BMW treated engineers to the sights and sounds of Formula One racing this week at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas.
Building a short stretch of fenced-in track in a parking lot across the street from the main convention center, the automaker allowed a racer to provide short demonstrations of the sights and sounds of his Formula One vehicle. The racer, Graham Rahal (son of legendary Indy racer Bobby Rahal), ran the vehicle’s engine to about 19,000 rpm and did a series of short, ear-splitting (130 dB) turns to demonstrate the power of the car.
“Usually a racing fan never gets this close,” said Joerg Csallner of BMW Motor Sport Marketing. “You get so much more here than if you were in a grandstand.”
Csallner explained that BMW teamed with Intel Corp. as a way of showing off Formula One racing to American racing fans, and as a way of showing how Intel has helped the automaker with its aerodynamic design efforts. Using Intel processors and expertise, the automaker has set up a supercomputer-like platform in Switzerland to help BMW work on the aerodynamics of its Formula One race vehicles.
Intel added to the festivities at CES’ “Pit Lane Park” by setting up a remote-control model car race. The remote-control cars were “driven” by Intel engineers located nearly a half-mile away in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Using wireless WiMax to send real-time camera images and commands back and forth, the Intel engineers operated the remote-control cars while sitting in simulators in the company’s booth.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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