What's novel about this approach is that it is mechanically simpler and potentially cheaper to manufacture than current Braille readouts (which, as far as I can tell use many small solenoids). Also, since the display elements are bistable (that is, requires power only to switch up/down states, but not to maintain them) power consumption is minimal and portable PDA-like devices would become smaller and more practical.
It's a floorwax! No, it's a dessert topping. Stop, we're both right. (though UVB and UVC, from what I infer, are ionizing because they cross the 1e-7 meter wavelength mark, so you're, like, more right).
Gives a new meaning to the concept of thoughtcrime. On the other hand, biofeedback from TV viewers through some logging device (even if anonymizing as TiVo Inc claims) is an ad agency's wet dream.
Pacemaker electrodes already include antirejection drugs already impregnated into the tip. By the time the drug stores are depleted, the body is used to the foreign object. I'd imagine that the principles and the drugs used in doing the same to the brain are similar.
http://audible.com/ will kindly sell you audiobooks already playable by the iPod and incredibly space-efficient to boot.
There is also a hack out there to make the iPod treat any AAC file like an audiobook file. I think it involves renaming the extension or something. This makes the iPod use persistent bookmarks on a file, and enables the speed up / slow down options for playback. I forget where I saw it though. Use Google to find it; I'm lazy.
The 4 flashes cause shadows to be cast in 4 different directions and creates a composite from the difference. If the subject DOESN'T cast a shadow, then the camera won't work.
So... You couldn't use this on a vampire. It's the vampires who have that no-shadow thing, right?
I mean, if you're one of those paranoid types that thinks Sun will pwn the Linux community, go do something about it. Give your local Sun rep a wedgie. Teach children how to navigate 'make menuconfig' in the maternity ward. Stand on streetcorners asking passersby if they've let Tux into their hearts and passing out copies of "Running Linux". Or just chill the heck out.
IANATSD (tv set designer), but my guess is that a simple way to do this is to pass the standard sawtooth-wave hscan and vscan oscillators through an amplifier with an output function to scale the signal in the needed fashion (1/2 full scale + sin x ? Approximate with a x^2 + 1/2fs ? Anybody? )
I'd imagine this is the reason why most modern PC monitors (and most TVs through 'debug' remote codes) allow and sometimes require you to adjust pincushion and trapezoid: basically the offset and gain of these two amplifiers gets programmed through digital pots or the like, as opposed to the internally tweaked pots and caps of yesteryear.
I imagine they do. I don't think anyone's found a more cost effective way to make an e-beam than to boil electrons off a needle. Magnetrons, x-ray tubes, and other such devices do it the same way they have since they were invented. I'd imagine you could make a good chunk of change if you could find a way to do it more reliably.
On a side note, the 'short' CRT is interesting in that a thinner tube means that you can get away with a lower acceleration potential, which is probably why they're rated as more energy efficient. I don't know if this also means a lower beam current can be used, but if so then the x-ray emissions should be lower, resulting in less glass and lead required in the tube itself.
If you've got one that is. Their weekly sales are bountiful and they've got a good selection. They do price matching even 30 days after purchase (to head off returns) and their rebates usually get dispatched fairly quickly. Just don't return anything (long, long process) or expect their actual electronic components aisles to be stocked.
Right. Except the bit about the car lighters. Car lighters have a spiral of bimetal (a clad strip of two metals with dissimilar thermal expansion characteristics, see inside an old mechanical thermostat) that heats up as a circuit is completed between the center pin (12V) and the housing of the lighter socket. When the bimetal reaches a certain temperature, the bimetal spring twists and releases the pushbutton mechanism of the lighter, breaking contact with the 12V pin.
Piezoelectrics are used in grill ignitors and 'electronic' lighters. They all use the same principle: Basically a piezoelectric material is put at the business end of a small hammer mechanism (much like a center punch) that strikes after a certain amount of pressure is applied at the button. Since the voltage at the edges of a piezoelectric material is proportional to the change in pressure, the quick blow produces a high voltage spike. That spike is fairly low current, but above the breakdown voltage of the air between the two contacts in the igniter.
Interestingly, these lighter modules are great fun for zapping people. Since it's a low current, there's really no danger to using these. It's much like a static shock.
