I love stories where people make changes in someone else's project without thinking of or knowing of the damage they could do. I unplugged an extension cord that ran to a copier so I could move a desk to another area and then I was going to replug it. Harmless right.
Well someone else had already disconnected the copier and had a computer plugged in. I pulled the plug and heard one of the book keepers say, "Oh no. I just lost March." I was tempted to quickly reconnect before I was found out, but confessed and had to indure icy stares for a good week or so.
Growing up on a small farm in Eastern Oregon, I learned how to fix a lot of things with tools/supplies at hand (I have a pickup and baling wire story). It's served me VERY well in this career and in my hobbies.
Streetrodder, I'll bet you have some of your own Sherlock Ohms stories. If you do, please send one along. Shoot for 350 words or more, and include a short two- or three-sentence bio.
As best I can recall, the students ran tests in a section of pipe for their project, so they could pull out the robot in case of problems. Maybe they used a low-tech retrieval system--string.
Hey, Jon, were they able to retrieve the robot once they lost communications with it? I would think they would lose control of it when communication stopped.
On the southwest corner of the campus at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA) stands a stone building used some time ago as a magnetics and electricity lab. It contains no magnetic materials. Read a short history and see a photo here: http://www.wpi.edu/about/tour/skull.html. The street-car line no longer exists. I cannot vouch for the veracity of stories about the Skull society and any "secret" ceremonies.
I heard a story about engineering students who created a wireless robot that would crawl through metal pipes. The robot would into the pipe, but at exactly the same point it would stop communicating. Turned out the pipe formed a nice waveguide and acted like a dead short for the RF, so communications ended abruptly. My memory is a bit hazy, so maybe some other waveguide effect caused loss of comms--I'm not a microwave guy.
Andrew Morris designed a circuit that could detect a stroke victim's groan and convert the sound into a signal so caregivers would know when help was needed.
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.
On April 21, NASA launched a novel project, putting into orbit three satellites that employ an off-the-shelf commercial smartphone as the control system.
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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