If you have ever played one of those coin-operated pool tables in a place like a restaurant or an arcade, then you know that the obvious question is, “how the heck does this thing return the cue ball to me???” If you look inside the table, there is a system of chutes that connect to […]
How does the ball return work on a coin-operated pool table? Read More »
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering has developed a robot fish that mimics the movements of a carp. This robot which is essentially an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is ready for applications, as it can be programmed to perform specific functions, for example, for underwater archaeology such as exploring nooks and corners of wreckage—or sunken city which are difficult for divers or traditional AUVs to access.
Team creates realistic Robot Carp, first robot fish with autonomous 3-D movement in Asia Read More »
The technology behind the LCD projector is nearly three decades old in 2012, but it remains one of the top digital projection technologies, alongside Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors. Inventor Gene Dolgoff developed the first LCD projector in 1984, and both Epson and Sony continue to employ the technology in 21st century projectors. The old
How LCD Projectors Work Read More »
(Phys.org) —The Raspberry Pi is a computing milestone as a very low-priced computing device running Linux; now a Japanese inventor wants to rev up another kind of breakthrough, with an affordable robot kit that can work with the Raspberry Pi and its camera module. Say hello to RAPIRO, as its makers say, “the robot you always wanted as a kid,” and, as its makers ask, pledge some money for it too, because it is a Kickstarter campaign.
RAPIRO wants to spread joy of robots with Raspberry Pi Read More »
The red color comes from light that reflects off of the retinas in our eyes. In many animals, including dogs, cats and deer, the retina has a special reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum that acts almost like a mirror at the backs of their eyes. If you shine a flashlight or headlights into their
Why do people have red eyes in flash photographs? Read More »
Once you dial the number, the Service Switch Point (SSP) in the telephone network recognizes it as toll-free by its 800 prefix, prompting it to query the Service Control Point (SCP) that has the routing instructions the weight-loss center (the toll-free subscriber) requested. In the example above, the instructions were to route all calls to
How Toll-free Numbers Work Read More »
As games evolved, so did controllers. They added extra buttons for more actions, triggers for our index fingers to rest on and finally joysticks to better control 3-D movement. Ergonomically, controllers have differed quite a bit — but when it came to functionality, they were about the same. That is, until the Nintendo Wii came
How PlayStation Move Works Read More »
Taking the two basic concepts of blocks and tables, four graduate students from the Univesitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, added music to the mix and designed something called the reactable. The reactableis essentially a music synthesizer, and if you hear it played, it sounds similar to a lot of modern electronic dance music. The
How the reactable Works Read More »
(Phys.org) —A team of robotics engineers working in the Personal Robotics Lab at Cornell University (led by Ashutosh Saxena) has developed a new way to give robots a context-sensitive way to organize a room. Instead of providing the robots with a map, the researchers instead cause the robot to “imagine” how a human being would use objects in a room and then to place them accordingly.
Almost since the birth of amplified guitars in the early 1930s, players looked for ways to enhance the sound of their electric guitars. A huge variety of guitar effects have emerged from their experiments. These include rack-mounted effects, effects built into amplifiers, and pedal effects. While rack-mounted and built-in effects are separate topics, this article
How Guitar Pedals Work Read More »
