Articles: Transportation
(Winner of an HP Workstation)
Regenerative Braking Bike Front Wheel
David Swain, Frank Maurer, Jason Moore, and Albert Shih
Ann Arbor, MI
With the push of a button and without...
Articles: Manufacturing & Prototyping
COMSOL, PTC, and Tech Briefs Media Group thank the following judges for their participation.
Articles: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Articles: Electronics & Computers
Many scientific, technical and engineering applications in finance, medical imaging, modeling, simulation, and...
Articles: Electronics & Computers
Automated industrial control systems are an integral part of today’s manufacturing facilities. As these systems’ capabilities advance, the engineer shifts from someone who oversees...
Articles: Electronics & Computers
In the design process, after the first prototype returns from fabrication, engineers often use traditional test equipment to make low-level measurements such as digital rise times, voltage thresholds,...
Application Briefs: Electronics & Computers
The desire to consolidate datacenter I/O has existed for several decades. It has been driven by I/O hardware providers who didn’t want to develop multiple versions of the same I/O card for different...
News: Energy
University of Michigan scientists have created pixels that will enable LED-projected and -wearable displays to be more energy efficient with more light manipulation possible -...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
The Portable Handheld Optical Window Inspection Device (PHOWID) is a measurement system for imaging small defects (scratches, pits, micrometeor impacts, and the like) in the field. Designed primarily for window inspection, PHOWID attaches to a smooth surface with suction cups, and raster scans a...
Briefs: Information Technology
Based only on its appearance in imagery, this program uses close-range 3D terrain analysis to produce training data sufficient to estimate the traversability of terrain beyond 3D sensing range. This approach is called learning from stereo (LFS). In effect, the software...
Briefs: Information Technology
An algorithm was developed to generate crop yield predictions from orbital remote sensing observations, by analyzing thousands of pixels per county and the associated historical crop yield data for those counties. The algorithm determines which pixels...
Briefs: Information Technology
AEGSE Virtuoso Charting is an application that enables animated, real-time charting of telemetry streams of data from a rover. These automatically scaled charts are completely interactive, and allow users to choose the variables that they want to monitor. The charts can process...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A voice-command human-machine interface system has been developed for spacesuit extravehicular activity (EVA) missions. A multichannel acoustic signal processing method has been created for distant speech acquisition in noisy and reverberant environments....
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Magnetic field response sensors are a class of sensors that are powered via oscillating magnetic fields, and when electrically active, respond...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Weather forecasting, hurricane tracking, and atmospheric science applications depend on humidity sounding of atmosphere. Current instruments provide these measurements from ground-based, airborne, and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites by measuring radiometric temperature on the flanks of the 183-GHz water...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
A differential SiGe oscillator circuit uses a resonant ring-oscillator topology in order to electronically tune the oscillator over multi-octave bandwidths. The oscillator’s tuning is extremely linear, because the oscillator’s frequency depends on the magnetic tuning of a YIG sphere, whose...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
An equation developed in part by researchers at the University of Michigan could do for organic semiconductors what the Shockley ideal diode equation did for inorganic semiconductors:...
Blog
Yesterday, after unveiling Creo, PTC's soon-to-arrive design application suite, the company arranged for a panel of analysts to address attendee questions about the product. The roundtable included Marc Halpern, Research VP at Gartner, Sanjeev Pal, Research Manager at IDC, and John MacKrell, a senior consultant at...
News: Energy
Purdue researchers will collaborate with Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, Michigan State University, and Orbital Technologies Corp. (Madison, WI) on a four-year project...
Blog: Software
There was a bit of a crowd lining up near Boston's Park Plaza this morning, and if it wasn't for all the business-casual attire, you may have thought another Apple Store was opening up down the street. The event was actually PTC's unveiling of its new product suite: Creo.
Here's the quick rundown:
Creo is a suite...
INSIDER: Medical
A first-of-its-kind clinical trial of robot-assisted brachytherapy for treating prostate cancer will take place at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Prostate brachytherapy, which requires accurate insertion of some 60 to 120 radioactive seeds in very specific places in the prostate, calls for a high...
Products: Transportation
Allegro MicroSystems (Worcester, MA) offers constant current LED drivers to address requirements of internal and external illumination applications within the automotive market. Allegro’s...
Products: Green Design & Manufacturing
The infrared DRAGON SFH 4236 from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors (Sunnyvale, CA) is designed for applications that require narrow radiation characteristics from limited board space, namely automotive applications such as...
Question of the Week
This week's Question of the Week addresses another technical development from Google. In early October, the search giant announced that it has been testing robotic cars on U.S. city streets. The vehicles, equipped with a complex array of sensors and cameras that allowed them to steer around...
Products: Green Design & Manufacturing
Papailias Incorporated (Northvale, NJ) has introduced a high intensity light engine to replace halogen technology. The Series HI-LED lamp is not a standard LED bulb, but a custom-designed lamp that features a...
INSIDER: Medical
Princeton engineers have developed a sensor that may revolutionize how drugs and medical devices are tested for contamination, and in the process also help ensure the survival of two species of threatened animals. In the wild, the African clawed frog produces antibacterial peptides...
INSIDER: Medical
One of the main techniques for measuring and monitoring mental activity, called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), can often be impaired because a person's hair gets in the way. A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington have...