Bluetooth 5.0

Bluetooth 5

Many of us have experienced, a stoppage of music due to loss of connection while roaming freely in home with your speakers plugged in your ears. Its due to poor connection or poor range of your bluetooth.. But losing connection is a concept of the past with brand new Bluetooth 5. This means that you’ll be in the kitchen with your phone and can start playing music from the speaker in your bedroom. Isn’t the future is so bright???

Let’s check some history of bluetooth.. Bluetooth is a wireless connection standard intended to connect disparate devices and transfer data over short distances. It is fittingly named after 10th-century king Harald Bluetooth, who united Denmark's tribes into a single kingdom. Bluetooth was invented by Ericsson in 1994, but it wasn't until 1998 that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) was established by Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Nokia, and 1999 when it was initially standardised. The last major version of the standard, Bluetooth 4.0, was officially rolled out in 2011, while the last iterative update was Bluetooth 4.2 on December 2, 2014.

The next Bluetooth Standard, Bluetooth 5, brings with it some serious upgrades including increased range, speed, and broadcast messaging capacityIt's faster, has longer range, and can transfer more information. Bluetooth 5 also promises twice the data transfer speed of the previous version and quadrupled range compared to Bluetooth 4.2.

The biggest improvement is Bluetooth 5 has enough bandwidth to support two sets of wireless devices at the same time. This will come in particularly useful for things like portable speakers. This could mean speakers in different rooms, or the ability to listen to support two sets of headphones without having to share a bud with your friend.

The new standard will also transfer data at double the speed of v4.2, from 1Mbps to 2Mbps and the capacity of data broadcasts will increase 800 per cent. i.e, Bluetooth 4.2, supporting the transmission of 31 octets and Bluetooth 5 supports 255 octets of data. With Bluetooth 5.0 being able to hold and transmit far more data, it should be able to preserve sound far better when it leaves the broadcast device. Bluetooth 5 can also detect interference at the edges of the 2.4GHz and neighbouring LTE band, and automatically prevent it, which should make for clearer music listening from any wireless device.

Manufacturers of mobile devices will be able to use the Slot Availability Mask (SAM) function to prevent any kind of interference in adjacent radio frequency bands.

It’ll also help facilitate additional location-based functionality. In particular, it should boost the uptake of Beacon technologies like Apple iBeacon and Samsung Proximity which will result in significantly improved indoors navigation in shopping centres and the like. Bluetooth 5 will add location and navigation functionality, so that Beacons can transmit custom information without connection and application barriers.

Bluetooth 5 allows exchanging twice the amount of data and the consequence is that the device consumes half the power to exchange the same data. Bluetooth 5 could also improve battery life. Because it's more efficient, it'll use less energy, which should mean longer battery lives for wireless speakers and headphones. For the same power envelope,

The adoption of Bluetooth 5 comes at a crucial time of industry growth, with ABI Research expecting 48 billion internet-enabled devices to be installed by 2021, of which nearly one-third will include Bluetooth. While your existing phones, speakers and equipment may work with Bluetooth 5 devices, they almost certainly won't benefit from its extra capabilities. That means you'll need to buy all-new Bluetooth 5-ready gear to take advantage of its entire expanded feature set.

Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus are the first phones released using the new technology. By having Bluetooth 5, the Galaxy S8 phones have been gifted a "dual audio" mode that will let them wirelessly stream music to two Bluetooth devices at one time.

It is an essential element for bringing everyday objects into the connected world. With the launch of Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth technology continues to evolve to meet the needs of the industry as the global wireless standard for simple, secure connectivity. Bluetooth 5 isn’t perfect and won’t solve all your streaming problems. Its a transformative update that promises a better 4x range, 2x speed and 8x broadcasting message capacity.

Say Hai to THOR...!!!

We all know normal multicopter drones are effective at hovering and Vertical Take-Off and Landing, they can't travel long-distance as efficiently as aircraft with fixed wings. This has been listed as their main disadvantage. But not any more. A team of students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is trying to get the best of both worlds with the Transformable HOvering Rotorcraft (THOR).

According to the design team, THOR's design inspiration came from the samara seed, 'helicopter' tree seed that is capable of flying long distances because of its stable shape. The concept was earlier raised in 1913 called the monocopter, it was "structurally efficient" ,the whole frame is used to generate lif, but "strategically inefficient." The lack of counter-rotational systems meant the pilot and cargo would have needed to spin with the rest of the aircraft, making it impractical to actually ride in.

Usually, when aircraft makers want to hover and cruise, they simply fix rotors onto rotating wings, but with THOR the wings become rotors, transitioning in mid-air and spinning around a central module like a single-bladed helicopter. THOR manages to achieve very high structural efficiency by using all of its aerodynamic surfaces in both vertical and horizontal flight modes, transforming from a flying wing into a sort of whole-body spinning bicopter thing that you really need to see to believe.

