Losing The War, Day By Day
I have to wonder what it was like for the Luftwaffe, day after day, facing the coming storm.
Electronics
Project Tinkertoy
In looking at technology, you frequently find roads not taken, technologies that for many reason, just never happened. On of those dead ends was the US Navy’s Project Tinkertoy in the early 1950’s. Project Tinkertoy was initiated because the navy was concerned that electronics could not be manufactured fast enough if a major war were to occur. This was a matter of concern because as WW2 went on, and electronics became heavily used in more and more weapons and communications shortages developed. The navy wanted to avoid future bottlenecks by developing automated assembly techniques and new ways of manufacturing components in a more modular fashion as shown on the video below.
How Much Energy Is In A Battery?
Recently I posted about Samsung’s engineering errors concerning the Note Seven. Well somebody has taken one apart and it’s worse than I thought.
The Biggest Engineering Failure Of The Year
The Samsung phone debacle. From corporate level, this has been a disaster. Samsung has lost significant portions of it’s market value and smart phone market share. Yet no one would normally assume that a battery would be the issue.
More Moore’s
Humans tend to believe that the same trends will continue in the same way regardless of circumstances. A trend will get everlastingly worse or better with nothing changing. The fact is that every trend is susceptible to outside factors. Here’s a case in point.
Little Robot And Some Comments, Let’s Build
This cute little robot project showed up on my twitter feed.
https://github.com/mnemote/ciril/
One thing that’s fairly obvious is that the creator is a software type. I’m going to guess that he’s(or she’s) hacked some apps together and wrote up some software. But as they say, hardware is hard. I can help.
If You Are Any Kind Of Maker, You will Want This
The complete Amateur Scientist on CD-Rom
http://www.surplusshed.com/pages/item/m2071.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0970347626/sciencehobbyist/
When I was a kid, Scientific American always had a science project that people could do in their home shops, usually with normal tools and some scrounging. The quality of these projects was always extremely high. Scientific American stopped putting those articles out sometime in the 1990’s, here they all are. There are thousands of pages of useful stuff and projects to fabricate. This is especially useful for getting info on obsolete projects and dangerous stuff.
