I’ve taken the liberty to translate the following article featured in “Calcalist”:

Samsung Ramat Gan:

Most smartphones equipment manufacturers in the world, and most tablet makers, are using developments of Samsung’s R & D center in Israel, according to Amit Baruch, director of Samsung’s Israeli Center in the heart of Ramat Gan, who is particularly proud of the contribution of the R & D center to the South Korean camera. “The new Galaxy 3 device’s rear camera and image processing technology are ours, and we will be partners for the development of future generations of the Galaxy.”

The Center, which wasn’t anxious to be exposed to this day, preferring to operate under the radar of the media’s coverage, is exposed now on the occasion of the arrival of the President of Samsung Semiconductor, Dr. Nam Sung (Steven) Woo, to appear before the plenum and high-tech conference next week in Haifa and Jerusalem. Additionally, he will visit the center of R & D and meet with the development teams and start-ups in Israel.

“We have tremendous respect in South Korea. We are the only development center of the company abroad,” says Baruch. The development center is functioning as an active partner in developing all of the company’s mobile phones and generates Samsung global revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

“We have created hundreds of millions of units that were integrated into phones, laptops, digital cameras and tablets of the leading companies in the world,” said Baruch, “It is not trivial for Samsung to let us only develop solutions, but the entire Galaxy’s camera. We are increasing the revenues of Samsung”.

Baruch also reveals that Samsung-Israel are partners for the future development of a camera based on Android operating system. He did not call a spade a spade, but the item is probably the Galaxy S Camera, and is expected have a thickness of about 2 cm, and is designed as a Galaxy device but with an enhanced lens.

Unlike Samsung employees worldwide, who went into gloom after the company lost a case against Apple and was fined 1 billions dollars, the employees of the development center in Israel probably share only successes. “Even though the general atmosphere in the organisation was bitter, we did not feel it here,” says Baruch.

80 patents in the last three years

The development center of the South Korean giant in Israel was established in 2007, after buying the Israeli TransChip, Inc. company for $50 million, which specialized in manufacturing mobile phone cameras. “Our center has grown from 50 employees at its beginning to 200 employees today. 40 out of the 50 employees at TransChip are still working in the company. I believe the phenomenon is very rare  in our field, but the numbers are not what matters to us but mainly the technological capabilities we offer here,” says Baruch. “We are not looking to recruit workers in order to increase the center, but rather as needed and by projects. I believe that in 2013 we will recruit a few dozen more.”

Samsung is currently the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, and the Galaxy S 3 has become the best selling cell phone of its kind in the last quarter of the year, and in the United States is even topped the iPhone. But Samsung-Israel also has an important role in many other manufacturers. Baruch does not specify the manufacturers names, but according to estimates, include LG, HTC and others that combine the Israeli technology.

So far, Samsung has been idle investments in Israeli companies. Can we expect a change in the trend?

“I believe that by the end of 2013, we will be active on all levels of business process management. Eighteen months ago we started our BPM activities aimed at creating cooperation at three levels: academia, start – up companies and investment in firms.” To focus on this field, the company appointed Ruth Adar as VP business process management. “The mandate that we received from Samsung in the coming year is not to improve current technologies, but to invest in breakthrough technologies,” says Baruch.

Do you seek academic cooperation similar to what Intel is doing, like setting up a research center?

“We are looking for partnerships with the academia. I believe that every company needs to connect to the academia in the way that suits them. We prefer to research technologies through direct access to professors, because of the size of our center.”

What do you develop in Israel?

“In Israel, we work in three key areas. First, the development of cameras for mobile devices, laptop computers and vehicles, which is not a very developed field. Second, is image processors that integrate in tablets and advanced mobile phone. The last field in which we operate is to take the Samsung’s integrated circuits and make them into 4GL Application generators. I can compare it to the revolution the MMX processor Intel developed in Israel made. Using our capabilities it is possible to develop computerised vision systems. In the future, a camera with our systems can look at the picture and really understand its content and not just picture it.

