Bench Talk

Back to Hubble (the space telescope). Twenty-five years later, we celebrate its birthday. The Hubble has been in operation so long it was serviced by space shuttles, a bunch of quaint space hardware that no longer flies and is parked rusting in museums these days.

Bounce radio signals off the moon? Unthinkable! Well it certainly was in 1945, when scientists at the U. S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth (Wall Twp., NJ) resuming trying (after World War II ended) to pierce the Earth's ionosphere with electromagnetic energy. Hardly anyone knew much about this program called “Project Diana” (named for the Greek goddess of the moon), and many still don’t today. This is a shame, as the project and its key participant removed one of the greatest obstacles to space travel.

Like many kids in my generation, I grew up with Star Trek. I’d watch the Original Series in re-runs and later followed the Next Generation in college. I found their take on space exploration fascinating and wondered if we would ever be able to explore the galaxy like Captain Kirk. In reality, space is one of the harshest environments that we as humans can face. Since we’re used to our oxygen-rich, solar-powered, radiation-shielded, one-g Earth, in order to explore the cold vacuum of outer space, we need a tremendous amount of ingenuity and determination.

The registered connector, better known as the RJ connector and commonly known as a modular connector, is one of the most frequently used connectors, present in almost every business and household in America. Yet, it is also one of the most misunderstood, and frequently plagues its users with doubts as to whether they are using the correct connector for their application.

With the decrease in cost of microprocessors and ARM cores, embedded Linux systems have become more accessible to the general public. Sure, it’s easy to just slap an Arduino on your project and call it done, but what if you want to go one step further and actually make your own Linux solution? The development team behind the open source Yocto Project have made compiling a custom Linux image simpler than ever.

Oh my goodness, did you see the Robot on Mouser robotics challenge? I have to be honest, I have done many things in software but almost nothing in hardware. I have coded robot brains to do things like clustered object avoidance, but never put it in actual hardware. I have wanted to since my second semester, I just never managed to find the time. Seeing all these robot gets me excited again.

Sometimes I feel the need to disappear, to suddenly pick up and leave – especially at those times when I feel the world is spinning just a little too fast. To slow it down, I find the perfect getaway vehicle is a car and an open road. It’s just the thing to clear my head and open myself up to new ways of thinking.

Many integrated circuit-based sensors and output devices offer an interface protocol called Inter-integrated Circuit, commonly abbreviated as I2C. There is tremendous value in using I2C-based components in a microcontroller-based solution that can result in a much more streamlined and robust product, especially if you need to interface with multiple external I/O devices. I2C allows you to share a common data and clock bus amongst multiple devices, thus reducing the I/O pin count and the number of interconnecting wires required to get everything communicating. This blog is an attempt to provide some practical tips on integrating I2C into your next application.

Robots are nothing new to the sci-fi genre. From servants like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet and The Jetson’s sassy maid Rosie, to noble, innocent machines like Johnny 5 and Data, robots seem to be everywhere in entertainment. But back in the day, actually interacting with one of these creations in real life seemed like, well, science fiction. But today, many of us interact with robots on a daily basis without giving it a second thought.

You’ve heard of the Love Boat, but have you heard of the Love Bot? Many romance seekers at the recent SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, were tricked into opening their hearts and pouring out their feelings to what turned out to be nothing more than Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) on the popular dating app Tinder.