opportunities.

And while an IT business student might not possess the full skill sets required to prototype a project on their own, knowing the basics behind prototyping platforms like Arduino as well as 3D design and printing, gives them the knowledge they need to create more realistic objectives and better assemble teams capable of achieving those objectives.

Do 3D Printers Really Need to be More "Consumer Friendly?"

September 9, 2016 | ProgressTH Just recently, our Ultimaker clone 3D printer, the Extrabot 3020 E3D, had a problem with its heater cartridge. We've been running it pretty hard for almost a year without any major problems so we've been lucky that this was the first real problem we faced.

Nonetheless, it was a problem. The heat would suddenly drop off during a print. If you were on hand and could jiggle the wire it might start heating again and finish the print. If you were away for even a few minutes, the temperature would drop below the melting point of the PLA plastic and the print would be ruined.

We first attempted to find and solder the faulty point in the line, but it turns out we never really found where the fault was. Eventually we had to give up and replace it. Because many 3D printers are opensource including ours it was very easy to find the exact heater cartridge we needed to replace it. We got it in about a day through the mail, and the same day it was delivered we installed it and were printing again.

Robotic Warehouses

August 20, 2016 | ProgressTH In the race between localized manufacturing and automating existing, global-spanning logistical networks, localized manufacturing will eventually win. But until that day comes, automating aspects of existing supply chains provides us with some amazing solutions especially in robotics, sensors, and even artificial intelligence.

Check out this video about inVia Robotics and how they are helping to automate warehouses. There are lots of other robotic companies out there with similar solutions. And don't worry, even when localized manufacturing takes over, there will likely be plenty of applications these sort of systems can play a role in.

Are there opensource solutions out there helping to automate local SMEs? Yes. Here in Thailand there is a company, RST Robotics, which makes small and medium industrial robots for welding and moving products from one part of an assembly line to another.

As prices go down for researching, developing, and fabricating technology, we'll see a lot more of the sort of systems only big companies once were able to afford working their way into local industry, businesses, and economies.

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How Robots Will Decentralize Manufacturing Worldwide

June 8, 2016 | ProgressTH MIT Tech Review recently published an article about how China is attempting to maintain its status as the "world's factory" by adopting robotic automation across its labor-intensive factories. The article describes how wages are increasing in China in relation to other regional manufacturing hubs like Thailand and Vietnam, and to stay competitive, China is turning to technology.

Several interesting figures were shared by Tech Review's article including the current number of robots per 10,000 employs in several countries compared to China. The article titled "China is Building a Robot ARmy of Model Workers" stated:

In South Korea, for instance, there are 478 robots per 10,000 workers; in Japan the figure is 315; in Germany, 292; in the United States it is 164. In China that number is only 36.

The article also shares the details of efforts being made by China to increase the number of robots used in manufacturing which includes increasing imported robotic systems from abroad as well as developing China's own robotic industry. The article also points out that newer industrial robots like Boston-based Rethink Robotics' Baxter and Sawyer models cost only tens of thousands of dollars versus the hundreds of thousands typical industrial robots cost.

Robots to Give Organic Agriculture an Extra Edge

June 4, 2016 | ProgressTH One of the biggest criticisms leveled against organic agriculture is the extra labor needed to weed between rows and the resulting soil erosion that occurs as soil is tilled during the weeding process. Claims that organic agriculture produces smaller yields are also common.

While organic farmers already are addressing these issues in a variety of innovative ways, the dropping cost in automation and robotics is opening many new options as well.

As robotic technology advances from academic experiments in agricultural applications to commercial applications, it is inevitable that whatever disadvantages organic agriculture may currently have, they may be more than made up for through the use of automation.

Imagine the best of both worlds, of organic agriculture that requires no dangerous and expensive chemicals or patented genetic alterations, coupled together with cutting edge technology farmers own that improves yields, soil health,  and reduces labor.

That is the promise agricultural robotics offers.

3D Printing: Make Your Own Supercar?

May 5, 2016 | ProgressTH 3D printing and opensource electronic prototyping boards are making it easier than ever for people to create their own technology and solutions locally, without depending on traditional supply chains, business models, and retailers. However, currently, 3D printing and electronic prototyping has its limitations.

