News
Subscribe to the free Elektor E-weekly Newsletter,
and receive all the latest on electronics by e-mail every Friday !
The driving bass rhythm of rap music can be harnessed to power a new type of miniature medical sensor designed to be implanted in the body. Such a device might ultimately help to treat people stricken with aneurisms or incontinence due to paralysis.
The heart of the new sensor, developed...
Publication date: 3 February 2012 - Education & Information
A new sensor prototyping kit designed as a plug-and-play tool to accelerate prototyping, validation and product development for new gas measurement instruments has been launched by Cal Sensors. Supporting both PbS and PbSe detector technologies, the prototyping kit allows engineers to focus on...
Publication date: 2 February 2012 - Test & Measurement
Many people still consider RF design a black art but with the right tools part of the magic quickly disappears. That is why Elektor created the RF & Microwave Toolbox app for Android. Whether you are an RF professional, radio-amateur, astronomer or hobbyist, this app puts some of the...
Publication date: 2 February 2012 - Elektor
Hyperspectral cameras can discriminate between different objects that cannot be accurately distinguished using traditional RGB (red-green-blue) imaging methods. They can be very useful in a variety of applications such as crop screening, food selection, skin cancer detection, target detection,...
Publication date: 1 February 2012 - Audio/Video/Photography
In the last few years the world has witnessed an impressive evolution of electric propelled vehicles, from self-balancing ElektorWheelies to electric bicycles. The latest addition to this growing family of high-tech electric transportation means are the motorized shoes developed by Acton...
Publication date: 31 January 2012 - Automotive
MikroElektronika has announced its brand new tool chains for ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers: mikroC, -Pascal & -Basic Pro for ARM . This first release handles up to 171 Stellaris microcontrollers from Texas Instruments. Support for the Stellaris Cortex-M4 processors is scheduled for the next...
Publication date: 30 January 2012 - Microcontrollers
The financial crisis that currently reigns is indeed like rain, it affects all of us, but there is not a whole lot you can do about it. Sit through it and try not to get frustrated. What, too late? Frustrated already by those few bankers that managed to make a profit out of your loss of...
Publication date: 27 January 2012 - Education & Information
Remember the fax machine? The first patent for a fax machine was attributed to Alexander Bain in 1843 but it took another 150 years before it became a common means of communication. And now they have almost disappeared.
Some people however believe in a comeback, not in 2D, but as a...
Publication date: 26 January 2012 - Education & Information
The recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan has revived interest in radiation meters. Elektor has published several circuits for such devices based on Geiger counter tubes in the past. Unfortunately, these tubes are expensive and have become difficult to find since Fukushima.
A...
Publication date: 25 January 2012 - Elektor
Launched at the end of 2011 the DesignSpark chipKIT Challenge invites participants to submit a low-energy design using the chipKIT MAX32 board. Besides winning a share of $10,000 cash for the best design, contestants can also compete for the community award. To make a chance on winning this award...
Publication date: 25 January 2012 - Elektor
Strategic Test has announced a new low-cost addition to its line of Freescale-based i.MX multimedia processor modules. The TX-28S has a 200-pin SODIMM form factor measuring just 68 x 25 mm and contains a 454 MHz i.MX283 processor (based on the ARM926EJ-S core) along with...
Publication date: 24 January 2012 - Microcontrollers
High brightness LEDs and special optics allow street lamps to be spaced up to 50 meters apart -- much wider than is possible with other solutions. By charging these street lamps efficiently during daylight hours using solar energy, the capacity of the conventional electricity grid can be...
Publication date: 23 January 2012 - Education & Information
The Fourier transform is a method for representing an irregular signal as a combination of weighted sine waves or ‘frequencies’. To calculate it quickly the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was devised some 50 years ago and ever since people have been searching for methods to make it even faster. At...
Publication date: 20 January 2012 - Education & Information
Researchers from Imperial College London have demonstrated that they can build logic gates out of harmless gut bacteria and DNA. These are the most advanced biological logic gates ever created by scientists. Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks in silicon circuitry on which the digital...
Publication date: 19 January 2012 - Education & Information
Electronics enthusiasts spend a lot of time tinkering. When this tinkering results in a new working circuit a prototype is born. Prototyping, as this process is called when you tinker at work, is an important aspect of electronics development and many tools are available to make it easier and...
Publication date: 18 January 2012 - Elektor
Biotech specialist Neurotechnology has launched embedded versions of their products for use in fingerprint and face biometric systems, including multi-biometric systems using face and fingerprints in combination. The embedded versions are designed for use in low-power, compact and/or mobile...
Publication date: 17 January 2012 - Computer/Software/Internet
Ground loops are one of the common causes of inaccurate measurements and interference problems. They often occur when measurements are made using USB instruments connected to a PC. The USB Isolator from Cesys prevents undesirable ground-loop currents in the USB cable, thereby eliminating the...
Publication date: 16 January 2012 - Test & Measurement
India has a thing with hot. It was hot in the sixties & seventies, Indian food has been hot as long as mankind can remember and now technology in India is hotter than ever. An excellent example of this was the fifteenth edition of Techfest , the International Science and Technology Festival...
Publication date: 13 January 2012 - Education & Information
Did you know that China produces 44% of the world's apples? Probably not. Yet if someone would ask you where the world's Apples are being made, wouldn't you answer China? You probably would and you would be right too as all of Apple's products are made in China....
Publication date: 12 January 2012 - Education & Information
With thousands of different microprocessors available why would you want to roll your own? Well, maybe because you have to be compatible with one that is no longer being made or maybe because you have plenty of gates left in your FPGA and you don’t want to put an extra chip on your board? Maybe...
Publication date: 11 January 2012 - Elektor
Informative articles
Password forgotten?
