EEHP Cover Photos
As the whim hits us, we periodically swap out the EE HomePage.com cover photos. Despite what you may have thought, these are NOT paid advertisements. They just represent whatever topic we thought was interesting at the time. Sometimes we look for topical subjects (like CES2007 or our interview of John Meredith), but most of the time, we are just looking for the newest whiz bang gadget or technology.
In that spirit, we've gathered together some of our past cover photos for your enjoyment. We should note, you will need to obtain permission from the authoring organization to reuse any of these photos. Many are not in the public domain.
Finally, if you have a really neat, really photogenic new product or technology you would like to share, please drop us a line at admin @ eehomepage.com. You just may see your product on our pages!
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Posted May 2009, the figure to the left was derived from a "3D Point Cloud" laser scan taken in Merv, Turkmenistan by the Ancient Merg Project at University College London in conjunction with CyArg.org. The technology used to generate 3D images of important histrorical and heritage sites is discussed in the cover article of the May/June 2009 issue of Archaeology magazine. |
| Posted October 2008: The "Lighthouse" shown here is an LED elevated above the base PC board for a home phone answering machine. |
Posted June 2008: When we examined the electronic Sudoku game pictured here, we found a simple, elegant design. It does exactly what is needed, and nothing else. Every cent of cost that can be squeezed from the design, has been squeezed out of the design. See our teardown report for the details.
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Posted March 2008: Your average mouse is a mechatronic wonder. We followed up on our tutorial on quadrature encoding with a detailed teardown of a BTC M850 optical mouse. We're particularly proud of this report, which includes numerous figures, theory and implementation details.
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 Posted February 2008: One of the most popular schemes for encoding direction and speed data is "quadrature encoding". You will find quadrature encoded signals inside your computer mouse, your desktop scanner, and motion control applications of all kinds. The types of sensors used to generate quadrature encoded signals vary greatly, but the interface itself is extremely simple and easy to understand. Read the full tutorial, available exclusively here at EE HomePage.com, to learn more.
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Free Tool for ElectroMagnetic SimulationsPosted: January 2008 - The free version of Infolytica's MagNet ElectroMagnetic simulation software will be useful to anyone studying electromagnetic theory. The company also has several excellent, original, texts located on their Trial Documentation site. The illustration shown here is a screen dump of the output from one of MagNet's simulations. Oh! Lest we forget, the company also offers an electric field simulation product called ElecNet. Again, a free version is available. | |
Best Christmas Gift?Posted December 2007: This Mexican Red Knee Tarantula is great for menacing sisters, mom's and spouses. But instead of crickets, this one is powered by two AAA batteries and was sold this season under the National Geographic label. The remote control allows for forward and turn operations, and the legs move in a lifelike fashion. Our editor had so much fun buying these for two young nephews that his wife later went back and bought one for him! If you have Windows Media Player, you can click on the photo to view a video of this beast in action. | |
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If you need, but can't afford, the Matlab numerical analysis tool, then this cover illustration from Nov/Dec 2007 will be of interest to you. These charts were generated using the open-source Scilab program, available at http://www.scilab.org. Scilab can be freely downloaded and installed in just a few minutes. It includes the Scicos block diagram editor, a Matlab script converter, and enough sample code and demos to get you started. EE HomePage.com tracks a wide variety of free and low cost engineering tools. You can always access the current list via the Tools link in our table of contents, on the left side of each page. |
This photo (posted October 2007) is a bit closer to home than usual. Even while undergoing a minor, but still rather unpleasant, surgical procedure, I couldn't help but be impressed by some of the technology being brought to bear. Specifically, X-ray film was nowhere to be found. My physician utilized a system from Dexis (http://www.dexis-intl.com/ and http://www.dexray.com/) to take digital X-rays of my jaw. A custom sensor, which utilizes a special CCD from Fairchild Imaging was inserted in my mouth and exposed using the usual X-ray source. But instead of waiting for films to develop, we were able to view the images instantly on a computer in the corner of the room. Way cool! You can find out more about Fairchild Imaging's Intra-oral dental sensor at Fairchild Imaging's Product Site. Oh! In case you're wondering... you are looking at the aftermath of installing two dental implants in my jaw to replace a couple of molars lost over the years. A few more months down the road, and these will be topped by two new teeth.
