I was surprised to hear that Apple’s Lightning connector has a chip inside.
It is a nice neat small connector that handles power and wired data to iPhone 5s.
Although why the micro-USB connector, that is good enough for the rest of industry, did not suit Apple is…
I had to repair the loo this weekend, as the cistern was taking ages to re-fill.
So apart it came…
… and it was much cleverer than the old ball-cock type where a floating lever operates a valve through solid connections.
Instead, there is a diaphragm in a sealed…
The Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube is an old invention that contains no moving parts and only needs compressed air to produce cold air. It is a bit like the steam-powered water injector and the pop-pop boat in that it is very simple mechanically, complex dynamically, and appears to be a bit impossible.
Subtitled ‘Immersion in the black art of analog design’, this huge book has over 1,200 A4 pages of joy. Bob Dodkin and Jim Williams of Linear Technology have pulled together huge amounts of information from Linear’s application labs on the stuff that is not going to get replaced by digital circuits.
Linear Tech has developed a fairly complicated bridge-type dc-dc converter with zero-voltage switching
Dr Viquar Qurashi is a British Pakistani working in the West Midlands. He is a pretty amazing bloke – spurred on by a natural disaster in Pakistan, he adapted an already clever low-cost artificial leg design to make it applicable to even poorer people. The brilliant bit is that his leg design…
ARM’s processors are in every phone. It is not a super-big company, so why doesn’t anyone buy it and make loads of money? The answer is, and bear in mind this is just Alice pondering, that the popularity of ARM’s products rely on ARM’s independence – it doesn’t make any chips itself – and it isn’t greedy.
Primary-side controllers for phone chargers are getting pretty common, and it is not often you see an innovation. Don’t get me wrong here, the various primary-side sensing techniques are extraordinarily clever, some of these chips can achieve 5% secondary regulation, and correct for cable losses on he secondary. It is just that NXP has come up with an interesting little twist that allows smaller output capacitors to be used.