Nuts and Volts - April 2010

CLASSIFIEDS

COMPONENTS

www.micromegacorp.com Extensive floating point support, GPS input, FFT, 12-bit A/D, matrix operations, user-defined functions. uM-FPU V3.1

Floating Point Coprocessor

32-bit IEEE 754 SPI or I2C DIP- 18, SOIC- 18

Fast – Easy to Use

Nixie Power

www.tayloredge.com/nixie 2-16V In, 4-8W / 150-200VDC Out 0.95" x 0.95" x 0.35" $9.95 (Shipping included)

Unicorn Electronics, Inc. For all your components needs I.C.’s, Transistors, LEDs, Capacitors Obsolete & hard to find 800-824-3432 Fax 724-495-7882 www.unicornelectronics.com

www.nutsvolts.com

FEEDBACK continued from page 11

Very sorry to hear about your Mother. Having to deal with sick family members is no picnic.

This also sounds like an interesting and challenging experimental project! Discriminating between sound that indicates a problem and sounds that are environmental, deriving the problem sound's point of origin, moving from the current location to target location, navigating around obstacles between current location and target location — that's a lot of puzzles for an experimental project!

HOWEVER, the key word here is *experimental.* This is just my opinion, but I don't know that I would want to bet someone’s life on my ability to program!

If I were going to do a project such as you suggest above, I would do it as a supplement to an existing monitoring solution. I can't imagine how I would feel if some harm came to someone because there was a syntax error in my code that prevented my bot from performing a life saving action!

Some ideas to consider: Firefighters use a motion sensor on the body of the firefighter. If they fail to move (become motionless) for more than a set length of time, an alarm goes off. Details can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/PASS_device.

You might be able to make something similar with an accelerometer and a wireless system like a ZigBee unit. The idea would be to make a pendant, belt buckle, or other "wearable" device that is "reset" every time motion is sensed. If no motion is sensed after a preset period of time, an alert could be sent to you to go check to make sure your Mother is okay. The alert could be SMS to your phone for example.

I'm happy to hear the HVAC idea was interesting and I would be very interested to know what you think of the book.

Vern Graner

high-end audio magazines can be a scream. Wonder if the pre-broken-in cables are "oxygen free" or is that last year's scam? My personal favorite is still the $300 CD demagnetizer that restores the high notes you've been missing from your CDs. CDs, of course, are made of plastic and aluminum — neither of which can be magnetized (as if that made any difference to a digital data file anyway.

Tom Wyckoff

You're right on. I wanted to be much more aggressive in the editorial, but didn't want manufacturers taking out contracts on me. Yes, they're a scream. I'm almost embarrassed to buy a Monster cable of any sort — when I do, it's because of the overall quality, not the vacuum sealed copper conductor or whatever.

I just finished a book with McGraw-Hill on teardowns. You wouldn't believe what's inside of those $200 power conditioners. Anyway, thanks for the note.