Design Engineer’s Weekly

Broaden your perspective. Expand your knowledge. Love your work.

In this Issue

• The Las Vegas Sphere: Another engineering marvel in the desert

• Tesla, Watt, Babbage et al: Who deserves the Nobel?

• How a BYU team built a gun that’s smaller than an ant

• Faster Fashion: Meet Adobe’s digital dress

• Bumpers, flippers and…data analytics? Pinball makers go high tech

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Cover Story

The Spherical Miracle

Las Vegas is home to many feats of engineering: The Stratosphere, the tallest observation tower in the US; the High Roller, the planet’s tallest operating Ferris wheel (the tallest is broken); and now, The Sphere, the world’s largest spherical structure containing the highest-resolution LED screen and the largest beamforming audio system ever made. It’s also the most expensive venue in Las Vegas history, with a final price tag in excess of $2 billion.

All that record-breaking didn’t come easily. The Sphere’s developer – MSG Entertainment – hired AECOM-Hunt as general contractor in 2019, only to demote the construction giant to a support role 18 months later. Earlier this year, MSG paid $48.5 million to settle four shareholder lawsuits over cost overruns. Three lawsuits against the developer remain unresolved, including one filed by AECOM-Hunt.

All that was easily forgotten amid the spectacle of The Sphere’s grand opening on September 29, when U2 started a 36-show residency that almost takes full advantage of the new venue’s capabilities. While the rock band is utilizing the interior 160,000-square-foot LED screen and the Sphere’s beamforming and wave field synthesis technologies, they opted out of its multi-sensory features, which include scent, wind and the haptics incorporated into just over half of the seats.

Designing and constructing The Sphere required a careful balancing of prudence and ingenuity. Its engineers used old standbys like the Law of Sines and the Navier-Stokes Equations to create a geodesic dome capped with a 120-ton crown that had to be lifted more than 500 feet above ground by one of the world’s largest cranes. According to Sphere Entertainment’s VP of development and construction, getting all the pieces to fit together (registration required) was even harder than it looks.

The Poll

In the News

Fast Fashion Goes Digital

One of the standout presentations from last week’s Adobe MAX conference was a digital dress created under the company’s Project Primrose initiative. Modeled by the Adobe research scientist who created it, the dress is composed of reflective light-diffuser modules containing polymer-dispersed liquid crystals (PDLCs). Smart films made with PDLCs can change their transparency, which enables patterns on the dress to be changed on demand or even in response to the wearer’s movements.

Who’s Psyched About Psyche?

Hot on the heels of its successful OSIRIS-REx mission, NASA launched a probe to another asteroid: Psyche, which contains precious metals worth a hundred thousand times the value of the global economy. Unlike OSIRIX-REx, Psyche won’t be bringing samples back to earth. Rather, its purpose is to observe the asteroid and test a laser-based transceiver for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications project that could greatly improve deep-space radio communications. If that disappoints anticipants of for-profit asteroid mining, they can take solace in recent developments that put one company on track to make the first commercial deep space mission as early as next year.

Future-Proofing Critical Infrastructure

Extreme weather conditions have been putting dams around the world to the test. In California, some are being water-starved while others are overwhelmed and risk flooding. New Bullards Bar, a major dam in Northern California, is one of several pilot sites testing forecast-informed reservoir operations (FIRO) to take advantage of advanced weather forecasting. Similar stories in British Columbia and Tajikistan show how important future-proofing is becoming in new and existing infrastructure.

Exposure

The World’s Smallest Nerf Gun

Imagine shooting an ant with a 100-micrometer Nerf dart. That’s the latest engineering feat from YouTuber Mark Rober, who partnered with mechanical engineers at Brigham Young University to achieve it. Using photolithography equipment and carbon nanotubes, the team crafted a Nerf blaster the size of a fleck of pepper that can actually be loaded and fired. Even better, the designs are available for 3D printing.

Recommendations

Generative AI Inspires Better Robot Designs

Mechatronics expert Didem Gürdür Broo offers a first-person account of how working with generative artificial intelligence helped her come up with new ideas for cyber-physical systems. While her prompts for a “jellyfish robot” didn’t lead to any designs taken directly from the AI’s output, the organic shapes it produced did inspire some avenues for further exploration by her and her team.

Google, circa 1968

In his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs described the Whole Earth Catalog as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” Launched in 1968, it was pitched as “an evaluation and access device” and included product reviews, educational articles, DIY guides and pricing information. It ceased publication in 2002, but now you can observe our transition from the analog to the digital age through the lens of the Whole Earth Index, a compilation of the original magazine and its several spinoffs.

From engineering.com

Not Your Grandfather’s Pinball Machine

Video games? Pffft. Everyone knows pinball rules. But did you know that today’s pinball machine designers have been going through their own digital transformation? Using simulation, rapid prototyping, data analytics and more, they’re cutting costs and improving manufacturability.

AI Can Now Design Electronic Circuits

The electronic component search engine SnapEDA has announced a new AI tool called SnapMagic Copilot that can create circuit schematics like the one above from natural language prompts like this one: “I want a low-power MCU with 2 SPI ports, an ADC, and USB 2.0. Build me a reference design with all required passives and connect the USB port to a USB-C connector.”

Up, Up and Far, Far Away

What does it take to get to space without the benefit of rocket boosters? For Florida-based Space Perspective, the answer is a big balloon and a lot of design work involving computational fluid dynamics and digital twins.