Electronics For You
June 2014 Issue
Vol. 46 No. 6
Technology Focus
3D Printing: The Technology That Changes Everything
Ever since key 3D printing patents expired earlier this year, there has been media frenzy predicting a bigger printing boom about to happen. Let’s take a look at the upcoming technologies for 3D printing, and how these could change our world
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Buyers’ Guide
Desktop Manufacturing Equipment With the market becoming more and more competitive in every segment, time-to-market is emerging as the most important factor defining a product’s success. However, designing and prototyping a product takes a long time as each part has to be produced in small quantities at different manufacturing units. With the advent of desktop manufacturing, most of these parts can now be produced in-house, saving a lot of time
| DIY: Project
Car-Reversing Audio-Visual Alarm Here is a simple car-parking alarm circuit based on an AVR microcontroller and an ultrasonic module
Download source code
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DIY: Project
Power Factor Corrector This project discusses the need for power factor correction and provides a suitable DIY solution that could be used for small-scale industries and establishments
Download source code
| DIY: Circuit
Alcohol Level Tester A lot of accidents happen every day due to drunk driving. This is a very useful circuit for testing whether a driver is drunk or not
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DIY: Circuit
Brushless DC Motor Driver Use of brushless DC motors (BLDCs) is on the rise. But their control usually requires rotor-position information for selecting the appropriate commutation angle
| DIY: Circuit
Versatile Audio-Visual Alarm This circuit uses an NE555 timer IC, some LEDs, a couple of piezo buzzers and a few other components to produce audio-visual effects as per your requirement
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DIY: Circuit
Crystal-Controlled FM Transmitter Most simple FM transmitters use LC (inductor and capacitor) tuned circuits to generate the carrier waves
| DIY: Circuit
Simple IR Remote Control Extender Sometimes you wish you could extend the range of the remote control of your TV set or DVD player, or take it to another room for use
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DIY: Tips & Technique
Controlling Devices Through WebIOPi Interface In the evening, with the day’s work over, your office is locked and you are about to leave for home
| DIY: Tips & Technique
Get Set Go with Raspberry Pi Camera This project describes how to connect a web camera to the Raspberry Pi and make use of it
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Futuristic Technology
Machine-Brain Interface: A Giant Step for Mankind As the brain-computer interface is being closely coupled with bionics, the medical field is witnessing a breakthrough, giving hopes to millions of amputated and paralysed people around the globe
| Test & Measurement
How To Build An EMC Test Kit All electronic devices have the potential to emit electromagnetic fields. In order to bring your product to market, you need to ensure it clears a set of EMC tests. Let us find out some facts about these tests and how to build a test kit for it
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Embedded Design
What’s New in Displays for Embedded Systems Various challenges, such as physical size and power consumption, have become more of a concern for embedded devices. This article presents some high-level solutions that are available to tackle the challenge
| Internet of Things
When Machines Talk to Machines During an interview on November 30, 2013, Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com took the correspondent into a secret room at the Amazon office and exposed an R&D project—Octocopter—drones that will fly delivery packets straight to the customers
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Defence Electronics
Part 3 of 4: Defence Lasers and Optronic Systems: Semiconductor Diode Laser Electronics Semiconductor diode lasers are close second to solid-state lasers in usage as far as tactical military applications of lasers are concerned. Laser aiming modules fitted on small arms and used to enhance night-fighting capability of infantry soldiers, short-to-medium range eye-safe laser rangefinders used for observation and surveillance, laser proximity sensors and short-range laser dazzlers are some prominent examples. Focus in this part of the article is on semiconductor diode laser electronics
| EFY Plus DVD
What is Inside This Month’s DVD This month’s DVD includes an EDA package with a professional standard printed circuit board design and layout tool. If you are a programmer, we have also included handy HDL simulators and an Arduino IDE
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Career
Electronics Manufacturing Jobs to Multiply by 2020 Here we explore the kind of job opportunities available in electronics industry in India, specially in the surface mount technology (SMT) sector. Also covered are skills required and pay packages that may be expected
| Industry Report
Quality Labs and Certification in Demand The government of India is pushing the manufacturing industry for a huge surge in exports, and this is leading to the growth of the quality labs and certification industry
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Interview
"Time to market is a critical factor for design engineers" The new oscilloscopes are evolving in multiple areas, but the most interesting aspect seems to be the increased focus on the user—the engineer who actually uses the scope. Kapil Sood, managing director, and Naresh Narasimhan, country manager at Tektronix India spoke with Dilin Anand of EFY
| eStyle First Look!
