Doesn't every product, everywhere, pass this test?
Not always, unless you design a PCB with the test in mind there's a good chance that it will emit or be sensitive to RF noise. Most electronics simply deal with it by ignoring RF in the design and sticking offending electronics in a shielded enclosure, which isn't an option for a bare-bones PCB.
A good experiment is to put AM radio set next some of your cheaper electronics and see if you can 'hear' them while powered up.
Fantastic! Where can I buy one? Needs to have a 20km range and be able to autonomously navigate a 40km round trip through alpine terrain (say) ten times without crashing.....
I'm in the middle of writing my EE thesis is on embedded control systems for UAVs and this is as good a distraction as any, so here goes: The kind of specs you're talking about you'd be lucky to get for high-end military and commercial (mini) drones. You'll either be spending tens(hundreds?) of thousands on an off the shelf model or a lot of time developing, testing, crashing and fixing your DIY solution. There are hundreds of DIY drones on the net but I doubt any of them have the kind of reliable autonomy you're talking about.
Autonomy is especially difficult, you'll need to learn a lot of control theory, kinematics, Navigation/AI and possibly computer vision. Then rememeber that you need to fuse sensor data from gyroscopes, acceleromters, GPS, compass, altitude and airspeed sensors, and that all of these sensors are unreliable/error prone. You need to be able to deal with loss of GPS link which means you need to have an alternate means of localisation(which is very difficult). Also, every commercial system I've seen requires an always on downlink and manned base-station for control, even if this isn't technically necessary, it's pretty much mandatory for safety.
Making an autonomous UAV only makes sense as a learning exercise or for R&D but it's not a good way to get any work done. If your goal is to get aerial photos, stick a camera on an RC plane, get some video goggles, a long range radio and some flying lessons.
At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world. Hell, in under a year I'm sure they could get local manufacuring ramped up to the point that any cost difference is negligible.
That'd be great if it were true, but it simply isn't. There's a huge amount of capital equipment, skills and expertise that's needed for efficient electronics manufacturing and a few hundred thousand boards is no where near enough to support this kind of investment. Cheap labour might give China an edge, but it's economies of scales and manufacturing experience that make them hard to compete with.
I've been involved in outsourcing electronics manufacture from Australia and the Chinese companies we've dealt with provide better quality, take half the time and charge half the price of local manufacture, and these aren't sweat shops.
See if there's an on campus computer club, that will almost certainly lead you to people, servers and networks that will help with outside access.
A few things I've seen used on campus: -SSH proxy tunneling -VPNs -IPV6 related workarounds -'partner' universities and organisation that can be accessed/tunelled through without going through the firewall -wifi router/repeater with long distance wifi link (eg with a 'cantenna') to an off-campus house/building -friends that work for campus IT, local ISPs and the university's ISP
Why does this treat particulates as only a concern because they contribute to climate change? That's a potential problem, to be sure, but particulate emissions are a much more immediate environmental concern for those breathing them in. If the levels have been underestimated this much, that's a problem for people's health, especially along highways and in cities. Why does climate change have to be the be all and end all of all environmental impact discussions? Is it because it's so contentious and the ongoing feud drives page hits?
Because a short term, localised and fairly minor reduction in people's health is a much smaller problem than an irreversible change to the climate and biosphere of the entire planet. Even if your only concern is health, people's health will suffer a lot more when they have to deal with economic hardship and resource shortages that could result from climate change.
There's always the AVR GNU toolchain for programming Arduino boards in C. It comes with the (free) WinAVR IDE/Debugger and works with any IDE that can handle GCC et al. Personally, I can't stand the way TI have tied their products to Code Composer Studio. It's free for some of the cheaper devices but if you want to use it on anything with a bit of muscle you'll be shelling out $500+ just to be able to program/debug the hardware you own.
Zigbee power efficiency isn't that great (Have a look at the ANT+ protocol). Besides, this is lossy compression on a well understood signal. It would be stupid to transmit 1000 bytes of raw data when we only need a dozen bytes of information.
Do you have math showing the compression consumes less power than just transmitting the raw data?
Lots of it, the power budget drives the design of the entire sensor. The micro-controller uses a lot less energy than the packet radio so it makes sense to process the raw sensor data on-board and transmit information such as fourier coefficients, integrals and other statistics. Every packet saved is another fraciton of a second the radio can be powered down.
