Collaborate Disseminate
Effects pedals for musical instruments like electric guitars can really expand a musician’s range with the instrument. Adding things like distortion, echo, and reverb at the push of a button …read more Continue reading An Effects Pedal for Keyboards (and Mice)
While the Fourier transform gets all the attention, there are other transforms that engineers and mathematicians use to transform signals from one form to another. Sometimes you use a transform …read more Continue reading A Quick Look at the Hilbert Transform
If many millions of years of evolution is good for anything, it is to develop microscopic structures that perform astounding tasks, such as the marvelous biology of insects. One of …read more Continue reading 3D Printing Bio-Inspired Microphone Designs Based On Moth Ears
An interesting aspect of time-varying waveforms is that by using a trick called a Fourier Transform (FT), they can be represented as the sum of their underlying frequencies. This mathematical …read more Continue reading The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West
Moore’s law might not be as immutable as we once though thought it was, as chip makers struggle to fit more and more transistors on a given area of silicon. …read more Continue reading ADSL Router As Effects Pedal
Hang up your car phone and toss that fax machine in the garbage. Even back in the late 80s it was possible to do away with these primitive technologies in favor of video conferencing, even though this technology didn’t catch on en masse until recently. In fact, Mitsubishi released a …read more
Continue reading Teleconferencing Like It’s 1988: Connecting Vintage Hardware to Zoom
Researchers reveal technology called SpiKey that can ‘listen’ to the clicks a key makes in a lock and create a duplicate from the sounds. Continue reading The Sounds a Key Make Can Produce 3D-Printed Replica
Circuit simulation and software workbooks like Matlab and Jupyter are great for being able to build things without a lot of overhead. But these all have some learning curve and often use clever tricks, abstractions, or library calls to obscure what’s really happening. Sometimes it is clearer to build math …read more
[Blaine Murphy] has set out to store an archive of visual art on cassette tape. To do so he encodes images via Slow-Scan Television (SSTV), an analogue technology from the late 50s which encodes images in for radio transmission. If you are thinking ‘space race’ you are spot on, the first images of the far side of the moon reached us via SSTV and were transmitted by the soviet Luna 3 spacecraft.
Encoding images with 5os technology is only one part of this ongoing project. Storage and playback are handled by a 90s tape deck and the display unit is …read more
Continue reading Space Technology and Audio Tape to Store Art
Hearing impairment, either partial or total, is a serious problem afflicting a large number of people. Almost 5% of the global population has some form of hearing disorder. For those affected by this disability from birth, it further impacts the development of language and speech abilities. In recent years, cochlear implants are increasingly being used to address this problem. These implants consist of two parts – the receiver and electrode array are implanted under the skin near the ear (with the electrode array terminating inside the Cochlea), while the microphone, electronics, transmitter and power source are attached on the outside. …read more
