This morning, my commute to work took an hour and forty minutes. Most was spent on the Route 128 beltway outside of Boston. One twenty eight was once informally referred to as "America’s Technology Highway," but I more think of it as America’s largest parking lot.
As I podded along at 2 MPH amid thousands of other unhappy campers, I looked at each lane and envisioned a set of railroad tracks, shuttling commuters around boston instead of into it. Various stations would dot the ring and there, commuters would be ferried to their office building by shuttles and vans.
With gasoline tipping $3 a gallon and strained oil supplies, I thought what a waste of a precious resource. Cars going nowhere and burning gaseline is something beyond a colossal waste. It’s nuts. It’s insane. It’s lunacy.
Meanwhile, the story on NPR is how Congress is failing to pass a comprehensive energy bill. Translation: our politicians are failing us. What is it going to take – $20 a gallon gasoline? If so, so be it.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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