It's a fairly common technique with sensor networks to process raw signals at the point of collection and transmit only the useful information, it makes the most use of your bandwidth and in this case energy.
While I too am sick of seeing dinky little Arduino projects, there are plenty of good reasons to be doing FFT on low power micros. For example, the company I work for designs battery powered wireless sensors: They have to be compact, consume minimal power and have minimal components for manufacture. We've got a single ATMega processor that sits between a sensor and a radio, doing, among other things, FFT and other 'DSP' functions to compress the data before we spend our precious milliamps transmitting it. It really is the cheapeast, lowest power way to get the job done, sometimes a hardware DSP is overkill.
The interesting thing is that the greater time window over which the FFT operates, you can observe finer frequency detail within that particular window at the expense of how quickly the graph or bars change over time (in simplistic terms). I wonder how this new algo will change the frequency detail/transient time detail trade-off. Do we see more detail in both domains? Less? The same?
This is a property of the Discrete Fourier transform itself. For a certain window size there are only a discrete number of frequencies that you can calculate.
The larger your window-> The more frequenecies you can see (at the expense of a longer sampling time)
FFT algorithms simply try to compute the DFT quickly, this advance is significant for paractical applications but doesn't change the underlying mathematics.
It doesn't need to, it should be fine under a layer solder mask/conformal coat/lacquer with plated contacts if necessary. In a flexible circuit you'd be sandwiching it between two layer of polymer anyway
There's a paragraph which most people will miss which states that if you give them notice in writing to a specific address within 30 days of agreeing to the contract, you can opt out of arbitration and retain your right to class action:
RIGHT TO OPT OUT OF BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER WITHIN 30 DAYS. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THE BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER IN THIS SECTION 15, YOU MUST NOTIFY SNEI IN WRITING WITHIN 30 DAYS OF THE DATE THAT YOU ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT. YOUR WRITTEN NOTIFICATION MUST BE MAILED TO 6080 CENTER DRIVE, 10TH FLOOR, LOS ANGELES, CA 90045, ATTN: LEGAL DEPARTMENT/ARBITRATION AND MUST INCLUDE: (1) YOUR NAME, (2) YOUR ADDRESS, (3) YOUR PSN ACCOUNT NUMBER, IF YOU HAVE ONE, AND (4) A CLEAR STATEMENT THAT YOU DO NOT WISH TO RESOLVE DISPUTES WITH ANY SONY ENTITY THROUGH ARBITRATION.
I think I'd rather not email Sony's legal department to register myself as a trouble maker....
Way to waste at least 20% of the CPU power, lazy programmers. I'll take my CPUs to something that actually uses them efficiently like Folding@home which is optimised as opposed to interpreted or even compiled java bytecode being pushed like molasis through a straw.
Or you could just download the native binary version. The java version was designed specifically for people that want to contribute but are unable/unwilling to install software on their computers. FTA:
Project participants also had a choice of how to participate in SkyNet: Either anonymously through simply having their browsers open on the SkyNet site, or through downloading a dedicated app to run in the background on their PC.
My Hyundai Sonata Hybrid uses Lithium Polymer batteries that according to this article already implement this technology.
It's a completely different technology.
FTA:
The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either.
A five to tenfold reduction in the price of batteries sounds pretty significant.
My Hyundai Sonata Hybrid uses Lithium Polymer batteries that according to this article already implement this technology.
It's a completely different technology. FTA:
The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either.
A five to tenfold reduction in the price of batteries sounds pretty significant.
Although the microscope itself collects raw data, an external laptop, smartphone, or cloud-based system performs all the processing.
The spatial resolution... is reportedly similar to that offered by low- to medium-power lenses.
At this point don't you have more in infrastructure needs than you would with a basic optical microscope?
No, you're ignoring the most important 'infrastructure need' of having an actual physician view and interpret the images. This system allows people with no medical training to collect image data and transmit it to a remote physician for diagnosis.For people in areas that are too poor/remote/sparsely populated, this may be the only possible way they can access medical diagnostic facilities. On top of that, with the ever decling cost of electronic components like diode lasers and ccds, this thing has the potential to be cheaper and smaller than optical equipment.