A completely different field are patents. During the last three years while working here, we filed about 80 patents in our fields. “

The rest of the article talks about the LG technological center in Herzliya that employs 10 people who search for Israeli companies and technologies for implementation in LG product through licencing agreements.

So remember, next time you see a BDSer using his Galaxy S3 camera, smile to him and say: “Thank you for supporting Israel!”

Smile!

 

The Ricor K508 micro cooler is used to cool the CheMin unit, responsible for analysing Martian soil and rock composition, or as NASA put it:

An important science goal of the MSL mission is to identify and characterize past or present habitable environments as recorded in sediments and rocks. CheMin is a definitive mineralogy instrument that will identify and quantify the minerals present in rocks and soil delivered to it by the Sample Acquisition, Sample Processing and Handling (SA/SPaH) system. By determining the mineralogy of rocks and soils, CheMin will assess the involvement of water in their formation, deposition, or alteration. In addition, CheMin data will be useful in the search for potential mineral biosignatures, energy sources for life or indicators of past habitable environments. CheMin can unequivocally identify and quantify minerals above its detection limits in complex natural samples such as basalts, multicomponent evaporite systems, and soils.

This NASA document explains exactly why the Israeli cooler was chosen:

CheMin is one of a suite of instruments on board the Mars Science Laboratory rover that
will be conducting chemistry and mineralogy studies on Mars. The Chemin instrument will use
the Ricor K508 cooler, with the Hybrid 18 drive electronics, to cool the CheMin CCD. The
cooler was selected for its small volume and mass, high cooling capacity, low cost, previous flight history and the fact that no other cooler of its size had any flight heritage (mechanical cooler).

CheMin has conducted a comprehensive test program to qualify the cooler for the MSL mission. The coolers have been subjected to lengthy characterization tests, including FA level thermal tests; the qualification model cooler has been subjected to qualification level random vibration and qualification level thermal tests; and two coolers are presently undergoing life testing.

So there you have it. Israeli culture, high-tech and know-how is currently roaming Mars, while BDSers down on earth still want to boycott Israel and regress humankind.

*A Sol is a Martian day

Choose a car: Renault Fluence ZE

Negative battery use: energy recovery

It’s now only a little while until I get my Better Place electric car as readers of Israellycool have probably noticed. For a few weeks I’ve been using a simulation iPhone app that allows you to measure how much battery you would use if you had been driving an electric car.

The app is called iEV [Updated to point to version 2]. The app is not free but they do offer a limited number of evaluation codes so if you’re interested go to the site and ask them for one. It allows you to pick an electric car  (they have most of the main models on the market) and run the app while driving. The app then takes the specs of the car (power, battery size, drag coefficient, weight etc) and calculates the battery use from the GPS derived position and speed as you drive. The app is even smart enough to detect when you’re going up and down hills and a couple of times I’ve seen negative battery use (i.e. energy back into the battery) because when I leave home I go down hill for a little while and an electric car would recover energy from this.

My usage summary

I have managed to use the app whilst driving a test model of the Better Place Renault Fluence ZE to directly check the simulation. It agreed with the onboard battery percentage readings to within 1% over two roughly 12km drives.

History by car: Suitability

Each time you start and stop a journey you need to run the app and hit start. That’s the down side: if you do this for a few days and especially for your regular commute, you get an idea of whether your chosen model can make your journey on one battery charge. The app doesn’t “know” about battery switching (which I’ll have access to here in Israel). My average daily energy use is 4.71kWh which is well below the car’s 22kWh battery size.

However I did take a drive one day that was over 22kWh and so might have required a battery swap. The app reports this on the “History by car” screen by saying whether the car is suitable. Obviously this one trip causes the app to tell me the car won’t work for me when I know different because I would have planned a battery switch (or charged at my destination).

I would agree that if you have to pay for this app, it’s only for the uber-geeky. However I see this tool as something electric vehicle manufacturers and distributors should be giving away to prospective customers. I would certainly like to see Better Place in Israel license this app and distribute it for free so people can get a feeling of how an EV would fit into their personal driving patterns.

And if you want to spice up your simulated life, you can always pretend you’re driving a Tesla Roadster!

