For a couple years now, I have been looking at home weather stations to measure wind speed and direction along with the other usual stuff - indoor and outdoor temparature, humidity and rainfall. I went with a WMR968 Professional Weather Station from Oregon Scientific. It uses solar to power wireless transmitters to send the data from instruments to the display. It was a bear to install, taking 6-8 hours to get the anemometer high enough and away from obstructions. The directions were so bad, I thought it would never work, but it does and fairly reliably - for now.
But I wished I had waited for the anemometer from Fascinating Electronics. It’s a homemade but cleverly fashioned together with PVC pipe. The anemometer (weather vane and cup rotor) is $100. Throw in another $25 for the temparature/humidity sensor and you all but the rain guage you get in the WMR968 which goes for $250 (I wanted Davis Vantage Pro 2, but could not justify the $500+ cost). To be fair, Fascinating’s piecemeal approach isn’t for everyone. It does not come with an electronic display so you have to build or acquire your own or use a calibration chart to translate pulses from the anemometer in MPH. But that could be a fun project.
Almost every automaker has had to 'pick a side' when it comes to alternative fuel options and ways to divest from a reliance on gasoline. Fiat is looking to back compressed natural gas or liquid propane as an interim solution.
Plastic may not be the most beloved of materials to the more environmentally minded, but Plasti 2012 aimed to mold a different opinion of the material in people's minds.
The rare earth element market has become steadily more rational, and new sources coming online will continue to reduce costs. Still, it is unlikely that prices will drop to their former lows.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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