Right, so which of the two parties is pro-copyright reform? Voting doesn't make a lick of difference when the laws are being written by the MPAA.The price of digital media in Australia is extortionate and in many cases content is not available at all legitimately. As long as US media companies treat Australian consumers like shit and try to manipulate government policy, they don't deserve to be paid.
1) Are the chargers "smart" like if I drop my wedding ring on the charger does it heat up/melt or does the charger recognize the inductance / current draw is way outta whack and shut off? If it shuts off does an indicator of some type turn on, or does it just not charge?
Assuming they're using the qi charging standard, yes. There is quite a bit of handshaking required before the charger will fully energise a coil.
3) Who can sell me an inductive receiver kit to power other stuff? I'm not talking about bolt and go, but ladyada / dangerousprototypes sort of places and products? Who makes this stuff, anyway? At a superficial glance the usual suspects in the analog power community don't seem to offer any specialized ICs for the task... unless the RX has no 2-way comm with the tx and literally is just any ole coil feeding a bridge rect and a switcher.
4) I'm sadly picturing some kind of hideous DRM where the expensive charger and expensive device need to negotiate a RSA key across bluetooth to light up the charger... Please tell me it isn't so? A generation of interoperability would be awesome.
The standard is available online. From memory there's no crypto-based DRM but you will need a license from the QI consortium to implement the technology
And the caps work quite well... In Australia, you can pay $30-$70/month to download 30GB-400GB over an ADSL2 connection (~12Mbit/s) and once you hit your 'cap' your connection is slowed to 128Kbps-256Kbps and you can download as much as you want. This seems perfectly fair, usage pays and all that. In fact, isn't this exactly the pricing model the cloud is based on? Pay for the resources you use?
If 'the cloud' can only survive in on the assumption that everyone, everywhere has unlimited network resources then it deserves to die.
Slashdot Mirror
At 500+ years old, I'm fairly sure the 'village' is in the public domain
Doesn't every product, everywhere, pass this test?
Not always, unless you design a PCB with the test in mind there's a good chance that it will emit or be sensitive to RF noise. Most electronics simply deal with it by ignoring RF in the design and sticking offending electronics in a shielded enclosure, which isn't an option for a bare-bones PCB.
A good experiment is to put AM radio set next some of your cheaper electronics and see if you can 'hear' them while powered up.
Fantastic! Where can I buy one?
Needs to have a 20km range and be able to autonomously navigate a 40km round trip through alpine terrain (say) ten times without crashing.....
I'm in the middle of writing my EE thesis is on embedded control systems for UAVs and this is as good a distraction as any, so here goes:
The kind of specs you're talking about you'd be lucky to get for high-end military and commercial (mini) drones. You'll either be spending tens(hundreds?) of thousands on an off the shelf model or a lot of time developing, testing, crashing and fixing your DIY solution. There are hundreds of DIY drones on the net but I doubt any of them have the kind of reliable autonomy you're talking about.
Autonomy is especially difficult, you'll need to learn a lot of control theory, kinematics, Navigation/AI and possibly computer vision. Then rememeber that you need to fuse sensor data from gyroscopes, acceleromters, GPS, compass, altitude and airspeed sensors, and that all of these sensors are unreliable/error prone. You need to be able to deal with loss of GPS link which means you need to have an alternate means of localisation(which is very difficult). Also, every commercial system I've seen requires an always on downlink and manned base-station for control, even if this isn't technically necessary, it's pretty much mandatory for safety.
Making an autonomous UAV only makes sense as a learning exercise or for R&D but it's not a good way to get any work done. If your goal is to get aerial photos, stick a camera on an RC plane, get some video goggles, a long range radio and some flying lessons.
At the risk of implying a consideration of the long term effect or *shudder* morality into capitalist economics, it is cheaper to have a local manufacturing base than rely completely on some rights-ignoring nation half way across the world. Hell, in under a year I'm sure they could get local manufacuring ramped up to the point that any cost difference is negligible.
That'd be great if it were true, but it simply isn't. There's a huge amount of capital equipment, skills and expertise that's needed for efficient electronics manufacturing and a few hundred thousand boards is no where near enough to support this kind of investment. Cheap labour might give China an edge, but it's economies of scales and manufacturing experience that make them hard to compete with.
