Join us in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, June 15 at noon for a low cost nanopositioning hack chat with En-Te Hwu!
This may sound like a provocative statement, but technology has long been on a downward trend. This is not a moral or ethical declaration, but an observation about the scale of technology. Where once the height of technology was like a water-powered mill, the smallest parts of which were measured in human hand size and endurance inches, today we regularly make machines etching silicon chips with the feature measured in nanometers, look inside the smallest cells and manipulate their internal , And uses microscopes that can visualize elements at the atomic level.
The world has become much, much smaller lately, and to work on that scale we need to think about motion in a different way than we used to. Being able to move things in nanometer resolution isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible and it can be done on a DIYer’s budget – if you know what you’re doing.
To help sort out the realities of nano-scale positioning, N. N. Hou, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who works in micromachines for the delivery of intelligent drugs, has created some really attractive low-cost nanopositioning systems. Using older DVD players or off-the-shelf linear slides, he was able to achieve nanoscale movement and sensing for a variety of purposes. He will stop by hack chat to discuss how we can create nano-positions and sensations in our projects, and start exploring a world we don’t even see.
Our hack chat is a live community event at Hackaday.io hack chat group messaging. This week we will be sitting on Wednesday, June 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time. If you have time zones tied, we have a simple time zone converter.
Featured image: low cost, open source XYZ nanopositioner for high-precision analytical applications, CC-BY-4.0