cmonkey

Let's apply some math to this solar power idea. There are optimistically 4 square meters worth of solar panel-able area on a car the size of a Volt. On a sunny spot of the earth, you can expect a peak of about 1000 W/sq M of sunlight, giving 4000 W of solar energy hitting the Volt at its peak. Averaged out over a day, you'd get about 24kWh per day.

Solar panels are of course not 100% efficient. Lets say you have some pretty amazing expensive polycrystalline solar panels that are capable of 15% efficiency, giving you 3.6kWh per day. Voltage conversion and charging inefficiency would get you to around 3kWh to the batteries.

The Volt consumes 36 kWh per 100 miles, giving around 8 miles of charge per day. This is with some pretty liberal fudging and also assuming no clouds, shade, or dirt on the panels.

Not bad, but it would add at least another $8000 to the price of the car.

@PR0F3TA I'd rather that they bake it fully and release it 6 months late than try to squeeze it in for this holiday season.

Wow, I always just assumed it was IR time of flight. From the description, it sounds like it's actually an IR structured light setup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_light

I can't wait to get one of these and see how they did it. It seems the third lens is not just a simple IR led, but some kind of IR projector.

That's 2 Gb of NAND, which is 256 MB.

BeagleBoards are pretty amazing, but if you're in the market for one, hold out for the BeagleBoard-xM that is coming out in the next few weeks. 1 Ghz CPU, twice the RAM, Ethernet and USB hub on board.

@einhanderkiller Camera manufacturers use dots/pixels instead of pixels to describe their screen resolutions. That is, they count the R, G, and B of a pixel as separate points, although they can together only display one pixel.

That camera (like most new ones) is 640 by 480. 640*480*3 = 921,600.

@jpxdude It's LiFePO, not the Lithium Cobalt or similar that is typically used for laptop batteries. While the energy density is a bit lower, it is significantly more stable, and also capable of many more charge cycles. These are also the types of cells used in Lithium power tools and OLPC laptops.

@taylorh This is what I came here to say as well. GNU Screen on a colocated server and SSH clients on every device/computer I own performs exactly this task for me.

I just built a similar setup using the same picoprojector both of these projects are using, for a first person shooter. Unlike these, it does full 360 degree yaw, pitch, and roll. http://eclecti.cc/videogames/projecting-virtual-reality-with-a-microvision-showwx

Memories. I had an iPAQ 3650 once upon a time, which may be what is pictured there. Complete with the ridiculously thick CF card sleeve, that I, like many others, hacked apart into something more pocketable.

@Almo
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/8/25/