I've been involved in outsourcing electronics manufacture from Australia and the Chinese companies we've dealt with provide better quality, take half the time and charge half the price of local manufacture, and these aren't sweat shops.
See if there's an on campus computer club, that will almost certainly lead you to people, servers and networks that will help with outside access.
A few things I've seen used on campus:
-SSH proxy tunneling
-VPNs
-IPV6 related workarounds
-'partner' universities and organisation that can be accessed/tunelled through without going through the firewall
-wifi router/repeater with long distance wifi link (eg with a 'cantenna') to an off-campus house/building
-friends that work for campus IT, local ISPs and the university's ISP
Why does this treat particulates as only a concern because they contribute to climate change? That's a potential problem, to be sure, but particulate emissions are a much more immediate environmental concern for those breathing them in. If the levels have been underestimated this much, that's a problem for people's health, especially along highways and in cities. Why does climate change have to be the be all and end all of all environmental impact discussions? Is it because it's so contentious and the ongoing feud drives page hits?
Because a short term, localised and fairly minor reduction in people's health is a much smaller problem than an irreversible change to the climate and biosphere of the entire planet. Even if your only concern is health, people's health will suffer a lot more when they have to deal with economic hardship and resource shortages that could result from climate change.
Are all freedoms equal? Do my freedoms hold more weight over yours?
That depends, are you rich?
There's always the AVR GNU toolchain for programming Arduino boards in C. It comes with the (free) WinAVR IDE/Debugger and works with any IDE that can handle GCC et al.
Personally, I can't stand the way TI have tied their products to Code Composer Studio. It's free for some of the cheaper devices but if you want to use it on anything with a bit of muscle you'll be shelling out $500+ just to be able to program/debug the hardware you own.
Zigbee power efficiency isn't that great (Have a look at the ANT+ protocol).
Besides, this is lossy compression on a well understood signal. It would be stupid to transmit 1000 bytes of raw data when we only need a dozen bytes of information.
Do you have math showing the compression consumes less power than just transmitting the raw data?
Lots of it, the power budget drives the design of the entire sensor.
The micro-controller uses a lot less energy than the packet radio so it makes sense to process the raw sensor data on-board and transmit information such as fourier coefficients, integrals and other statistics. Every packet saved is another fraciton of a second the radio can be powered down.
It's a fairly common technique with sensor networks to process raw signals at the point of collection and transmit only the useful information, it makes the most use of your bandwidth and in this case energy.
While I too am sick of seeing dinky little Arduino projects, there are plenty of good reasons to be doing FFT on low power micros.
For example, the company I work for designs battery powered wireless sensors: They have to be compact, consume minimal power and have minimal components for manufacture. We've got a single ATMega processor that sits between a sensor and a radio, doing, among other things, FFT and other 'DSP' functions to compress the data before we spend our precious milliamps transmitting it.
It really is the cheapeast, lowest power way to get the job done, sometimes a hardware DSP is overkill.
The interesting thing is that the greater time window over which the FFT operates, you can observe finer frequency detail within that particular window at the expense of how quickly the graph or bars change over time (in simplistic terms). I wonder how this new algo will change the frequency detail/transient time detail trade-off. Do we see more detail in both domains? Less? The same?
This is a property of the Discrete Fourier transform itself. For a certain window size there are only a discrete number of frequencies that you can calculate.
The larger your window-> The more frequenecies you can see (at the expense of a longer sampling time)
FFT algorithms simply try to compute the DFT quickly, this advance is significant for paractical applications but doesn't change the underlying mathematics.
It doesn't need to, it should be fine under a layer solder mask/conformal coat/lacquer with plated contacts if necessary.
In a flexible circuit you'd be sandwiching it between two layer of polymer anyway
US law is world law, pushed through economic bullying and enforced by the world police.
It should be stamped out ASAP
There's a paragraph which most people will miss which states that if you give them notice in writing to a specific address within 30 days of agreeing to the contract, you can opt out of arbitration and retain your right to class action:
RIGHT TO OPT OUT OF BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER WITHIN 30 DAYS. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THE BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER IN THIS SECTION 15, YOU MUST NOTIFY SNEI IN WRITING WITHIN 30 DAYS OF THE DATE THAT YOU ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT. YOUR WRITTEN NOTIFICATION MUST BE MAILED TO 6080 CENTER DRIVE, 10TH FLOOR, LOS ANGELES, CA 90045, ATTN: LEGAL DEPARTMENT/ARBITRATION AND MUST INCLUDE: (1) YOUR NAME, (2) YOUR ADDRESS, (3) YOUR PSN ACCOUNT NUMBER, IF YOU HAVE ONE, AND (4) A CLEAR STATEMENT THAT YOU DO NOT WISH TO RESOLVE DISPUTES WITH ANY SONY ENTITY THROUGH ARBITRATION.