Computer controlled routers which cut materials rather than add them layer-by-layer are increasingly being adopted by makerspaces and small local businesses to increase the size and capabilities of their projects and products. These machines can handle things up to the size of furniture or even small architectural elements.

But what about more complex items, like automobiles?

Transforming Our Communities Ourselves With Technology

April 20, 2016 | ProgressTH Many people may mistakenly believe that the future is something that others, like big companies or governments usher in and that they themselves play either a minor active role, or one that is entirely passive. In reality there are already groups of regular people just like you or I around the world literally building the future of their communities themselves with their own two hands and in collaboration with their friends, family, neighbors, and through the power of the Internet, with like-minded individuals around the world.

Instead of some planned community built by government or developers, we can add a layer of opensource technology over our existing communities, on our rooftops, in our offices, and at existing public spaces or markets. In addition to this added layer of physical technology, a little change in our mindset will go a long way in transforming our communities. 

Because of the exponential progress of technology, the impact of small, organized projects is increasing as well. Think about 3D printing and how for many years it remained firmly in the realm of large businesses for use in prototyping. It was only when small groups of enthusiastic hobbyists around the world began working on cheaper and more accessible versions of these machines that they ended up on the desktops of regular people around the world, changing the way we look at manufacturing.

Similar advances in energy production, biotechnology, agriculture, IT, and manufacturing technology are likewise empowering people on a very distributed and local level.

What we see emerging is a collection of local “institutions” giving people direct access to the means to change their communities for the better, bypassing more abstract and less efficient means of effecting change like voting or protesting. 

Big Ideas: What is Post Scarcity?

The money of tomorrow may be no money at all. 

April 19, 2016 | ProgressTH The science fiction series Star Trek shows us a future in which no money exists. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” said Captain Picard while trying to explain this world to an outsider. And while Star Trek is indeed a science fiction fantasy where elements are added to storylines to make them more interesting, relevant, or poignant, there could be some interesting interpretations of just how and why a moneyless society came to be in the 24th century.

 
Post-scarcity is defined by Wikipedia as “a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely,” and many may already be able to think about a few examples of this sort of trend already emerging.

In the Star Trek universe, physical goods are created by energy-matter conversion in a futuristic version of a modern-day 3D printer. Virtually anything can be copied or designed and created through replication, and thus the need for money is minimal to nonexistent.

What Comes After GE-Backed FirstBuild Microfactory?

The next maker revolution will be the rise of the independent microfactory.

April 9, 2016 | ProgressTH GE (General Electric) in cooperation with opensource distributed automaker LocalMotors, MakerBot, and several other names in digital fabrication, opened FirstBuild, a microfactory that crowd-sourced design ideas, prototyped and manufactured them in small batches, before using GE's mass production and marketing power to bring them to the international market.

As of 2016, over 1,000 ideas have been created there.

One potential advantage of this business model is that it allows large conglomerates struggling against growing competition worldwide to cut down on R&D and marketing. Ideas that are crowd-sourced by the market itself are likely to feature things people already want and find lacking in existing consumer goods, saving (or putting out of a job) a marketing expert from having to research these needs, before handing them over to a team of engineers to develop.

Exploring Makerspace-Made Electronics

April 6, 2016 | ProgressTH We were lucky to attend a DIY Science Project + DSIL workshop held at Fab Cafe Bangkok (their website is here) yesterday where Yair Reshef of  TAMI (Tel Aviv Makers International) introduced a wide variety of microcontrollers to participants.

Microcontrollers are small computers used to control electronic devices. They can allow you to control sensors, motors, lights, and relays that allow you to turn on and off appliances around your home or office. Microcontrollers with WiFi on them allow you to do all of this and more, only over the Internet as well as directly.

Yair gave participants a demonstration of how to setup a WiFi enabled board (the Node MCU), and how to collect sensor data and transmit it over the Internet to your personal computer.

The Rise of Local Microcontrollers

April 3, 2016 | ProgressTH If you wanted to control something, say an appliance in your home, a light, a sensor, a motor or something else electrical, you would either have to buy a consumer version that lets you control it the way you wanted, hire an engineer, or invest time and money into learning the skills required to research and develop a solution yourself.

