Some animals can jump out of water from a standing start, without anything to push against except the water. A pair of researchers at Cornell University – Sunghwan Jung and Brian Chang – wanted to know how, and could a robot do it. “We collected data about aquatic animals of different sizes – from about 1mm ...
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C&K has launched two series of micro-mini side-actuated detect switches. FDSD switches are 4.20 x 3.60 x 1.20mm, with optional flat or bent terminals for PCB mounting. The SPST-NO beryllium copper contacts have a resistance of less than 1Ω and are rated for 10mA at 5Vdc with a lifetime of 50,000 operations. A maximum force ...
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Topological insulators are key to bending light around tight corners in tiny spaces with low back-scattering loss, according to engineers at Duke University in the US. The rectangular device is 35 x 5.5μm – said to be 100x smaller than previously demonstrated ring-resonators. By carefully controlling the geometry of a crystal lattice the researchers blocked ...
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‘Explore’ is a body scanner that combines positron emission tomography (PET) and x-ray computed tomography (CT). The idea, 13 years ago, of University of California Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, it can produce an image in as little as one second – because, according to the University, the machine captures radiation far more ...
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Power Integrations has introduced a 600V half-bridge motor driver with integrated high-side and low-side drive FredFets (fast recovery diode field effect transistors). Branded BridgeSwitch, the parts can be used in inverters of up to 98.5% conversion efficiency in brushless DC (BLDC) motor drives up to 300W. Home-appliances such as refrigerator compressors and HVAC fans are the ...
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Raspberry Pi has released a cut-down version of its high-end Pi 3 Model B+, and has added a video player to its Raspbian Linux-based operating system. On the processing side, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, as it will be known, shares the same 1.4GHz quad core Arm Cortex-A53 as the top-end 3B+, but looses ...
This story continues at Meet Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, and Raspbian gets a media player
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A UK consortium is to develop quantum-based gravity sensors that will allow underground objects and voids to be detected. The aim is to build a portable technology demonstrator by April 2021, that is twice as sensitive as the industry standard (falling mass) technique and, importantly because the aims is for this to lead to a ...
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Rigol revealed details of its MSO5000 series oscilloscopes at Electronica in Munich. Bandwidth options range across 70 to 350MHz with two or four channels, sampling is at 8Gsample/s, and maximum capture 500,000waveform/s, with up to 200Msample record length. The display is 9in colour and touch-enabled. The instruments use the firm’s UltraVision II, centred on its Phoenix ...
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Recom has added a pair of quarter brick power supplies for railway use with inputs that operate across 14 to 16oVdc, that’s a 12:1 range. “The input voltage range covers all input voltages from nominal 24Vdc up to 110Vdc in a single product, including EN50155 transients making them a universal solution for railway rolling stock ...
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Belgian chip firm Melexis has upgraded its optical time-of-flight sensor – effectively a multi-pixel light-based radar – for in-vehicle use. The new device, the AEC-Q100 qualified MLX75024 has the same 320 x 240 (QVGA) resolution as the firm’s previous offering, but with twice the sensitivity and half the power consumption. The sensitivity increase “allows it ...
This story continues at Electronica: Time-of-flight distance sensor doubles in sensitivity for in-vehicle detection
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