I think I'd rather not email Sony's legal department to register myself as a trouble maker....
and I'm not letting them any near my CPU.
Way to waste at least 20% of the CPU power, lazy programmers. I'll take my CPUs to something that actually uses them efficiently like Folding@home which is optimised as opposed to interpreted or even compiled java bytecode being pushed like molasis through a straw.
Or you could just download the native binary version. The java version was designed specifically for people that want to contribute but are unable/unwilling to install software on their computers.
FTA:
Project participants also had a choice of how to participate in SkyNet: Either anonymously through simply having their browsers open on the SkyNet site, or through downloading a dedicated app to run in the background on their PC.
My Hyundai Sonata Hybrid uses Lithium Polymer batteries that according to this article already implement this technology.
It's a completely different technology.
FTA:
The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either.
A five to tenfold reduction in the price of batteries sounds pretty significant.
My Hyundai Sonata Hybrid uses Lithium Polymer batteries that according to this article already implement this technology.
It's a completely different technology.
FTA:
The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either.
A five to tenfold reduction in the price of batteries sounds pretty significant.
Although the microscope itself collects raw data, an external laptop, smartphone, or cloud-based system performs all the processing.
The spatial resolution ... is reportedly similar to that offered by low- to medium-power lenses.
At this point don't you have more in infrastructure needs than you would with a basic optical microscope?
No, you're ignoring the most important 'infrastructure need' of having an actual physician view and interpret the images. This system allows people with no medical training to collect image data and transmit it to a remote physician for diagnosis.For people in areas that are too poor/remote/sparsely populated, this may be the only possible way they can access medical diagnostic facilities.
On top of that, with the ever decling cost of electronic components like diode lasers and ccds, this thing has the potential to be cheaper and smaller than optical equipment.
If you dont like the laws, change how you vote.
Right, so which of the two parties is pro-copyright reform? Voting doesn't make a lick of difference when the laws are being written by the MPAA.The price of digital media in Australia is extortionate and in many cases content is not available at all legitimately. As long as US media companies treat Australian consumers like shit and try to manipulate government policy, they don't deserve to be paid.
1) Are the chargers "smart" like if I drop my wedding ring on the charger does it heat up/melt or does the charger recognize the inductance / current draw is way outta whack and shut off? If it shuts off does an indicator of some type turn on, or does it just not charge?
Assuming they're using the qi charging standard, yes. There is quite a bit of handshaking required before the charger will fully energise a coil.
3) Who can sell me an inductive receiver kit to power other stuff? I'm not talking about bolt and go, but ladyada / dangerousprototypes sort of places and products? Who makes this stuff, anyway? At a superficial glance the usual suspects in the analog power community don't seem to offer any specialized ICs for the task... unless the RX has no 2-way comm with the tx and literally is just any ole coil feeding a bridge rect and a switcher.
Texas Instruments makes it. They also have a devkit:
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/wireless_power_solutions/index.shtml?DCMP=hpa_pmp_bq51013_en&HQS=Other+BA+bq51013-bnc
4) I'm sadly picturing some kind of hideous DRM where the expensive charger and expensive device need to negotiate a RSA key across bluetooth to light up the charger... Please tell me it isn't so? A generation of interoperability would be awesome.
The standard is available online. From memory there's no crypto-based DRM but you will need a license from the QI consortium to implement the technology
And the caps work quite well...
In Australia, you can pay $30-$70/month to download 30GB-400GB over an ADSL2 connection (~12Mbit/s) and once you hit your 'cap' your connection is slowed to 128Kbps-256Kbps and you can download as much as you want. This seems perfectly fair, usage pays and all that. In fact, isn't this exactly the pricing model the cloud is based on? Pay for the resources you use?
If 'the cloud' can only survive in on the assumption that everyone, everywhere has unlimited network resources then it deserves to die.