The resident eggheads at KAIST (the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, something like South Korea’s MIT) developed a technology called Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance, or SMFIR. It consists of power cables operating at a specific frequency, which then generates an electromagnetic field. A coil placed within a certain proximity to that field can turn that resonance into electricity. It’s essentially wireless charging, but due to the intricacies of the KAIST design, they can achieve an astonishing 85% transmission efficiency.
What Gumi has done is lay SMFIR cable underneath select stretches of road, and then kitted out two electric public buses with the SMFIR coil. The batteries in the buses are quite small—about a third the size of what you’d find in a regular electric vehicle—and planners calculated that due to the high efficiency rate of SMFIR, they only needed to wire 5% to 15% of the bus’ route to provide the requisite juice.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
Outstanding accomplishments in the field. Korea is one country to look forward to technological advanced in the next years to come.