Crafting a Triode
Fabrication d'une lampe triode
Vacuum tubes still have a market in CRTs radio transmissions and with musicians We find them still being manufactured in Eastern Europe. While silicon isn't under threat yet, French amatuer Radio Operator, is buillding a vacuum tubes. In this fascinating video, Claude Paillard takes us step by step in the process of hand fabricating a vacume tube. This is indeed the work of a true craftsman.
Labels: Electronics
Cameras, a useful tool
At our shop in
Baytown I find that our little digital camera is one of the most useful in our arsenal. I admit its not thought of as useful as our multimeters and o'scopes but it can save a lot of work and surely aids in communication.
While working on an old 650 Watt Sorensen power supply it became apparent that a small 4 winding toroid transformer had to be changed. I needed to rewind it with some fresh new magnetic wire. Now I could try to make notes on where each of the leads go and try to keep track of each of their windings and polarities. The simple thing to do of course is take a picture, print it out on the laser/ink jet jot a few notes and I have some pretty foolproof documentation. Using Photoshop or just about any other photo editing software one could put text tags mark up a photo that will be emailed or saved to disk. A picture can also simplify a written procedure by showing just what a specific setup is supposed to look like.
Often part numbers can be confusing a particular widget might have a zillion options and a dozen build options a picture just might be the way to communicate exactly what widget is under discussion.
Some companies have pretty tight security policies on cameras in the workplace. We as support people have to live within whatever guidelines that are given us. However in most cases justification can be made in the time and money that a camera can save in documentation and communications. I am seeing more shops and support people with cameras available when they need them.
Labels: Electronics, Industry, Troubleshooting
Paper May Soon Power The Machine That Replaced It
Ever notice that the only reason some of your electronics are as big as they are is because of their batteries? For instance how much smaller and lighter would your laptop be if it had a battery the size of a piece of paper in it? Well huge, clunky batteries may soon be a thing of the past thanks to some students Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Two groups of students were working on two different projects: working to dissolve paper to be cast for dialysis and making carbon nanotubes with polymers. The two RPI groups got together and figured out that they could combine the two projects. Instead of using the polymers for the nanotubes they could use the paper casting techniques. The device is an integrated device; it is not a combination of several pieces. The paper is in infused with an electrolyte and embedded with the carbon nanotubes. The tubes act as electrodes, the paper the separator, and the electrolytes are the medium in which current flows. Their ultimate goal is to develop a process that allows the batteries to be “printed” like newspapers. This idea is already in use with PCB design and board printing. The current prototype, “a thin sheet black on one side and white on the other”, is still far from being put into any consumer or commercial device, but the hope is there. In the past 18 months the students and researchers have developed the battery, a capacitor, and a new device that acts like both. So until this product hits the market, I guess we are stuck with keeping up with all those letters and numbers: AA, AAA, C, D, A23, AAAA, CR927….
Labels: Electronics, Industry
The Wait Is Over
Let’s say you just got to work and you are booting up your PC, this is where the waiting begins. You have to wait for your hard drive to turn on and get its head in the game. Oh and of course as you are waiting for your system to boot up your boss walks by and definitely notices you sitting there not doing anything. “But it’s not my fault I was waiting for the computer to…” Next thing you know you are putting all your stuff in an empty Hammermill paper box. Well this my friends may be a thing of the past. Japan and the Netherlands teamed up to reinvent the hard drive; a year after its 50th anniversary. The physicists reign from Rabboud University Nijmegen of the Netherlands and Nihon University of Japan. They have devised a way to use lasers to flip the magnetic memory bit in hard drives. Currently, as it is, data is stored on hard drives via magnetic moments that are either in an ‘up’ or ‘down’ position. Then, a certain number of ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ correspond to a binary bit, which then in turn correspond to a piece of data as a whole. An actuator arm with a head at one end and a voice coil on the other control the amount of electricity that gets through the voice coil and on to the platter(the spinning disk inside) which may be spinning at speeds upwards of 15,000RPM. The physicists’ hard drive would use a laser concentrated to 5 micrometers on a piece of magnetic film. The pulse used to flip the bit would be 40 femtoseconds (10-15 s). “Ok, who cares and what does that mean?” Well it means that hard drives will be able to access data 50,000 times faster. Let’s put this in perspective: it takes you 10 minutes to get from your house to the grocery store, now we apply this hard drives speed to your trip now it only takes you 0.012 seconds to get to the store. This is an incredible feat and it is a commercially viable product. If a few minor kinks get worked out, like finding materials with a higher coercivity than the gadolinium, iron, cobalt alloy that they used in the experiments, the hard drives could be on the market in less than 10 years. One of the researchers has already patented the process, he says that anyone could do what they did the only problem would be concentrating a laser to a 50 micrometer spot. By the way 50 micrometers is smaller than the wavelength of the laser itself. So the Hammermill box will soon be a thing of the past, well at least in this instance…
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/30762
Labels: computers, Computing, Electronics, Industry
Samsung's Bi-DVD
The DVD wars hae been on ongoing. Japanese consumer electronic giants Sony and Toshiba have taken their stands, Blue Ray in one Corner and HD DVD in the other. Korea's Samsung has taken the technological lead and introduced the HD DVD and Blue Ray hybrid.