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| Posted 19 September, 2007: Our first reaction on seeing videos for the new Surface Computer? Harry Potter has nothing on Micrsoft! This stuff is magic! The YouTube video to the right was produced by Popular Mechanics. It provides a basic introduction to Microsoft's innovative new Surface computing platform, which will debut in November of this year. To find out more about this new technology, including Microsoft video's on the subject, visit http://www.microsoft.com/surface. | |
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Posted 29 July, 2007, This photo was provided courtesy of Daryl Larsen at Tessera, Inc. This ultra-small camera, generated using Tessera's wafer-level camera technology, can be mounted directly to your PC board using the same reflow process used to assemble other electronics. Tessera has an excellent video tutorial on the technology available (click the "Web Cast" link under "Additional Resources" on the right side of the linked page). We've also included a couple of other photos from Tessera in the next couple rows. |
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Posted here on 29 July 2007: This photo helps to put the size of Tessera's wafer level camera in perspective. This photo didn't make our front page, but we thought it was worth sharing here. |
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Posted here on 29 July 2007: This is a side view of the same camera featured in the previous two illustrations. |
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Posted 30 June, 2007, this photo was provided via a press release by Horizon Fuel Technologies, and shows the "Hyfish" - the world's first zero emission fuel cell powered jet aircraft. Visit the EE HomePage.com Fuel Cells Page to see a video of this amazing plane in action and to learn more about the technology behind it. |
| Posted in May 2007, this cover photo is courtesy of New Scale Technologies, which markets tiny ceramic motors. New Scale Technologies claims this is the world's smallest linear motor. These motors utilize piezoelectric ceramic actuators and generate no magnetic fields. See the New Scale Technologies website for further photos, a movie of the motor in action, and collection of whitepapers explaining the technology. |
| Posted in April 2007, this photo is courtesy of the Flomerics, which markets thermal and EMC design tools. The photo illustrates a PCB airflow and temperature simulation. Flomerics offers a free trial offer of their FLOPCB tool at their website. We also recently posted directions to online tools by Fairchild and Vishay that you might want to experiment with. |
| The photo to the left (posted March/April 2007) is courtesy of the Infrared Training Center, a premier educational and training resource for infrared camera application professionals. The photo illustrates the industrial use of infrared photography in the quality control of a plastic extrusion process. You can see the non-uniformity in the extruded product easily. Infrared allows the operator to make adjustments to the process to improve quality. |
| Posted in February/March 2007, we took this photo ourselves. We like to destroy things - usually to the greater goal of learning something new. This time around, we disassemble an AM/FM radio designed to run off of a couple of coin batteries - and fit inside a ball point pen. Read the full report on the next page for a closeup view of technology on a small scale. |
| This cover photo (February 2007) is courtesy of Micron Electronics and illustrates an electronic assembly pick and place machine in action. You can click on the photo to bring up a higher resolution version. |
| This is another photo we took ourselves (posted January 2007). We've all gotten them. You open up that greeting card from friends or family, and are bombarded with a tinny sounding version of happy birthday or "Old Lang Syne". In my case, the battered card was from my sister, and the song was an amazingly good sounding version of "Jingle Bell Rock". Like any good engineer, I set it aside to be dissected later. [continued on next page] |
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Each January, the Consumer Electronics Show (shown in an EEHP exclusive photo trip report) takes over Las Vegas for a week.
Lines get long, traffic slows to a stop, and the media descends in hordes.
You can read the full report here |
| We borrowed this photo of our friend John Meredith from his page on the IEEE web site. In January, we ran this interview of John, 2007 President of IEEE-USA. We asked him to give us his thoughts on a number of topics impacting practicing EEs today. John graciously agreed to our interview, which can be read onthe next page |
here in the future! | |