Techies & Technology
jfiore | November 13, 2008There is some confusion as to precisely how a setback thermostat saves energy. In fact, because of misunderstandings I have heard a number of people proclaim that a setback doesn't save energy. There are two common arguments:
1. Although you save energy as the house is initially cooling during the setback period, the furnace has to work overtime to make up this loss once the setback period is over. This "overtime" counteracts the initial savings for no net savings.
2. If the house is set for, say, 68F, when it cools a degree to 67F the furnace will turn on. It takes just as much energy to…
jfiore | November 12, 2008Electronic Design has released their 2008 salary survey for electrical and electronic engineers. Average salary for design and development engineers is now $94k (base salary). Engineering management is up to $116k. The highest paying regions are Pacific and Mountain at $114k and $103k, respectively. The lowest regions are East North Central and West North Central at $87.4k and $90.3k (I guess North Central USA is not the place to be).
Other interesting tidbits include a very telling disparity between men ($97.5k) and women ($78.6k). Starting salaries are around $50k. Those with one to four…
jfiore | August 1, 2008It has been said that the Olympics is rather like a genetic freak-show: All of the extreme outliers from the population show up and do their thing. While specific "genetic gifts" are pretty much required to reach the top of most any sport these days, a little technology can certainly assist in the process. This week's Electronic Design cover story is The 2008 TechnOlympics and discussed some of the technology that will be used in Beijing.
One item that caught my eye was the increased use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Although wind tunnel testing has been used on cyclists…
jfiore | June 19, 2008As part of my continuing adventures in drumming symmetry, I have been working on a dual electronic hi-hat pedal. The idea is to have a single hi-hat pad respond equally well to either a left or a right foot pedal. It is similar to having both left and right kick drum pedals. For the hi-hat, this effect is sometimes realized through the use of a switch, but that requires some extra motion and it's not possible to use both pedals at the same time. These pedals (both an FD-7 and an FD-8) are used with a Roland TD20 drum controller. The hi-hat pedal uses a resistive position sensor to indicate…
jfiore | April 4, 2008How does a 7000 pound, 35 foot diameter chandelier using high-brightness LEDs sound to you? Well that's what was installed the other day at the Stanley Theatre in Utica, NY. The manufacturer, Meyda Tiffany based in nearby Yorkville, claims that it is the world's largest LED chandelier. Here are details from the local newspaper and from an industry magazine.
The Stanley is one of those grand old movie houses from the 1920s, in an opulent style called "Mexican Baroque". It's one of the jewels of Central New York. I love going to the place and just looking around. Recently it has undergone a…
jfiore | December 22, 2007The latest issue of Embedded Systems Design has an interesting article on combining C code with assembly code for DSP applications. In some cases, they show an ten fold speed up for an assembly plus C implementation versus straight C code.
Now before anyone starts hollering, please remember that embedded programming is not at all like normal desktop application programing. Generally you're operating in a "slim" (i.e., resource poor) environment. Heck, some embedded processors only have a few hundred bytes of RAM available and you might be talking about a clock frequency of just a few…
jfiore | November 1, 2007In previous installments in the DIY NME series, I've looked at the application of symmetrical motor patterns using the drum kit. For this entry, the approach is a little different and says something about "handedness" as well. A few months ago I rearranged my semi-symmetrical drum kit into what I call the super symmetrical kit. The original semi-sym kit offered a centered hi-hat and three toms on each side, decreasing in pitch from front-center to rear. The remaining cymbals were arranged in a more-or-less typical configuration for a right-hander (ride to the right, crashes arrayed as desired…
jfiore | October 18, 2007Sometimes I can't seem to find just the right lab equipment I want for a particular experiment so I design it myself. Such was the case recently for a course I developed and teach entitled Science of Sound. This course is a natural science elective and deals with the physics of audio and acoustics. We start with a few very basic concepts such as harmonic motion. One of the laboratory experiments involves vibrating strings. I like this experiment because students can relate to it as most are at least familiar with guitars and other stringed instruments (the guitar players really like this one…
jfiore | October 8, 2007A previous post featured a short film about members of the Audiophile Club of Athens and the rather extreme sound systems their members have created. Some members spent in excess of $300,000 to build their systems. You may be wondering just what manner of gear that sort of money would buy, and would it really sound that much better than a more modest (yet still comparatively "high end") system of say, several thousand dollars. Before we go any further, let me state that in no way am I making fun of the way people spend their money. Heck, I've been known to drop some coinage on musical…
jfiore | September 27, 2007This week's Electronic Engineering Times features a short article on the upcoming USB 3.0 spec. The main highlight is a target transfer rate of 4 Gigabits/second (10 times the current rate) providing usable data at 300 Megabytes/second. This rate would challenge IEEE 1394 (AKA FireWire). USB 3.0 is being referred to as "Super Speed USB" and will be "hardware agnostic" according to the article, meaning it could be implemented over copper or optical cabling.
