Vegetable vending machines
Monday, July 7th, 2008
Are we heading towards a time when we’ll be able to fulfill all of our material needs without ever making human contact? These vending machines in Japan that dispense fresh vegetables make me think maybe yes.
The vending machine craze hasn’t quite taken off in the U.S., though people who are nostalgic about New York’s Automats from the olden days can visit BAMN in the East Village, where you can get hot comfort foods from automat machines.
Via Trends in Japan.
These amazing peel & stick solar power panels from Lumeta are literally what it sounds like. Simply peel off the backing, and lay them down on a rooftop. Hook up the cabling and power connectors and you’re good to go. Hit the jump for an video of 2 workers laying down 6 of these 8′x4′ panels and hooking them up in less than 35 minutes.
If you’ve got the coin to roll deep enough to own a Tesla Roadster, we’d imagine that making sure the car gets its 8 (or fewer) hour charge from a 220v / 80A circuit (like what powers some larger home appliances) won’t be a huge issue. But if not, think twice about your driving schedule with the all-electric sports car, because while you can technically power a Roadster from any standard wall outlet, the amount of draw a standard 110v / 15A plug delivers would mean a 30 hour wait to juice up your vehicle’s thousand pound battery pack. Thankfully, Tesla owners have time to think over how to deal with these kinds of details, being that none of the customers who’ve pre-ordered a car have yet received theirs.
When Brian Hart’s 20 year old son was killed in Iraq in 2003, the grief-stricken parent turned his anguish to engineering, founding Black-I Robotics to build unmanned ground vehicles for recon, explosives and hazard work, and most of the other stuff you see land-bots doing in dangerous situations. Of course, what makes Hart’s story so powerful is also what gives it a certain irony — after taking the government to task for leading the nation’s under-equipped military into unnecessarily dangerous situations, he began taking on work as a defense contractor to develop a cheaper, more robust machine in the hopes of getting more soldiers out of harm’s way. Last week Black-I secured another $800,000 contract from the gov’s Technical Support Working Group, and has also been field-trialing their latest version of the Land Shark UGV for the past few months.
