Technology

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding the correct combination of resistors to achieve the elusive 440Hz. I had to come up with a kludge. I inserted an adjustable resistor (potentiometer) and was able to turn the knob on the potentiometer to tune the circuit to 440Hz to my electronic keyboard. The problem is mostly likely to do with the tolerance of the resistor. The resistors I used had gold bands and that means they have a tolerance…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding the correct combination of resistors to achieve the elusive 440Hz. I had to come up with a kludge. I inserted an adjustable resistor (potentiometer) and was able to turn the knob on the potentiometer to tune the circuit to 440Hz to my electronic keyboard. The problem is mostly likely to do with the tolerance of the resistor. The resistors I used had gold bands and that means they have a tolerance…

In honor of National Robotics Week 2013 (April 6-14) I am adding this article that I originally posted on my Society of Robots blog page. In this article you will learn how to build a programmable Snap Circuits Rover by adding a PICAXE micro controller. First, you will learn how to install the PICAXE Programming Editor (the PICAXE is the microcontroller or computer brain for your programmable Snap Circuits robot). Next, you will learn what a simple PICAXE program looks like and what it does. Then you will learn about the various parts and electronic components used to build robot. You…

In honor of National Robotics Week 2013 (April 6-14) I am adding this article that I originally posted on my Society of Robots blog page. In this article you will learn how to build a programmable Snap Circuits Rover by adding a PICAXE micro controller. First, you will learn how to install the PICAXE Programming Editor (the PICAXE is the microcontroller or computer brain for your programmable Snap Circuits robot). Next, you will learn what a simple PICAXE program looks like and what it does. Then you will learn about the various parts and electronic components used to build robot. You…

In my previous blog post, Build a Simple Tone Generator with the 555 Timer IC, I successfully demonstrated how to build a simple tone generator, but when I tried to demonstrate how to build a guitar tuner, instead of generating a 440Hz tone--a standard tuning frequency for musical pitch, or A4 on your piano--my circuit generated a 369.994Hz tone, or F#4/Gb4. In building a simple guitar tuner I had hoped to demonstrate that one could interchange the positive time interval resistor R1, and the negative time interval resistor R2 to control the charging and discharging of the .01uf capacitor…

PubMed Central is costing biomedical journal sites readership and that effect is increasing over time. The bulk of modern biomedical studies are controlled by the government, which means taxpayer-funding, so it makes sense that the results would be available to the public, but Phillip M. Davis writing in The FASEB Journal says that PubMed draws readership away from the scientific journal even when journals themselves are providing free access to the articles. Over time, the paper says this may weaken the ability of journals to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the…

The current situation and future prospects for biosimilars is similar to that of small molecule drugs, according to an analysis by Research and Markets: they get to benefit from patent expiry. On this basis, prospects for biosimilars might look good, with the vast majority of leading originator brands in the global biologics market expected to lose some degree of protection by 2019.  But even though that is on the horizon and all major countries also now make provision for what they consider an abbreviated biosimilar development and regulatory pathway, the reality has been different. The…

Maintaining a Curriculum Vitae (CV) regularly is an important activity for researchers mainly driven by the need to show the impact of his/her research during hiring, promotion, grant application etc. and of course it's a matter of reputation.Digital technologies offer nice tools/services to compose our CV online, but none of them offer a way to display a comprehensive set of impact metrics, visualizations and rich content in a digital CV, real time. This CV may reside on a researcher's webpage as a living document continuously getting updated.Key features of this CV could…

An international team of physicists has proposed a revolutionary laser system inspired by telecommunications technology that could be used in both fundamental research at laboratories such as CERN and more applied tasks such as proton therapy and nuclear transmutation.  The International Coherent Amplification Network (ICAN) system would be composed of massive arrays of thousands of fiber lasers.  In femtoseconds, lasers can provide bursts of energy with a thousand times the power of all the power plants in the world. Compact accelerators are also of great societal importance for…

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics have been working to program a group of 40 robots that 'swarm' together to carry out jobs. So far, they have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.   The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority.  The programming for that part is simple. If the robots are being asked to group together, each robot only needs to be…