The blogs of Chris Gammell and Silicon Farmer were going back and forth on the issues of starting a small tech company back in the 1950′s as compared to now. Having been down the path with success and crash and burns a few times, plus an era as a chief engineer of a small contract [...]

continue reading.....

The Guardian had an interesting article entitled “The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent“. As one who used to co-lead a very large internet forum, we used to laugh at some of the lame attempts at astroturfing (they were easy to detect). The big deal is that over time, such [...]

continue reading.....

Here is the block diagram for the long wave IR theremin design. A full size expanded version is available by clicking the image. IR Sensor Discussion The IR sensors are an array of thin film Bismuth-Antimony thermocouples surrounded by Xenon gas. Active junctions in the center of the detector receive radiant energy through a thin [...]

continue reading.....

The detector mounts are ready to roll but the it is getting more than a bit cold outside, so here goes the theory of operation and block diagram section. A simplified view of the long wave IR detector is shown in figure 1. The background radiation is ever present, and the detector is mounted in [...]

continue reading.....

The traditional theremin used a couple oscillators, a reference one, and another one was controlled via physical proximity. The difference frequency between the oscillators was then sent to an amplifier, whose volume was controlled by yet another set of oscillators. In the 1920′s such an instrument was no doubt difficult to build. In our time [...]

continue reading.....

Broken studs can be a real nightmare, even more so because more often than not, they end up in locations where its near impossible to get at. The traditional approaches of drilling out the stud, and then using an ez-out or other broken stud extraction tool often fail. Sometimes they mere strip out, which inevitable [...]

continue reading.....

The case of an inadvertent transformer winding… A new large turbogenerator in a UK power station was designed to have its 20kA three-phase output busbars split either side of one of its support pillars, because of a lack of space. The support pillars were steel, part of a steel framework, and created a single-shorted turn [...]

continue reading.....

One of the headaches of dealing with high temperature materials, is not that they are not available, but more so, that its often impossible to buy them in non-oem (original equipment manufacturer) quantities and/or lead times. However, if one steps back a bit, and looks not so much at the oem world, but the mro [...]

continue reading.....

I came across the following from Home Shop machinist and it looks to be a really cool tool for identifying aluminum alloys. Granted, I have yet to verify this myself… on the other hand, the author very much seems to know what he is talking about based upon other threads. Rather than using the image [...]

continue reading.....