Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.
The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers’ dance party Friday night.
The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.
Foxconn, the world’s largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions.
The company currently employs 1.2 million people, with about 1 million of them based on the Chinese mainland.
help promote people visiting as many hackerspaces around the world as possible
increase collaboration
increase cross-polination so we can all learn from one another
encourage all hackerspaces to support each other
(And it’s fun.)
These Hackerspace Passports look a lot like US Passports, but no fingerprints needed! And, rather than a requirement for passing borders, they are intended to encourage it!
If each hackerspace and hacker con makes their own stamp, then people can get their Hackerspace Passport stamped everywhere they go.
I am releasing the first 2,500 of these at Chaos Communication Camp 2011, which seems appropriate to me, since the previous Camp (in 2007) was the birthplace of the new wave of hackerspaces.
The Hackerspace Passports cost me about €1 each, and that’s what I’ll be selling them for.
I hope that all hackerspaces and all hacker conferences will make their own stamps, so that hackers can travel the world and share their stories with one another by showing off the stamps in their passport.
Thanks to Matthew Borgatti, who did a great job on the way cool artwork!
You can download the artwork for free (of course)!
OK, so about a year or so ago, I was working at my bench and I could not quite see what I was doing. I needed more light! I got so mad, I built this in about a half a day, and fixed the problem. Now I have enough light even when working on tiny things with magnifiers on my head.
I now have 4 white 12″ CCFL tubes, 6 1 watt warm white LED’s, 144 cool white LED’s (in strips), and 12 5mm diffused white LED’s under the bench pointed at the floor (did you ever drop anything?). All the LED’s are ramped on and off with PWM dimming as you will see in the video above. I also have 2 more channels available with full PWM dimming. Running everything wide open will allow you to see very well, and only consumes 17 watts.
A little overkill, but I was really frustrated. And hey, who just wants a plain ole boring switch anyway? Not me…
You can never have enough lights on your bench!
UPDATE: Jeremy has made a new explanatory video (above, bottom), and shared his source code. You can check out all that new goodness here.
GitHub badge is a simple embeddable badge showing your GitHub stats like the number of public repositories, number of followers, favorite languages etc. It runs on Google App Engine with a memcached backup at here. If you like this and use it too much, we may exceed our quota.
Cool way to show the # of projects you have on Github.
Let’s say you have an idea for a product, maybe even one that will enhance or improve people’s lives: a remote-controlled lawn mower for the elderly, a combo light show/breathalyzer your party guests can consult before driving home, or a stylish laser-cut table that breaks down quickly and packs flat for storage or easy transportation.
What if you could design your idea using free software? What if you could produce parts for your product using machinery you build from free blueprints or a kit, and could actually manufacture that product on your own desktop or in your office, without a factory? What if you could easily customize your product — making each one slightly different — at almost no extra cost?
The founders of MakersFactory want to show you how to do all this and more.
Chris Yonge and Dave Britton will be leading the way to the maker revolution in Santa Cruz. They hope to open the doors to the first phase of their MakersFactory — an 800-square-foot space in the Cruzio building in downtown Santa Cruz — in October. The emphasis will be on learning the basics of DIY fabrication, by providing classes, software, hardware and workspace for members and the community.
So, what is open source hardware and why should I be interested in it? Open source hardware is simply hardware that is released in the wild along with CAD files (PCB layout data), documentation, and hopefully a tutorial on how it is set up and works…
Now, I was skeptical about this when I first heard about it because I thought,”If I want to sell my stuff, why give away the information I worked on?” I mean after all, aren’t we supposed to design something, then patent, copyright, trademark, and lock it in a safe? Thats the way to keep it ours right? After all, I worked on it, and I should get all the credit and all the profit right? I’m not giving my stuff away! But then I started thinking…
What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. Mosfet the cat stops by too. Previous chats can be viewed at http://www.adafruit.com/ask
Ah, the lowly rubber bumper sometimes it seems like the whole world rests on its shoulder! We like these bumpers because they’re very sticky, not too big and not too small, and ‘deep’ enough to protect nearly any THM dev board from scratching a table or getting shorted. We love them so much we include 4 free with every single Arduino. One of those little extras we like to keep people happy
Our next live google+ hangout electronics “show-and-tell” will be Saturday night 9:30pm ET 7/30/2011 ! If you have a project and you want to share and talk about it stop by the Limor “Ladyada” Fried Google+ stream around 9:30pm and join the hangout. Make sure your camera works, you’re in a quiet area (or can quickly mute your mic) as others are presenting.
One of the best articles I’ve read all week is this post from the Fog Creek blog. The author, Anna Lewis, briefly discusses the history of women in computing. In 1987, women made up nearly 50% of all developers, but shortly thereafter the number began to decline significantly. Those numbers are only now beginning to rise again, though they have yet to match the peak of the mid-80′s. The history part of the article is interesting but, in my opinion, the article really shines in its interview with Fog Creek intern Leah Hanson. Hanson, as it happens, is the only woman on the Fog Creek technical staff, and still a student at Johns Hopkins. Regardless of her professional stature or experience however, her answers to questions about women in computer science are compelling and informative (emphasis mine):
Q: Why do you think younger girls or college-age women don’t go into computer science?
Leah: Well, I used to be baffled at how they could miss seeing how awesome programming and CS in general are, but there’s a bunch of things that seem to contribute to that. For example, women seem to give up sooner even in everyday situations with technology. Like, it’s socially acceptable for a woman to give up on technology and say, “Oh I can’t figure out how this computer thing works.” My friends who are girls ask for help to fix their computers normally because it’s acceptable for them not to be able to do it. They don’t realize that I’m just going to google the answer anyway! They think I already know the answer! Whereas I think most guys would be embarrassed to admit that they can’t fix their computers. Having experience with going through the frustration of trying to get some piece of technology to work, and eventually succeeding, builds skills that you need for working with technology and for debugging. Also, most girls don’t really get computers of their own when they’re young. It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister. That means that girls can’t experiment on computers. You need your own computer because you have to be able to possibly break it while you’re trying new stuff, without getting in trouble. For my sixteenth birthday, I got to build my own computer with my dad and then I could have all the time I wanted on it and break it or whatever. Until I had complete control of my own computer, I never had any interest in trying Linux; when someone else is responsible for keeping your computer functioning, and does a good job of it, there’s little incentive to try something like a different OS, since you’d have to convince other people that it’s a good idea to mess with what’s currently working.
I just received my MiniPOV and USBTiny programmer kits, and wanted to tell you how pleased I am with their quality, and with your excellent instructions. Everything worked perfectly the first time! If there’s any drawback at all, it’s that it was so much fun I stayed up half the night building both kits. Thanks for everything! – Michael
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