DIY electronics had, for the longest time, been an almost exclusive realm for hardcore hobbyists with a deep interest and knowledge of engineering.

This barrier, however, was overcome when in 2005 a cheap, opensource microcontroller called the Arduino was introduced. It was developed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy with the goal of creating a low-cost, simple platform for non-engineers, and at the time, for art students who wanted to create interactive electronic art projects.

Big Ideas: Castles in the Sky

Our path among the stars is paved with asteroids.  

July 31, 2015 | ProgressTH Humanity moving out among the stars is not only the ultimate fulfillment of everything that makes up the best of humanity, it is the only way humanity and the many organisms and natural wonders we inhabit Earth with can ultimately survive. Whether an asteroid smashes into our planet and strips all life from its surface, or our sun goes supernova and consumes the planet in its entirety, hedging our bets by bringing life off-world will be both our greatest adventure and our only insurance policy.

Science fiction today, worlds like this might be a reality tomorrow, and the key to establishing permanent settlements beyond Earth. The space habitat featured in the movie Elysium was an example of what is called a Stanford Torus. 

We often talk about our first steps off-world being on the moon or on Mars. While we will undoubtedly return to the moon and one day set foot on Mars, perhaps the most important step we must make is onto worlds of our own creation. These "castles in the sky," more technically would be the Stanford Torus, Bernal Sphere, and O'Neill Cylinder habitats of NASA's 1970's Summer Studies where engineers and designers worked out just how to construct such worlds.

These habitats could be put in orbit around the Earth, around the sun, around Mars, Jupiter, or anywhere we prefer. Their strengths include this ability to precisely position them, as well as control both their climate and gravity, something that will be impossible on the moon or on Mars, barring something like science fiction-style terraforming technology and gravity plating. The fact that both the moon and Mars lack these features makes permanent settlement of either a challenge.

The ring-shaped Stanford Torus configuration.

While we are confident in theory, for the longest time we have been confounded on how to put into practice the construction of these habitats. Of course the idea of using asteroids as construction material, rather than launching hundreds of tons of construction material into space from Earth, has been on the drawing board for the longest time, but progress toward realizing it has been slow. 

Digital Fabrication: Making Your Own Furniture Factory?

March 23, 2016 | ProgressTH You don’t need to be an expert economist to know that IKEA makes a lot of money selling furniture to people around the world. According to Wikipedia, the company raked in some 3.3 billion Euros in 2014 alone. Imagine if that immense profit was more equally distributed beyond IKEA’s 147,000 employees, most of whom are only seeing a small fraction of that total income anyway?

What if every district, village, or town could have a localized furniture designer, fabricator, and distributor?

With computer controlled manufacturing, this is becoming a reality. In fact, there is already at least one growing network, OpenDesk, built around a similar concept. The company curates a collection of designs you can download and make yourself, or contact one of the makers in their network to make it for you. The price includes money that is paid back to the designer and OpenDesk who prototypes and tests the designs.

Big Ideas: The Potential Problems With AI

March 14, 2016 | ProgressTH Artificial intelligence (AI) is, simply put, intelligence exhibited by software and machines. Intelligence itself could be defined as the ability to learn and solve problems. In nature, evolution has endowed many species with intelligence, and human beings in particular with a relatively formidable ability to learn and solve problems.

IBM's Watson can be posed questions in natural human language to which it can answer by "reading" amassed knowledge such as encyclopedias.    

Human intelligence has allowed our species to diverge from evolutionary and natural environmental constraints, giving us mastery for better or worse over the planet and all other life upon it. We have done this through technology which includes the simplest forms of tool-making to the most complex machines we use to ply the seas, skies, and even outer space.

Our natural, human intelligence has given rise to exponential technological progress, and amid that progress, we have begun to create an artificial intelligence through computer science unconfined by natural evolution, biological limitations, and thus able to accelerate exponentially faster than our own intelligence has developed.

Tesla's Alternative World is Here and Now

February 10, 2016 | ProgressTH US-based electric car company Tesla Motors set out with a goal to usher in an era of electric driven transportation using renewable sources of energy. It was founded in 2003, and 13 years later it looks well on its way toward achieving that goal.