One nifty application is in electronic buzzers. While that in itself may not be very inspirational, the actual design is pretty slick. Many fixed-frequency buzzers use a piezo elememt that has a small 'island' in the conductor along one pole. That island of conductive material is connected to a third wire. This wire is used as feedback to the oscillator driving the buzzer. What happens here is that you have the speaker (the majority of the element) and a separate microphone in the same substrate, enabling you to get a consistent tone by forcing feedback through the element itself! Since the peak volume of the buzzer is achieved at the resonating frequency of the element, this scheme locks the buzzer to the loudest tone it is designed to emit without any tuning of any sort.
Also, check out some info on the 'net on the use of piezoelectrics in: SAW filters (surface acoustic wave), fuel injectors, crystal oscillators (not just for your Timex!), angular rate gyros, and micromanipulators such as scanning tunneling microscope heads.
Nevermind that the audible noise from the average PC will drown out most of that dynamic range. Assuming the entire hardware chain from the digital audio source to the speakers could represent even 20 bits accurately, there's no chance that a person sitting near a computer could hear that kind of resolution over the noise. Most people can't hear more than about -94-something dB in an average listening setup, so even without any noise sources the improvements are wasted.
Firmware for many modern devices is encumbered by license restrictions beyond the hardware vendor's control. Look at the MP3 player. A manufacturer selling a player that can do MP3 and WMA must not only pay the Fraunhofer tax, but also pay Microsoft for the WMA codec. If the firmware is designed around an RTOS, then there's that too. While most copies of firmware are useless on hardware other than the vendor's, the possibility that a freely redistributable binary will provoke the ire of the owners of the software components tends to freak out the vendor's legal department.
Just like how these guys claim their product uses "refractive lens technology" as opposed to the other kind? (AFAIK a 'reflective lens' is called a mirror, regardless of its curvature).
What does it matter? You already need a 20k+ machine to rework BGAs on a conventional PCB. Why would this add complexity to the fray? I know how to solder/desolder TQFP and the like, and it takes far more time to replace one component than most consumer electronics are worth. We're already in an end-it-don't-mend-it society for these kinds of products anyway.
It's fairly easy. Make a cavity out of firebrick (IIRC, it's some sort of compacted gypsum, or whatever the inside walls of fire safes are made of). A cube with a removable front or top works ok, a cylinder or cylinder-like shape with flip-open top will radiate more uniformly. Find a wire with high melting point and a reasonable electrical resistance. You then need to find out the length of wire needed to wrap around the inside wall of the cavity that will radiate the desired amount of power at the voltages needed. Use the wire's ohms-per-meter and Ohm's law (V=IR), plus some ad-hoc geometry to determine this. Then find some sort of high-temp standoff to suspend the wire inside the firebrick in a helical shape.
Once this is done, you need some way of regulating the temperature. The way the furnaces I worked on did it was to use a solid-state relay to switch the current to the coil, and a high-temp thermocouple to sense the temperature. Use some hysteresis to keep the relay from switching too rapidly near the target temp, and keep in mind there is some thermal inertia to the contents of the kiln. Also keep in mind that at these temperatures, almost all of the heat from the wires is in IR convection, not conduction. Therefore, the surface of the wires should be bare and line-of-sight visible to the material to be heated.
I worked on the firmware and electronic bits of the furnace, and not the mechanics of the muffle (the name for the kiln-like portion). See http://www.whipmix.com/7ovens/index.html for an example of some of the products I worked on. Mind you, it was VERY interesting when working on these as occasionally the CPU would die in a state where the furnace coil was turned on full time, leading to a possible thermal runaway (though, IIRC, the one time this happened unbeknownst to me the muffle wiring burned out before a 'meltdown' happened). Our furnace also often operated in a near-vacuum state inside the chamber, which was a whole 'nother barrel of laughs.
Also, keep in mind that the voltages and temperatures in this system are dangerous! Trust me, you can burn yourself something bad on something that 'looks' like it's cooled. Get some sort of cooling rack and another thermocouple or one of those nifty IR non-contact thermometers to be sure. Also++, at these temperatures, most adhesives and epoxies liquify or burn, often releasing not-so-healthy byproducts. I'm not responsible for anyone else's foolhardiness!
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What's novel about this approach is that it is mechanically simpler and potentially cheaper to manufacture than current Braille readouts (which, as far as I can tell use many small solenoids). Also, since the display elements are bistable (that is, requires power only to switch up/down states, but not to maintain them) power consumption is minimal and portable PDA-like devices would become smaller and more practical.