Thanks to greencareports.com for the image

Since I took the plunge and decided to buy an electric vehicle as my next car from Better Place, I’ve been following news on various green energy and driving web sites: not a corner of the net I’d spent much time in before. I’ve seen no good reason to believe human activity is wholly responsible for the slowly varying climate that was slowly varying long before man started burning stuff in vast quantities a few hundred years ago. I’m not saying we have no impact, but I am saying that we can’t work out what impact (good or bad) we have so we’re better off investing our amazing inventive talents in adapting to change as we’ve done throughout sentient human time on the Earth.

So the news that Volvo has made an innovative step with a sophisticated combination of fully electric car for driving and some small use of a liquid fuel (ethanol or petrol) for heating up the car is a great example. I see plenty of non climate reasons for driving down our use of petrol (gasoline): the main one is to reduce our transfer of vast wealth to the OPEC rulers who hold the swing production today.

Green Car Reports: Volvo C30 Electric: Keeping Car And Occupants Warm In The Cold.

Using either petrol or bio-ethanol, the liquid fuel system works in concert with the electric heaters when the car is first started to quickly reach a comfortable temperature for the occupants.

Once the cabin temperature has risen, the car’s electric heaters turn off, using only the liquid fuel tank for heating.  According to Volvo technicians, its 3.17 gallon tank can provide enough energy to heat the car for 24 hours at an impressively efficient rate of around 0.13 gallons per hour.

From a technical point of view, what Volvo has done is eminently sensible. Electric cars are practical today but they have a dramatically reduced range (20% or even more) in cold winter climates because running electric heaters is huge drain on batteries. Interestingly air conditioning is not such a big drain. Burning stuff, however, is very efficient so the combination of using the elctricity to drive the car and an almost insignificant amount of fuel to heat the car’s vital parts (battery and motor) and warm the occupants, is perfectly sensible.

This is where ideology bites: green ideological purists will now say the car is no longer zero emission! It might have trouble getting the tax breaks or the ability to drive in California’s sought after High Occupancy lanes. The solution is technically correct but falls between extremes.

What it represents is a moderate electric car in a world screaming for extremes.

Perfect for taking out any deviant Hamans. Great story for this day of the year especially!

If Big Oil grew weed, Detroit would be making the bongs. Let’s get something straight, the bailout of the US car companies didn’t only happen because the auto industry was lobbying. Even with the famed United Auto Workers riding shotgun, there’s another huge lobby that wanted to see Detroit bailed out: the Oil Lobby. And by Oil Lobby, we’re talking about the dovetailed interests of western oil companies and the middle eastern despots they rely on for access to the most important oil fields in the world.

One statistic: oil accounts for 95% of all transport power in the USA. It only accounts for less than 2% of electricity generation. [Source: James Woolsey in WSJ April 2010].

For years the auto companies have shied away from developing anything that seriously challenges the interests of Oil. They’ve kept bio-fuels at the margin in the US. They’ve poured almost no money into true electric cars or R&D on batteries: almost all the advances we’re now enjoying have come from the field of small electronics. At Big Oil’s behest, Detroit has been turning out cars that match the blueprint set down by Henry Ford more than a century ago. Cars have become faster, safer, heavier and slightly more efficient but have never seriously looked at any power source beyond oil. And probably worst of all, it doesn’t appear anyone has turned their full lobbying potential toward more domestic energy production in the US.

So while it fell to Honda and Toyota to come up with and successfully commercialise the hybrid idea of electric and gasoline working together, it took a lot longer for the US auto industry to be dragged into competition.

Hybrids have proven an adequate stepping stone but they are still dependent on oil and are not much more efficient than the best small diesel cars. The next evolutionary step is to plug them in and drive at least a few miles on grid electricity. Note: I’m not interested in carbon or other climate change issues. What’s important is that generating electricity in bulk gives us non oil options that aren’t available in portable form as well as scale advantages.