Today, supercharger stations crowd a map of the United States, with similar coverage planned for Europe and Asia. The company has produced 3 successful models, the Roadster, the Model S, and most recently the Model X. Each car was designed to help develop the electric car market in a very specific way both financially and technologically with each model being progressively cheaper and more capable, and thus more accessible to a wider range of people.

However, despite its current success, Tesla Motors almost didn't come into being. Founder and CEO Elon Musk has recounted in interviews how he had hoped to encourage AC Propulsion to develop their tzero model into a more viable product. When they declined, Musk and others took the tzero design and transformed it into Tesla's first model, the Roadster.

From Global Supply Chains to Local Freedom

Consumerism requires huge amounts of energy, produces huge amounts of waste, and winds around the planet. Here is a high-tech local alternative that solves all these problems and more. 

January 31, 2016 | ProgressTH Go to any logistics company’s website, and they will be more than proud to tell you just how far your consumer goods travel (thanks to them) from factory to storefront before ending up in your hands. And to a certain extent it really is truly amazing how supply chains have fueled the rise of modern society.

However, all good things come to an end, and sometimes, that “end” is the beginning of something much better. And the end of modern consumer supply chains is just such a case.

Think about how it is now...

Your shoes were likely made with raw material sourced from socially and economically precarious monoculture rubber farms in Southeast Asia, shipped to a sweatshop somewhere else in Asia, where workers toiled under conditions you likely would find unacceptable, before being loaded onto a truck or train and sent to a port.

3D Printing + Titanium Prosthesis Saves Patient's Hand

January 27, 2016 | ProgressTH Ravaged by a tumor, a 37 year old patient in Thailand had her right metacarpal thumb bone removed. Put in its place, is a titanium prosthesis created using a mirrored 3D scan and 3D printed cast of her existing left bone. The process was carried out by researchers, scientists, and doctors at Thailand's prestigious Chula University (Chulalongkorn University) and Phramongkutklao Hospital.

3Ders.org would report:

The procedure is a first in the medical world, though it is sure not to be the last 3D printed titanium metacarpal implant. As Boonrat Lohwongwatana, a member of the engineering team that created the implant says, “This technique can also be used to replace damaged bones from other parts of the body and it only takes a couple of weeks to make one of these bones.”

For the last several years, this team of researchers at Chula University have been developing this technique, using scans taken from patients to then 3D print a mold for casting a replacement part in titanium. The 3D printer used was the ExtraBot, also made in Thailand and derived from the opensource Ultimaker 3D printer. The printer uses both ABS and PLA plastic and is fitted with the E3D Volcano extruder. In other words, it is an affordable, relatively mainstream piece of technology used as part of a revolutionary medical advancement.

The 3D Printing Revolution and The Importance of Design Literacy

Why design literacy will be as important tomorrow as computer literacy is today.

January 22, 2016 | ProgressTH Some may remember in the 1980's when knowing how to use a computer was a fringe skill. Computers were poorly understood by many and so was their potential utility. 

But today, if you are unable to use a computer, you are at such a profound disadvantage you may find yourself facing many of the challenges illiterate people face. For older generations, even those with immense talent, skill, experience and education, they find themselves outpaced and outmatched by younger colleagues with basic IT know-how.

 As computing continues crossing over into the physical world, both via the internet of things (IOT) and computer controlled manufacturing such as 3D printing, the ability to be able to measure, define, and create physical objects and even spaces will become as essential as computing itself.

MIT's App Inventor Gives You Power Over Your Smartphone

January 20, 2016 | ProgressTH We all have used apps (applications) on our phones. Whether it's an Internet browser or a clever app that lets us use the sensors or camera on our phone to do something, we depend on apps to connect us with the hardware.

But what we can do with our phones is usually limited to what is included on it from the store, or what we can download from app stores online either for free or for a price.

What if you could make your own apps? World renowned technology university MIT has developed what it calls App Inventor, an easy-to-use interface that uses drag-and-drop blocks to put together applications.

To use App Inventor, all you need is a Google Gmail account and to go to their website here, and click on Create Apps! in the upper right corner. From there you will be brought to the workspace where you create your apps.