PSP Innovations Sony practically invented the world of portable electronics when it released the Sony Walkman audio cassette player in 1979. When it came time to design a portable gaming system, Sony wasn’t content to replicate what had come before: Typical handheld game systems are a few generations behind the cutting edge of home console […]
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What is Surround Sound? There are many ways to make and present a sound recording. The simplest method, and the one used in the earliest sound movies, is called monaural or simply mono. Mono means that all the sound is recorded onto one audio track or channel (a single spiraled groove in a record, for
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What is a Diode? A diode is the simplest sort of semiconductor device. Broadly speaking, a semiconductor is a material with a varying ability to conduct electrical current. Most semiconductors are made of a poor conductor that has had impurities (atoms of another material) added to it. The process of adding impurities is called doping.
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Making a Flash A basic camera flash system, like you would find in a point-and-shoot camera, has three major parts. A small battery, which serves as the power supply A gas discharge tube, which actually produces the flash A circuit (made up of a number of electrical components), which connects the power supply to the
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Types of PDAs Traditional PDAs Today’s traditional PDAs are descendents of the original PalmPilot and Microsoft Handheld PC devices. Palm devices run the Palm OS (operating system), and Microsoft Pocket PCs run Windows Mobile. The differences between the two systems are fewer than in the past. Palm PDAs Most Palm devices are made by palmOne,
Inductor Basics In a circuit diagram, an inductor is shown like this: To understand how an inductor can work in a circuit, this figure is helpful: What you see here is a battery, a light bulb, a coil of wire around a piece of iron (yellow) and a switch. The coil of wire is an
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Pendulum Parts Pendulum clocks have been used to keep time since 1656, and they have not changed dramatically since then. Pendulum clocks were the first clocks made to have any sort of accuracy. When you look at a pendulum clock from the outside, you notice several different parts that are important to the mechanism of
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From How CDs Work, you learn that a normal CD uses microscopic bumps to store data. The surface of the CD is a mirror, and the bumps disrupt the mirror’s perfect surface. The laser that reads the CD can detect the difference between a perfect mirror and an imperfection caused by a bump because of
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Focusing on the Problem At the most basic level, a camera makes a record of light. When you photograph a scene, light reflected by the scene hits your camera’s lens. The lens bends the light and redirects it to the recording medium. In a film camera, that medium is a strip of chemically treated plastic.
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In the Beginning: Etching Tin Thomas Edison is credited with creating the first device for recording and playing back sounds in 1877. His approach used a very simple mechanism to store an analog wave mechanically. In Edison’s original phonograph, a diaphragm directly controlled a needle, and the needle scratched an analog signal onto a tinfoil
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