It's a floorwax! No, it's a dessert topping. Stop, we're both right. (though UVB and UVC, from what I infer, are ionizing because they cross the 1e-7 meter wavelength mark, so you're, like, more right).
Ultraviolet (UVB, UVC) definitely can cause DNA screwage. Ultraviolet is non-ionizing. Discuss.
Except for the glass part, you mean like these: http://www.netapps.com/products/filer/fas200_ds.ht ml? Or these http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/disk_ arrays/midrange/va7410/index.html? Or these http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds4000/d s4500/index.html? Real freakin' futuristic.
Will the solid-state version be called Grandmaster Flash?
Gives a new meaning to the concept of thoughtcrime. On the other hand, biofeedback from TV viewers through some logging device (even if anonymizing as TiVo Inc claims) is an ad agency's wet dream.
"I hate those Poopli kids so much!"
Pacemaker electrodes already include antirejection drugs already impregnated into the tip. By the time the drug stores are depleted, the body is used to the foreign object. I'd imagine that the principles and the drugs used in doing the same to the brain are similar.
There is also a hack out there to make the iPod treat any AAC file like an audiobook file. I think it involves renaming the extension or something. This makes the iPod use persistent bookmarks on a file, and enables the speed up / slow down options for playback. I forget where I saw it though. Use Google to find it; I'm lazy.
Haha! First free-meme-association post!
So... You couldn't use this on a vampire. It's the vampires who have that no-shadow thing, right?
They must have been watching this movie while writing that.
I mean, if you're one of those paranoid types that thinks Sun will pwn the Linux community, go do something about it. Give your local Sun rep a wedgie. Teach children how to navigate 'make menuconfig' in the maternity ward. Stand on streetcorners asking passersby if they've let Tux into their hearts and passing out copies of "Running Linux". Or just chill the heck out.
I'd imagine this is the reason why most modern PC monitors (and most TVs through 'debug' remote codes) allow and sometimes require you to adjust pincushion and trapezoid: basically the offset and gain of these two amplifiers gets programmed through digital pots or the like, as opposed to the internally tweaked pots and caps of yesteryear.
I imagine they do. I don't think anyone's found a more cost effective way to make an e-beam than to boil electrons off a needle. Magnetrons, x-ray tubes, and other such devices do it the same way they have since they were invented. I'd imagine you could make a good chunk of change if you could find a way to do it more reliably.
On a side note, the 'short' CRT is interesting in that a thinner tube means that you can get away with a lower acceleration potential, which is probably why they're rated as more energy efficient. I don't know if this also means a lower beam current can be used, but if so then the x-ray emissions should be lower, resulting in less glass and lead required in the tube itself.
The name of the "Visine Commercial Dude" is:
? ??
/. is ignorant, but the man had a critical role in defining the 1980's!)
is...
is...
had a short-running game show on Comedy Central...
anyone???
anyone???
Ben Stein.
And Ben Stein is best known for:
anyone???
anyone???
thundergeek???
thundergeek
his appearance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
(sheesh, I know the average person around
I don't have a space cycle, you insensitive clod!
If you've got one that is. Their weekly sales are bountiful and they've got a good selection. They do price matching even 30 days after purchase (to head off returns) and their rebates usually get dispatched fairly quickly. Just don't return anything (long, long process) or expect their actual electronic components aisles to be stocked.
Right. Except the bit about the car lighters. Car lighters have a spiral of bimetal (a clad strip of two metals with dissimilar thermal expansion characteristics, see inside an old mechanical thermostat) that heats up as a circuit is completed between the center pin (12V) and the housing of the lighter socket. When the bimetal reaches a certain temperature, the bimetal spring twists and releases the pushbutton mechanism of the lighter, breaking contact with the 12V pin.
Piezoelectrics are used in grill ignitors and 'electronic' lighters. They all use the same principle: Basically a piezoelectric material is put at the business end of a small hammer mechanism (much like a center punch) that strikes after a certain amount of pressure is applied at the button. Since the voltage at the edges of a piezoelectric material is proportional to the change in pressure, the quick blow produces a high voltage spike. That spike is fairly low current, but above the breakdown voltage of the air between the two contacts in the igniter.
Interestingly, these lighter modules are great fun for zapping people. Since it's a low current, there's really no danger to using these. It's much like a static shock.