How THOR actually works?? It has two modes of flight: hovering mode (H-MOD) and cruising or fixed mode(C-MOD).When transitioning from hover mode to fixed-wing mode, the wings rotate into alignment. When the drone is in hover mode (left), it can rotate its wings (servos) by 90 degrees (middle) to transition to cruise mode (right). And when in cruise mode, it can do the reverse to switch to hover mode. During this transition, centrifugal force of switch is used to move the ballast, a weight in an aircraft used to bring the center of gravity into the allowable range, to keep the aircraft balanced.

Two key points in the innovative design are First are the bearings placed between the drone’s body and the wings. The bearings allow the wings to rotate appropriately depending on what flight mode is used. Second is the motor power, primarily in hover mode. The motor must have sufficient power during the transformation so that THOR doesn’t just fall to the ground. It needs enough power to create the instantaneous transformation without losing altitude, but not so much power that the motor will break the wings.

As you can see from the video, the design still needs a bit of work, as transitioning from one mode to the other isn’t seamless. With the exception of the servo and bearing used for wing rotation, THOR uses every other structural component in both hovering and cruising modes, making it highly efficient relative to hybrid designs. It’s very much a prototype, and both the hardware and the software controller need some optimization, but look how innovative the design is.

The UAV business is now getting a world of extremes. At one end, you've got hobby-grade consumer gear, which has improved dramatically in the last couple of years, and at the other end, you've got the military gear tough, rugged. There are no real standards for industrial-grade drones yet, but it is a continually growing market as all sorts of companies in all sorts of areas start to discover the power and potential of unmanned aerial systems. The advantage lies in its applications as the commercial world can see the benefits of industrial-grade UAV tools. It'll be interesting to see what sort of machinery and standards develop in this space over the next few years.
Applications of THOR seems to be endless i.e. anything that requires both long range and an agile hover, and because of its inherent potential to scale, it can be made smaller than other hybrid platforms,which will unlock many possibilities where current hybrid UAVs are too big or bulky to operate! These include agriculture, surveillance, and package delivery, all of which are hot topics in drone development as of the moment. I really hope this turns out to be a platform for the development of the next-generation unmanned programs.

First Generation of Batteryfree Cellphone!!!!

Don’t you ever felt frustrated and thought of throwing your phone away due to dying batteries in an emergency?? Here is some news, the recharging challenges with cellphones may get away from the new innovations from US. A team from the University of Washington have developed battery-free phone that can harness power from radiofrequency (RF) waves sent to it from a nearby base station. The phone not only harnesses the power it needs to operate from those waves, but can also place a voice call by modifying and reflecting the same waves back to the base station, through a technique known as backscattering.

The battery-free device prototype is built using commercial-off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board. It can operate on power that is harvested from RF signals transmitted by a basestation 31 feet (9.4 m) away. Using power harvested from ambient light with tiny photodiodes, the device can also communicate with a basestation that is 50 feet (15.2 m) away. The team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions such as transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons. Using Skype, researchers were able to receive incoming calls, dial out and place callers on hold with the battery-free phone. 
One of the phone's key innovations is the use of analog rather than digital voice encoding, which the researchers say saves a substantial amount of power. Supplemental power to increase the device’s range comes from photodiodes, essentially tiny solar panels. Unlike a traditional cell phone which uses 800 milliwatts(tens of thousands of times more power), when making a call. The entire device consumes just 2 to 3 microwatts of power to place or receive a call.
The battery free phone takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone’s microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call. An antenna connected to those components converts that motion into changes in standard analog radio signal emitted by a cellular base station. This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power. To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device’s microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone’s speaker.
The UW phone is also half-duplex, that means there is a button that users need to press to switch between sending and receiving mode. A microcontroller manages the RF switch, connecting the microphone to the antenna when a user presses a button to talk, and connecting the earphones when the user wants to listen. It’s more similar to a walkie-talkie than a real cell phone. But I dont think, it wont be a technical hurdle to create a system that detects when the user is talking or not and make the switch between these two modes automatically. Hope researchers can fix phone's biggest drawback sooner.
There is a long way to go before it hits markets. Currently the phone has a basic touch-sensitive number pad and its only display is a tiny red LED that glows briefly when a key is pressed. The researchers are looking into equipping it with an e-ink display, which doesn't consume a lot of power as well as a low power camera. The team is also looking forward to improving it’s operating range and encrypting conversation to make it more secure.
In this scenario where phones have become the most important devices that virtually everyone uses and we all love to have a batteryfree smartphone. Its surely a major leap in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones and is also an incredible step towards technology. What do you think of a cell phone never dying on your hands in the future?