So here steps in the much maligned (in US conservative circles) Chevy Volt. Obviously the Volt’s long development was underway before the Obama administration bailed out Chevy. What’s interesting about the Volt is it really has the drive train of an electric car with the electric motor driving the wheels directly. Even when the small petrol engine is needed to extend the range, that mostly supplies power by keeping the electric motor feed with electricity: very different to hybrids. However (unlike the recently in the news exotic Fisker sportscar) the Volt also has the engineering to send mechanical power directly to the wheels. You really have to drive an electric car, even only briefly, to understand it’s a very attractive feeling.

Even more so with a car like the Volt than any conventional car: averages are meaningless. For those drivers who regularly travel 20 miles each way to work, they may run for a year on a couple of gallons of gas. Right now on the VoltStats.net website (where consenting owners allow their cars to upload their raw driving data data) their whole fleet has travelled over 3 million miles at 117 MPG. That’s astonishing and represents a huge reduction in the use of the oil for transport. It is the start of a shift that can spread our transport to other sources of energy. I count 345 drivers who average over 100 MPG.

However, the Volt carries a penalty for having two power sources. It needs to do this because there has been almost zero investment in infrastructure for anything except oil transport. How many mobile phones were sold before someone sank millions into a network of cell towers?

Let’s leave aside the battery and look at why an all electric car makes sense. Electric motors are produced in their millions with varying powers and weights. They are all smaller, lighter and more efficient than internal combustion engines of similar power. They run without generating significant heat and need only rudimentary cooling. They have as few as four moving parts. Many will run without maintenance for years. Electric motors deliver the unobtainable holy grail for combustion engines: full power delivery independent of speed even briefly at 0 RPM. So electric cars don’t need variable gearboxes, complex clutches or any associated workings. Regenerative braking, by taking power out of the motor, both slows the car and recovers otherwise wasted energy back to the battery: this reduces wear on the main braking system.

Again, I’m still putting the battery to one side and here are a couple of the down sides. Heating the car in a cold climate is a problem: with our combustion cars this comes for free because the engine is generating so much heat all the time we actually need to expel it. Electric cars have to artificially divert energy for this purpose which means, counterintuitively, air conditioning is easier than heating.

But today all the weight and cost gains of no gear box, no clutch, simpler engine, simpler cooling and no fuel tank are given over to huge battery packs. The modern lithium based batteries these cars have adopted from electronics are starting to hold enough power and for some peoples’ uses they’re sufficient but we’re just at the start of their automative use. A Chevy Volt is an admirable solution to making EV’s practical but it still carries the penalty of duplicating complexity. And the batteries are very expensive today: sometimes half the value of the vehicle.

With all due respect to Fox News, battery fires are a pretty minor Achilles heel: have you ever seen gasoline burn? Crash a car and bad stuff happens, that’s just common sense. As long as you manage to escape your crashed Chevy Volt within three weeks, you should be at least as safe as any gasoline filled car. And to load the Chevy bailout money onto the first few thousand Volts off the production line is creative accounting of the worst kind. The latest smear? A disconnected, parked Tesla electric sports car has a completely unusable battery. Tesla warned early drivers specifically about this and Nissan say it’s never happened to any of their 20,000 cars, but suddenly it is a big story for Fox. It’s really just a case of a new technology needing new care: we all know not to drive when the oil warning light comes on but we don’t know about the extremes of Lithium battery chemistry.

But what we’re missing is a joined up approach that sees the electric car and especially it’s battery as only part of an infrastructure network: we have that for oil. We have thousands of filling stations, fleets of road tankers, sea tankers and refineries to keep our cars running. I’ve written already about the Better Place battery switching network about to go online in Israel: that’s the kind of thinking we need and it’s outside the box Big Oil has allowed car companies to play in. That is also why it’s progress is hugely important and I suspect why it’s been privately funded. Better Place crucially separates the battery from the car because it allows owners to lease the biggest part of their car that will wear out. And when batteries improve or cheapen, existing owners gain the benefit without worrying that their own batteries are depreciating very quickly.