This third variant on the USB theme will adopt a new physical layer, splitting data and acknowledge signals onto separate paths. On the…
jfiore | September 17, 2007It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was.. Oops. Sorry, already been done. Start again.
The other day I brought up some thoughts concerning the high cost of college textbooks. In the arena of science and engineering there are issues with the fairly narrow audience and resultant low volume, and some difficulties with the used book market. There is, of course, the issue of the publishers. I am going to risk having my snout slapped by biting the hand that feeds me, but hey, I noticed something the other day that has my head spinning anyway.
I teach an introductory course in…
jfiore | September 17, 2007The latest Embedded Systems Design features an overview of their annual comprehensive programmer's survey. ESD (an unfortunate acronym for a hardware journal) has offered the same survey for the past few years to engineers and programmers in both the USA and Europe, seeking info on their current and anticipated needs, projects, tools, and the like (N>1000 for the past three surveys). There are many useful tidbits in here but one in particular caught my eye, and that's the trend in development languages used.
Embedded programming is considerably different from the more typical desktop…
jfiore | September 14, 2007We're a couple weeks into the semester and the ever-popular subject of the cost of textbooks has raised its head. Along with my students, I often wonder why they shell out so much for these works. I think there are several things at play here, but first a little background: I've been teaching at the college level for over 25 years and I've written a few textbooks myself, for two different publishers: West and Delmar/Thomson Learning (including the ever-exciting Op Amps and Linear Integrated Circuits mentioned on the sidebar, complete with color-coordinated matching laboratory manual). The…
jfiore | September 9, 2007Sequences, whether it's the colors of the rainbow, the names of the planets, or ages of Earth's geologic past just scream for mnemonic devices such as acronym-sentences. Some of these can be quite entertaining in their own right, and even more entertaining if you make them up yourself. For example, beginning electrical engineering and technology students are faced with the task of memorizing the resistor color code. The code is used to denote the nominal value of resistors with a total of ten colors corresponding to the numerals 0 through 9:
0 Black
1 Brown
2 Red
3 Orange
4 Yellow
5 Green
6…
jfiore | August 2, 2007On the audio front, National Semiconductor, long a player in analog semiconductors, has announced a couple new op amp families producing a total harmonic distortion plus noise spec of 0.00003%. These devices are aimed squarely at higher end audio applications and also offer a very low voltage noise spec of 2.7 nanovolts per root-Hertz with a flicker noise corner of 60 Hertz. I find these numbers to be pretty impressive, especially considering a starting price of $1.35 per unit in 100's (up to about $10 depending on package and other details).
During my college days it was something to find…
jfiore | July 25, 2007This week's NOVA Science NOW on PBS has an interesting piece on the Kryptos sculpture in front of CIA headquarters. The segment does a decent job of showing some of the basic techniques used such as substitution and transposition, in just a few minutes.
I am not a cryptographer but it is an area I have studied a little. It's a great topic to introduce to my first and second year programming students. Some of them really perk up when we start talking about it. Invariably, someone will ask if I can show them how to "crack" protected software. I always tell them that, although I have the…
jfiore | July 12, 2007Curious about what's inside an iPhone? Well, the good folks at Audio Design Line (via EE Times) have a teardown.
Mind you, it's not like the old days when you could just pop off the cover of your new electronic doohickey and look at the manufacturer's part numbers on the chips. These are the days of self-branded ICs. So what did the folks at the technology evaluation/investigation company Semiconductor Insights do?
To get inside the chips, SI resorted to decapping, a process that involves immersing the chips in acid to dissolve the outer packaging and then manually scraping away any residual…
jfiore | May 31, 2007Here's an interesting piece from Audio Design Line regarding a new file format just released from Beatnik. The format is said to produce files one-tenth the size of MP3 files and is intended for narrow bandwidth phones in emerging markets.
The format, called Mobile XMF, would work in conjunction with Beatnik's music player, which would have to be preinstalled on the phone. Beatnik believes there's a market for music downloads in Eastern European countries, China, Latin America, and India, where manufacturers sell lots of low-cost phones.
I sometimes hear students listening to music on their…
jfiore | May 14, 2007Back around 1987 I picked up a Commodore Amiga 1000. This was an interesting little box for home computers of the day. In the late eighties the typical home/office PC was running MS-DOS and had a whopping 640k bytes of memory. The Amiga didn't look like the average home computer and it certainly didn't behave like one. For starters, it had a graphical user interface (popularized by the Mac a year or two earlier) and a two button mouse. Unlike the average Mac, it was color (4096 color palette). Further, it had a choice of screen resolutions including 640x400 interlaced. While those numbers…