Electronics Circuit And Electronics Info

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tamper Proof and Self Destructing USB Memory Stick

Victorinox, the family company behind the famed Swiss Army Knife, has launched a pioneering memory stick design at an event held at its European flagship store on London’s

New Bond Street

The device is, says the company, the most secure of its kind available to the public. It uses several layers of security including fingerprint identification and a thermal sensor — so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick’s contents. The Victorinox Secure has also been made tamper-proof. Any attempt to forcibly open it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that irrevocably burns its CPU and memory chip.

Victorinox says it is so confident of its new product’s elite security standards that it offered a £100,000 prize to a team of professional hackers if they could break into it during the two hours the launch event lasted. The money went uncollected.

A new version of the device, which will employ e-paper to give users a read-out of its contents, is already in the pipeline. Victorinox say they wanted to create not only a product for today’s modern lifestyle but a new generation of memory stick that had all the values of functionality and reliability that the iconic Swiss Army Knife has come to represent.

3-D Shapes Covered in Solar Cells Beat Flat Panels

Flat solar photovoltaic panels are becoming more widespread, but the power they produce varies over the course of the day as the sun’s position changes — unless the panels are mounted on tracking systems to keep them pointed sunward, which adds complexity and expense.

Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was inspired by the way trees spread their leaves to capture sunlight and wondered if a three-dimensional shape covered in solar cells would be more efficient than a flat panel. He worked with a UROP student, Marco Bernardi, to create a computer program that starts with basic shapes and lets them evolve, changing slightly each time and selecting those that perform best to start the next generation, he found that such systems could produce relatively constant power throughout the day without the need for tracking, and produce significantly more power overall — up to two and a half times as much as a flat array. He is continuing to work on finding the best shapes and building a prototype system, and figures that solar panels based on this concept could be shipped flat and then unfolded at the site to their complex shapes.

The images in the slide show produced by Jeffry Crossman and Bryan Myers for MIT visualize some of the varied shapes with improved efficiency that emerged from the evolving simulation.