Initial reports look good!
... the BD-UP5000 is fully HD DVD compliant, able to play back all the interactive menus and features that are the hallmark of the format. I tested it with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and things came out flawless. Even though this was a prototype drive. Also, the drive has local storage and Ethernet, which are part of the HD DVD spec. The UP5000 also features an HQV Reon processor, the same video scaler and deinterlacer that made the current gen Toshiba HD DVD player's images so good.
Blu-ray discs played fine, and I wish I'd brought along the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest to see if the Blu-ray Java problems persisted. But I doubt that is an issue, given the fact that the bug is well known and was patched across the board last month.
Its a beginning. Perhaps this product and others like it will open the hi def video market a little more. The new player will be an obvious choice for many. Congratulations to Samsung not only for a promising product, but for jumping on and taking the technical lead!
Labels: Electronics
USB-503 from Measurement Computing
Things always seem to happen when we are away or not looking. A circuit trips a fault condition or a stall. If the equipment involves a modern DCS system we might be able to figure out what happened if we can trend some monitored points.
Measurement Computing has some
kewl new devices that might prove interesting. They are USB remote data loggers. The idea is to plug the devices into a USB port. Set it up where you need it and log away. To view the data all one has to do is connect back up to the USB port download and view. They come in a couple different flavors. Temperature Current (4-20) and Voltage (0-30V) Sounds to good to be true. I had to have one if these!! I opted for the Voltage unit, the
USB-503. It could i could stick a resister in series to do some current monitoring if I needed to.
I receive a unit about 2 weeks ago, and although the logger checked the voltages correctly. the clock logged the time in to quickly. It was as though the the clock was about 10 times to fast. I called Measurement Computing and they exchanged a new one right to me. As always their service is excellent and flawless.
The Unit consist of a CD with the Data logging Software, instruction pamphlet, a 3.6V 1/2AA lithium battery and the unit itself. The software is pretty self explanatory. There are 3 functions:
- Setup Data logger. One can set up the logger to take measurements from avery 10 seconds to every 12 hours. At every 10 seconds will log up to 3 days 16 hours. One of the neat features is that the logger can be set up to to do linear unit conversions.
- Download data. This creates a CSV data file suitable for a spreadsheet program or supplied Viewer.
- View Data: Data is presented via a configurable and self-scaling trend graph suitable for presentation.
The Temperature models could be very handy for those who need to monitor food storage. The USB-502 does temperature and relative humidity and could be real handy in monitoring environmental control such as in the textile or farming industry. Its pretty hard to beat the prices on these things at under $100.
I do have a couple of nitpicks though. The 10 second maximum scan rate isn't really fast enough for the voltage logger. I would like to see a 1 second or at least a 2 second scan rate it would be more likely to catch momentary surges and dips on an overnight run. The alligator clips and leads are too big. The tinning on the leads make it impossible to insert into the unit without trimming them back.
All in all I rate my USB-503 as pretty useful though, and I'm finding more uses for it all the time. Measure Computing Corporation has some pretty neat USB devices that fit in real well with real world needs. We also also own a a couple of their PMD devices which we have used to perform some automated experimentation and proof of concept demonstrations. It is just further proof that one doesn't need a $100k DCS system to monitor and trend a point or to control a tiny process for a bit.