There is another benefit too: a smart network of lithium batteries, if their charging is centrally controlled, can have a dual purpose. The fleet of cars and batteries can act as a storage system for otherwise wasted renewable power. Every single charge point connected to a battery is monitored and controlled centrally. The rate of charge can be individually tailored or stopped. Better Place receives a minute by minute update from the Israeli electric grid on how much capacity there is spare in the system. They have a proprietary system to prioritise power delivery. A car with a 90% full battery, charging at a place of work that won’t be needed for 6 hours (when it’s driver might only need 40% to get home) can have it’s charging current reduced or cut. A car that has a 5% battery and is a 60 mile drive from the nearest battery switch can keep charging.

This capability is why Denmark, which has invested heavily in wind power, pursued Better Place. The network effect of dual use lithium batteries has a huge potential to wring more benefits from the unreliable renewable power generation they’ve already bought.

Better Place is a network like AT&T while the car companies are the phone manufacturers like Samsung, Nokia and Motorola. The investment is needed in the network but the huge rewards are also there because that is where the relationship will be. The first to build a sensible network that removes range limitations from technically and financially viable electric cars could prove to have a very big hit. And remember: Europe led the US on mobile phones too. Covering densely populated Europe was much easier than sparse US. And Israel led just about everywhere in the technology for mobile phones too. So guess where the first battery switch network for electric cars is.

Once again I found the car excellent to drive. It made me think of another car I drove many years ago: a Morgan Plus 8. For the non petrol-heads that is basically a wooden horse drawn carriage married with a powerful engine from a large Range Rover SUV. The one I drove had one of the most horrible gear changes I’ve ever felt with a super heavy clutch and a hard to move gear stick. The reason it reminds me of the Better Place Electric Car? The easiest way to drive that monster was to stick it in third and forget about the gears. It had so much power (but really it was torque) that it could pull away and accelerate from stand still in that gear.

I’m also testing a battery simulation tool on my iPhone and I’ll write more about that in another post soon I hope.

The Better Place Fluence ZE has that same feeling: only one gear and instant oomph no matter what your speed. Press and go. As we left the battery switch station I floored it as I turned right onto a divided highway. The motorbike just behind me couldn’t believe it. He stopped at the next light next to me to ask how I’d done that because a normal Renault Fluence can’t do that!

Without further ado, here is the video I took at the switch station. It’s rough and hand held and the first time through they didn’t turn on the in car notification system. We got that on the second pass. They’re in a test mode at the moment so we didn’t swap the battery from the car we drove to the station, rather we used one of the test cars they have at the station. Remember: the whole network is not scheduled to go live till June but from what I can see that is definitely easily achievable.

Driving into the station is just like driving through an automatic car wash. Once you’re level with a big yellow sign you put the car in neutral, take your feet off the brakes and let go of the steering wheel. The first step in the process is a battery wash but this wasn’t operating for us (the test car is pretty clean and there’s no sense using water now). That said, it obviously recovers and re-uses water so it’s overall water use won’t be significant.

The first point to note is that the car actually has a main battery pack for driving and a completely normal 12V car battery for doing the other stuff like running the lights, the entertainment and GPS system or phone integration. That battery also drives the ventilation fans but not the A/C. That’s important because when the battery is being switched, the car’s normal 12V battery keeps the music playing and the GPS working: if you want to check or change destination, choose your next playlist or maybe download a new app to the car (yes really, it has apps!) you can do all this even while the main battery is being swapped. All in all I think the main battery is disconnected for about two minutes.

Once you’re being pulled through the process you can feel the car being jostled a little to line it up and then it physically lifts a few centimetres. Sensors make sure nobody opens a door and the whole process will stop if that happens. On my second run through we had the benefit of seeing exactly what was happening on the in-car GPS screen. It shows you when the old battery is being taken out (which you can feel as the car shakes a little) and when the new one is being inserted. That you can certainly feel as the back of the car seems to give a tiny bump. There are a few quiet noises and the screen in the car seems to match up with everything that happens.

Once it’s done displays outside and inside the car instruct you to turn your car back on and drive out. It took exactly 5 minutes but I can see that they’re not pushing the equipment too hard and could probably knock some time off that if they had to. All in all, however, it’s really a pleasant experience.

