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Welcome to my new and second blog. My intention is to identify consumer products that work well or badly, focusing on design and and quality. No I am not an engineer, but as I mention in my blog profile, I love mechanical and electronic things. My experience includes working in factories and machine shops and a very good lay understanding about how motors and things you'd find in those venues work. My first blog, by the way, was The Dodge Report at my former publication, Electronic Business.
My first victim is the suction cup bracket that came with my Garmin GPS nüvi 350. The nüvi is a great little GPS unit, but the suction cup that holds the unit to the windshield sucks. Or actually, it doesn't stay sucking like it should, constantly falling off the windshield even though it feels solidly built and looks smartly designed. Part of the problem might be that I keep removing it so as not to advertise the presence of this nifty little $600 unit (which tied for first place in Consumer Reports tests on portable GPS devices). Still, it should stay put every time I affix it to the windshield. Such irony: Garmin can get the sophisticated electronics right, but blows it with something as trivial as the bracket. When the whole thing collapses, it's very irritating and what will be even more of a travesty of a mockery of a sham is if the nüvi ends up breaking the next time it crashes against the console of my car.
The nüvi is a great little GPS unit, but the suction cup that holds the unit to the windshield sucks.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
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.
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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