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Category: transportation

Lakeview Generating Station was once a coal plant in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. But now, developers are reimagining it to become a mixed-use, lakefront village, where residents can walk or bike anywhere within the site in just 15 minutes.

Lakeview Village, as the new development will be named, will reclaim access and views of the lake, both of which the former coal plant had restricted for locals. As reported by Fast Company, the government shut down the plant in 2005, and initially planned to replace it with a gas-fired power plant. But the community protested this idea, instead pushing for the site to become something meaningful for the residents.

“There were a lot of grassroots community efforts that really resisted and had a more ambitious vision for what the waterfront could be here, toward a mixed-use, sustainable waterfront community,” Brian Sutherland, vice president of development at Argo Development Corporation, told Fast Company. Argo is leading the redevelopment project.

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Horizon Aeronautics is prototyping an eVTOL hovercycle concept that uses a complex and interesting split-swashplate “Blainjett” variable pitch rotor system that only exposes half of each fan. Very odd, but Horizon says it’s highly efficient.

To understand how this Blainjett propulsion system works – and before anyone asks, no, these guys are no relation to me – you first need to understand how the swashplate and cyclic controls work to distribute thrust as a helicopter’s top rotor spins. Each blade can vary its pitch independently, with the height of the swashplate determining the pitch. With the swashplate sitting flat, pushing the whole thing up and down will change the pitch of all the blades at once.

But with the cyclic control, helicopter pilots are able to tilt the swashplate. Pushing the stick forward, for example, tilts it such that the blades gradually tilt as they spin around, getting flatter as they pass the front of the aircraft, then pitching up to develop more lift as they go around the back. The result is an asymmetry in lift, with more at the back of the disc, and the aircraft pitches forward and accelerates in that direction. The cyclic control can do this in any direction; it’s part of what makes helicopters such dynamic aircraft.

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One of the best thing about electric and hybrid vehicles is that the energy doesn’t get completely wasted when you need to brake. By using an electric motor as a generator, you can slow a vehicle down and put some of that kinetic energy into a battery pack so you can use it again later. Sure, there are conversion losses both going into the battery and coming back out to the wheels, so you don’t get a lot more than half of the energy back, but an ICE vehicle turns all of that energy into heat, which gets dissipated into the air.

Electric bikes, scooters, and other micromobility options can do regenerative braking, too. This is great for getting better range and doing fewer brake jobs, just like in a car.

But can this be done without batteries and electric motors? Can you store energy away for later use? It turns out that you can, and this guy built a bicycle that does it.

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It’s also building chips for Microsoft’s AR glasses.

At the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently taking place in Las Vegas, chip maker Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon announced several key new initiatives.

Amon described Qualcomm’s technology roadmap as including connectivity, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon premium-tier Android smartphones. Snapdragon is a suite of system-on-a-chip (SoC) semiconductor products whose central processing units (CPUs) utilize the ARM architecture.

Qualcomm’s new initiatives will be in the spaces of: next-generation ARM PCs, the metaverse, wireless fiber, Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), and virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR).

Full Story:

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HB1 is an automated wall-climbing robot that was designed to streamline home construction projects.

No matter the size, location, style, or chosen building material–when it comes to constructing houses, it can be a dangerous job. Even with bulky construction vehicles, building homes requires a lot of finesse and attention. As our technological worlds evolve, so do our tools and that includes those used for home construction. Home-building robotics company Hausbots developed an automated, climbing construction robot called HB1 to help get home projects done.

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