One nifty application is in electronic buzzers. While that in itself may not be very inspirational, the actual design is pretty slick. Many fixed-frequency buzzers use a piezo elememt that has a small 'island' in the conductor along one pole. That island of conductive material is connected to a third wire. This wire is used as feedback to the oscillator driving the buzzer. What happens here is that you have the speaker (the majority of the element) and a separate microphone in the same substrate, enabling you to get a consistent tone by forcing feedback through the element itself! Since the peak volume of the buzzer is achieved at the resonating frequency of the element, this scheme locks the buzzer to the loudest tone it is designed to emit without any tuning of any sort.
Also, check out some info on the 'net on the use of piezoelectrics in: SAW filters (surface acoustic wave), fuel injectors, crystal oscillators (not just for your Timex!), angular rate gyros, and micromanipulators such as scanning tunneling microscope heads.
Mod this guy up!
Nevermind that the audible noise from the average PC will drown out most of that dynamic range. Assuming the entire hardware chain from the digital audio source to the speakers could represent even 20 bits accurately, there's no chance that a person sitting near a computer could hear that kind of resolution over the noise. Most people can't hear more than about -94-something dB in an average listening setup, so even without any noise sources the improvements are wasted.
Firmware for many modern devices is encumbered by license restrictions beyond the hardware vendor's control. Look at the MP3 player. A manufacturer selling a player that can do MP3 and WMA must not only pay the Fraunhofer tax, but also pay Microsoft for the WMA codec. If the firmware is designed around an RTOS, then there's that too. While most copies of firmware are useless on hardware other than the vendor's, the possibility that a freely redistributable binary will provoke the ire of the owners of the software components tends to freak out the vendor's legal department.
Just like how these guys claim their product uses "refractive lens technology" as opposed to the other kind? (AFAIK a 'reflective lens' is called a mirror, regardless of its curvature).
What does it matter? You already need a 20k+ machine to rework BGAs on a conventional PCB. Why would this add complexity to the fray? I know how to solder/desolder TQFP and the like, and it takes far more time to replace one component than most consumer electronics are worth. We're already in an end-it-don't-mend-it society for these kinds of products anyway.
...wasn't "log". It was "lol!!1! did u get my msg??"
It's fairly easy. Make a cavity out of firebrick (IIRC, it's some sort of compacted gypsum, or whatever the inside walls of fire safes are made of). A cube with a removable front or top works ok, a cylinder or cylinder-like shape with flip-open top will radiate more uniformly. Find a wire with high melting point and a reasonable electrical resistance. You then need to find out the length of wire needed to wrap around the inside wall of the cavity that will radiate the desired amount of power at the voltages needed. Use the wire's ohms-per-meter and Ohm's law (V=IR), plus some ad-hoc geometry to determine this. Then find some sort of high-temp standoff to suspend the wire inside the firebrick in a helical shape.
Once this is done, you need some way of regulating the temperature. The way the furnaces I worked on did it was to use a solid-state relay to switch the current to the coil, and a high-temp thermocouple to sense the temperature. Use some hysteresis to keep the relay from switching too rapidly near the target temp, and keep in mind there is some thermal inertia to the contents of the kiln. Also keep in mind that at these temperatures, almost all of the heat from the wires is in IR convection, not conduction. Therefore, the surface of the wires should be bare and line-of-sight visible to the material to be heated.
I worked on the firmware and electronic bits of the furnace, and not the mechanics of the muffle (the name for the kiln-like portion). See http://www.whipmix.com/7ovens/index.html for an example of some of the products I worked on. Mind you, it was VERY interesting when working on these as occasionally the CPU would die in a state where the furnace coil was turned on full time, leading to a possible thermal runaway (though, IIRC, the one time this happened unbeknownst to me the muffle wiring burned out before a 'meltdown' happened). Our furnace also often operated in a near-vacuum state inside the chamber, which was a whole 'nother barrel of laughs.
Also, keep in mind that the voltages and temperatures in this system are dangerous! Trust me, you can burn yourself something bad on something that 'looks' like it's cooled. Get some sort of cooling rack and another thermocouple or one of those nifty IR non-contact thermometers to be sure. Also++, at these temperatures, most adhesives and epoxies liquify or burn, often releasing not-so-healthy byproducts. I'm not responsible for anyone else's foolhardiness!