Here's an alarm clock that clicks on your favorite music, vibrates your pillow, removes your sheets and makes your coffee. Brian Wagner and his mechanical engineering teammates at Colorado State University (Matthew Cuff, Ryan Seeboth and Steve Schmitt) devised the perfect wake-up machine. The alarm uses a keypad and six LEDs to indicate depressed buttons or command functions that determine the sensory mix to wake you up and ease you into your day. The temperature gauge can be connected to a heater or fan to activate the perfect wake-up temperature.
Using three (four?) PICs, a keyboard encoder, a 555, and four digital potentiometers when only the PIC16F747 would do is not a good design. I suspect everything on the "Light Dimmer Circuit" sheet could also be incorporated into the one PIC16F747.
Starter motors with automatic starting capabilities will hit the auto market in a big way in 2012. Within 15 years, every new vehicle could offer "start-stop."
Branching out from its CAM software roots, PartMaker is adding a 3D CAD modeling component to its PartMaker portfolio, acknowledging that machinists need better tools for working with 3D models.
Environmental stress cracking is a common failure mode for plastics, and you may need to do your own testing to make sure that the plastic you plan to use will not crack.
The tray table that folds in half for stowage in the armrest of an airline seat is something admired for its design ingenuity, but long cursed for its operational opaqueness and flimsiness.
Thanks to embedded electronics, medical devices are getting smaller and smarter than ever. Pacemakers and implantable defibrillators are now able to call physicians. MRIs, CT scanners, and ultrasound machines are gaining mobility. And the venerable Band-Aid may soon be able to detect illnesses ranging from fevers to heart arrhythmias. On February 21, join Design News senior editor Charles Murray for a wide-ranging discussion, "Embedded Angles for Medical Products," which will explore the latest developments in medical electronics. The discussion will examine advances in medical device technology and offer an inside look at the embedded electronics behind it.
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