Electro-ramblings

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Last year around this time, Silicon Labs introduced C8051F9xx - a microcontroller family capable of operation down to 0.9V, and up to 3.6V.

The core does not actually run at 0.9V, there is an in-built boost converter.

Atmel has gone one better, or maybe just 0.2 better, and come up with an MPU that works down to 0.7V.

Crabs can produce a bromine-rich biomaterial 1.5 times harder than Perspex "and extremely fracture resistant", said University of Oregon scientists.

According to the University, the material is a new member of a class of structural biomaterials that employ heavy atoms like zinc, iodine and iron.

A team from Vanderbilt University in the US have machined silicon to make what is claimed to be the world's smallest version of the periscope.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

I was trawling the archive of Electronics Weekly, and came across an article from November 16th 1996.

It describes the invention of two famous analogue chips - the 741 and the 555.

Just in case you are interested, as it doesn't seem to be available from the website, I have included the full text below.

Enjoy

'Alice'

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Occasionally, the workshop RCD used to trip and I could never find out what was causing it.

In my defence, I did look over the whole lot and made sure there was no water in anything, and everything looked sensible.

It only ever happened after a couple of hours of use, and when workshop heater was set to 2kW.

So for want of something more intelligent to do, I blamed the RCD which is of the plug-in type and which naturally runs fairly warm.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

But when evidence for it was first claimed, no one could repeat the results and the overall effect was worse that a damp squib.
It made scientists look a bit mad.

PICTURE - The US Navy says these three tracks are evidence of cold fusion

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

 I came across the LTM8020 dc-dc buck converter and thought it would be ideal for charging the Mark V bike light Li-ion battery.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

GOCE is an unusual satellite - the one that was launched recently to measure gravity accurately.

Most unusually, it is an aerodynamic satellite because it flies low at 250km altitude where there are still a few air molecules.

 PICTURE - GOCE is 5m long, weighs 1,100kg, and its chassis is carbon fibre

Its solar cells are stuck on the outside like old-style satellites rather that being on steerable wings, both because drag is less this way, and it can't afford to be vibrated by steering motors.

In fact, it can't afford to be vibrated by anything.