Labels: Electronics, Industry
Flexible Fiber
Fiberoptic cable is a great way to move a large bandwidth. Verizon has been working to connect up to 18 million homes into its fiber network. Te catch is that fiber isn't all that flexible. Bending and flexing can completely kill the signals as
Fortune explains This intolerance for bending can make fiber optics a nightmare to install in someone's home. Snaking the wiring along the floorboards is out of the question - just one tight turn around the bookcase, and the signal is kaput. So Verizon's installers have been forced to come up with alternate routes, such as drilling holes in walls to get the cabling from one room to another. The process is time-consuming, expensive, and potentially destructive. The problem is particularly acute in apartment buildings - and there are a lot of those in Verizon's East Coast territory - which are full of conduits, shafts, and corners that must be navigated in order to hook up each customer. (In most single-family homes Verizon just needs to connect the fiber to a special box on the outside of the customer's house.) Fun fact: To get a fiber connection to a typical basement apartment, installers encounter an average of 12 right-angle turns.
But Corning seems to have some answers.
Corning's researchers figured out a way to keep the light going as it turns corners - lots and lots of corners. We can't go too deep into the technical details - the company exhibits CIA-levels of paranoia about its inventions. But essentially Corning's technology infuses the cladding that surrounds the fiber's narrow core with microscopic guardrails called nanostructures. They help keep the light from seeping out of the fiber, even when it is wound around a pencil - treatment that normally would render it completely useless.
Like many innovations at Corning, the discovery of "bend insensitive" fiber was a combination of serendipity and determination. A group of scientists from different disciplines - chemist Dana Bookbinder, chemical engineer Pushkar Tandon, and optical scientist Ming-Jun Li - had been thinking independently about nanostructures in their fields. Bookbinder, a sociable chap who says he spends a lot of his time "b.s.-ing" with other scientists, realized they needed to collaborate. They began brainstorming on Friday afternoons, and by the summer of 2004 they had started experimenting with nanostructures in fiber.
At first they conducted experiments on their own initiative, with Bookbinder rewarding his colleagues with homemade chocolates for coming in on weekends to help cook up early versions of the fiber. He also encountered skeptics. "We had several physicists who rolled their eyes and said, 'This will never work,'?" Bookbinder recalls.
Corning's business executives were less disbelieving, and as soon as they got wind of the project in early 2006, they put it on the fast track for development. They even shared early findings with Verizon, which loves the idea.
"When you see somebody tie a fiber cable in a knot and it is still able to transmit a signal, you initially think, 'There's something not right with that,'?" says Paul Lacouture, the Verizon executive who has led its FiOS buildout. Lacouture (who announced his retirement in late June) says the company also is considering wireless technologies that could help it deliver broadband in apartments, but for now Verizon's money is on Corning and its bendable fiber.
I hope us industrial guys don't have to wait too far behind the home applications. Our applications typically aren't as bandwidth hungry, but we sure could use some of that less delicate fiber!
Labels: Electronics, Networking
Finding the Hot Spots
It can be helpful to find what is heating up, when attempting to repair a piece of equipment. I had an old Army instructor who drilled into our heads, "Whats the first thing you look for after you turn on the equipment?" The answer is "look for smoke and fire." The first step in testing an unknown piece of equipment is to look for smoke and fire. Check for strange smells or a visible wisp of smoke. At the most primitive level we just look for burned components or perhaps some smoke and fire. While this can be destructive, most of the damage is already done by the time we get a chance to open it up and look around.
There are tools to help monitor temperature:
Infrared temperature monitors are real handy. They can find hot spots fast and is an inexpensive solution. We use a couple of inexpensive EXTECH in our shops. A major advantage to these devices is a person does not need to actually make contact with the equipment under test. This is a big advantage when checking out CRT monitors and radio equipment.
- Infrared thermal imaging is another method. Although this method is getting more inexpensive every year, it is still pricey. These devices are great to see all the components that are getting hot and isolating the cause. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case several thousand dollars.
- Another method is thermocouple digital thermometers. These are often available as calibration equipment and are generally inexpensive. We have several in our shops from a high-priced Fluke 724 Temperature Calibrator to an inexpensive Omega 871 thermometer. Generally speaking, a thermocouple can be attached using either kapton or masking tape. A real advantage to thermocouple thermometers is they can be monitored over a period of time. The Omega we use has a milivolt output so that temperature can be monitored and logged over a period of a few days.
Although temperature isn't the first thing a technician thinks of for test equipment, it often is a valuable tool when chasing down intermittent and stability problems.
Labels: Electronics, Troubleshooting