You don’t have to breath in petrol fumes for one thing and there really is nothing much to do before driving out with a full battery.

The Better Place charging points won’t allow this. When you connect to a public charge point you swipe an RFID card over the point and it then opens up. You insert your cable and this locks into position. At the car end as soon as you lock the car, the charge cable also locks in place. To remove your cable from the public charge point you again need to swipe your RFID card.

I’m sure a determined vandal could destroy these, but you can have your car scratched or tyres slashed too and that tends not to happen every day.

The charge point they install (included in the price of the car) at a user’s home already has a cable so you just need to take it from a hook on the wall and plug it into the car. You don’t even need to identify yourself when using your personal point at home (though you can choose to if you want).

The Israeli press has been let loose on the cars now and they’ve been pretty kind. As I’ve already written the financial case is compelling and the driving experience is good: it’s a family car not a sports car but it’s very good to drive around town.

JPost article: Better Place unveils battery-swap network

Walla article (Hebrew translated by Google): First test: Renault’s electric Fluence Better Place in Israel (Note that Google translate continuously mis-translates KPH into MPH and km into miles)

Better Place unveils battery-s…JPost – Business – Business News.

“From our perspective, this is inevitable,” Agassi said. “Any gas-fuelled vehicle exiting a Renault, Fiat or General Motors production plant today… will use an average 4,000 euros [NIS 20,000] per year of gasoline over the next 20 years, or 80,000 euros [NIS 400,000] in total, and that is without taking into account erratic behavior from Iran or the Chinese.”

In the same period, Better Place customers will spend around one-quarter of that amount operating their car, he added, explaining that because the company takes full responsibility for the battery, fluctuations in the price of electricity will not change the cost to consumers.

Agassi is spot on here. He’s not talking about carbon or any other nonsense. For sure there is still energy being used to drive around and, for the most part, it’s going to come from burning things, but for the end user it is going to be much cheaper to use centrally generated and paid for electricity, than local generation of kinetic energy from liquid fuels.

Agassi rejected criticism that the launch was behind schedule, saying the delays could be summed up in a few words: “Form 4 – building permit applications.” Better Place initially promised the electric vehicles would hit the roads in 2011, but Agassi admitted last week that “we didn’t know anything four years ago.”

So for those who think this has received a red-carpet government mandated launch, Agassi is basically saying that the rate limiting step has been the planning permissions for building their battery switch stations. These have generally been built alongside existing petrol stations where they fit nicely. They’re cleaner, don’t produce any pollution and look nice, yet the usual fear of anything new has slowed down the process of getting them finished.

…

Buying Anobit is not the end of the story for Apple. Sources in Israel are reporting that, independent of the Anobit purchase, Apple is looking to establish their own chip research and development office. This is big news because Apple has never performed core component or product design work outside of California. Only marketing, selling, and support have happened out of the state.

…

The real question: why did it take Apple so long? One suspected cause was the political leanings of Steve Jobs’ wife: firmly in the left-leaning liberal and pro-Palestinian camps. Apple has neglected Israel as a market for its computers for years despite Israel leading the world in per-capita computer use. Apple’s market share in personal computers is much lower in Israel than in the United States or even Europe, and support for Hebrew is not as comprehensive as it is on Windows.

So now Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and Google are all working and developing new products in Israel. Ironically, that means that the “boycott Israel” crowd has to use computers and software developed in Israel to argue that the country is a terrible place that should be wiped out.

The Kindle Touch is distinct from something like an iPad because it has the eInk display. This is not a display that lights up or glows, it is completely passive. That means you can’t read it in the dark but need some light shining on the page, just like a real book. It also means that the device is not blasting light into your eyes directly.

Anyway you can read more about these products on the Amazon site. I’m just giving you two nice pictures that you can use as Disk Icons if you’re on a Mac. I did this before from some Crucial SSDs.

To set your own nice disk icons on your Mac, the easiest way is to use a little piece of freeware called “Set Icon”. I’ve attached suitable png images of the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire to this post. Download those png files (click on them, they’re big) and use the Set Icon program to drop them on your device.