Bench Talk

Choosing the type of control to use for various motor applications is a strategic choice that should be made before selecting a specific vendor or model. This is because there are many trade-offs when deciding to use a general-purpose processor that is well-suited for motor control, a computation-friendly FPGA, or a dedicated control IC (the latter is most often from a specialized motion-control vendor).

The many reality technologies to pick from let us escape to a virtual or semi-virtual world, but with telehaptics we can get even more jacked in and get as close possible to that ultimate Star Trek geek-out: teleportation.

On the surface, it appears to be among the simplest of games. An austere board marked with a 19 x 19 grid, where two players take turns placing black or white pieces. The rules are brutally simple: capture enemy pieces by surrounding them with your own; capture the most territory to win. But the game of Go has a 2,500 year history, 1,000 years longer than chess, and is a far more complex challenge than that younger game. Until recently, its upper ranks were considered beyond the reach of computers. A machine that could challenge the best players was seen as the holy grail of games-playing artificial intelligence (AI).

Because virtual reality required quite a large amount of computing power, and the technology was very expensive, it never really took hold. Until 2012 that is, when the small startup Oculus introduced the first head mounted display with a visual field of 90 degrees. Now, with many other companies developing HDMs, the technology is more affordable, therefore spreading into different industries.

I was an intern at Mouser this past summer, and this is my last week before I go back to school. Coming into this internship, I would never have imagined that I would be asked to fly across the country and represent Mouser at one of the biggest technology showcases in the world. I thought I would be writing a blog or an article every now and then while designing some sort of project by the end of the summer. Every engineering student needs some hands-on design experience on their resume, and that means spending time developing some quirky product that stands out among the droves of other students interviewing at major tech companies.

For a good while now we’ve thought of our phones as fairly drop proof (how many times have you dropped yours?), relying on the solder joints to keep the semiconductor components tightly mounted to their circuit cards. Before flash memory became widely available and cheap, (enabling smartphones enough storage space for personal data, music videos and pictures) cell phone manufacturers like Nokia wrestled with the possibility of using micro-miniature disk drives. Too fragile for smartphones or portable media players, smartphone makers concluded, too many moving parts, a strong possibility for damage if the phone were dropped, and an almost universal assumption that, many times during its life time, the phone would be dropped.

In its current form, smart metering holds out little benefit to the consumer – apart, perhaps, from putting an end to the receipt of estimated bills. This is because consumer end devices in the shape of energy monitors are still not intelligent enough to provide useful information to us. If you have a ‘smart’ meter, all it demonstrates is that, if you turn a light switch or appliance on or off, the total power draw, water flow or gas usage increases or decreases accordingly. That’s hardly rocket science.

Have you ever felt elation when your design finally worked, followed by horror the next morning because it had morphed into a brick? This happened to me. No response to commands on the user interface and no indication of what caused it to die. Intermittent design “seizures” were my most feared failure mode. Or what about an intermittent failure that is actually caused by a chain of two or more design flaws in the system? Here’s my story; a snapshot of embedded development and valuable lessons a young engineer (me) learned the hard way.

What is a harsh environment? It might be a holiday dinner with the polar-opposite-political relatives, especially if later trapped in the living room by a crackling fireplace with the distant uncle who sends four chain emails a day. But, today we're talking about harsh environments for electronics. Electronics Hell.

You’ve spotted them flying at the park, you’ve seen the amazing aerial videos they can take. Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are no longer just a military phenomenon but have entered the civilian fray. But while you’ll often see drones being flown just for fun, these days they’re being put to work in useful and increasingly surprising ways.