Programmable Materials | Hacker News Reader

Programmable Materials

monograph.io

59 pointsflippyhead12 comments

As an RC-FlyingThing hobbyist, this stuff interests me immensely. I'd love nothing better than to be able to fly something with a self-reconfigurable airfoil, and these technologies offer that to me .. the only issue I have is a non-wide general availability of nanowire ..

Here's a direct link to the original page from MIT http://www.selfassemblylab.net/ProgrammableMaterials.php

Fascinating stuff. I am already imagining its application in optics where a single substance can be made to behave as an universal lens by varying the power of the lens programmatically.

Make it responsive to varying levels of current and you'd get artificial muscles.

They're trying to make "robots without robots" and I think they should make robots out of their robots-without-robots.

very interesting, I would like to know, programmable in which way? I have already signed up

For example, a flat piece of wood that will morph into the shape of a cowboy hat when come in contact with water.

Basically manufacturing items (wood, carbon fiber, etc.) that are designed to act in a specific way under specific conditions, rather than leaving it up to chance.

IKEA instructions 10 years: add water.

Think flying things. This technology would usher in a new age of flight.

This would be an amazing use to it.

It looks to me like the materials dry out and take their designed shape. If you watch the videos very carefully you can see them look wet in the beginning and drier as time passes. Well, I see it at least. I could be wrong.

For the "programmable" wood, yes. This isn't necessarily the case for the other materials. It appears they mean programmable in the sense of shape memory alloys of a few years back. Given a set of conditions, the material assumes a predetermined shape based on the architecture of the material.

It is not what many of us think when we imagine "programmable materials." When there is a computational substrate driven by software that can assume shapes based on the software instructions... that will be programmable materials.

In this case we have extreme Origami.

Still very cool, though.

This is Joseph Sun!!!

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