.Micromax launches Smartphone Supporting 21 Languages .BenQ Launches Full-HD Gaming Monitors .Samsung’s New Curved TVs with 4k Resolution .Cubix Music Powerhouse that Fits in Your Palm .Panasonic Smartphone with octa-core Processor .GizMo ByTes
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Useful Websites
Troubleshooting and Repairing Tips Do-it-Yourself (DIY) troubleshooting and repairing of electronics gadgets can be fun as it helps you save money and gain useful knowledge. This month we present some websites for the brave hearts who like to troubleshoot and repair electronic devices by themselves
| EFY Plus DVD
Create PCBs up to 16 Layers with KiCad Operational on Apple OS X, Linux and Windows, KiCad is an electronic design automation software tool to design and generate professional schematics and printed circuit boards. A well-known software tool, KiCad is released under the open source General Public Licence v2 (GNU GPL). Try out KiCad included in this month’s DVD exclusively available with EFY Plus
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EFY Plus DVD
Create Professional PCB designs with ZenitPCB Suite A free, easy-to-use computer-aided design software package for Windows platform, that lets you design printed circuit boards of professional quality very quickly
| eStyle Buyers’ Guide
Gaming Hardware: Put Your Game Face On The idea of gaming stopped being something for children a long time ago. PC and console games today are highly advanced in all respects, be it the storyline, content, graphics or the kind of hardware they use. That said, playing the newest games requires one to be equipped with top-of-the-line hardware, starting from gaming consoles to keyboards and mice. It is a huge market not only in India but all over the world, and here’s what it has to offer
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Internet of Things
The IoT is on Everybody’s Mind The Internet of Things (IoT) appears to be one of the hottest topics in the IT world today and seems to be significantly influencing the strategies and plans of companies in varied segments ranging from mobile and data centre to systems security. Here is a collation of some recent strategy-related announcements from industry leaders that shows how much companies are betting on the IoT. In fact, at major events including the International CES and Mobile World Congress, people seemed to be talking about little else
| Interview
"What should you look for in a chip?" Which chip do you select for high-performance parallel calculations and control applications? How do you reduce the power consumption on a chip? Satish Bagalkotkar, president and CEO, and Devesh Gautam, COO, Synapse Design answer the above questions and more as they speak with Dilin Anand of EFY at Synapse’s new office in Whitefield
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DIY: Software
HCT: The HDL Complexity Tool HCT stands for HDL Complexity Tool, where HDL stands for Hardware Description Language. HCT provides scores that represent the complexity of modules present in integrated circuit (IC) designs
| DIY: Software
Part 5 of 5: Designing with FPGAs: FPGA-Embedded Processors FPGA devices are suitable for implementing parallel algorithms. However, sequential algorithms, especially those that do not demand large processing power, are easier to implement as a program in a microprocessor
Download source code
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Technology Focus
3D Printers to Print Lunar Base and Living Tissue From being used to prototype designs and build custom toys, 3D printing technology is now ready to churn out everything from space stations and human organs to houses and food too
| Innovation
Smart Glasses Just Got Smarter Golden-i Gen 3.8 is a handsfree wireless computing and communications headset that operates by voice commands and head movements. It was demonstrated at Electronics Rocks Conference 2013
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Telecom Technology
How to Protect Telecom Networks Automatic protection switching schemes allow configuring a pair of lines for line redundancy. When the working interface fails, the protection interface quickly assumes the network traffic and provides end users with a continuous operation. Let’s delve deep into protection mechanisms...
| EFY Plus DVD
ZamiaCAD, an Open Source Platform for Advanced Hardware Design ZamiaCAD is a modular and extensible platform for your advanced hardware design, analysis and research. Let us take a look at what it delivers
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Buyers’ Guide
How to Select AA-Size Battery Cells electronic devices run on batteries of different shapes and sizes. But the most popular amongst them are AA-size primary cylindrical cells. These cells’ prices are different but for most buyers they all are the same. But does a cell with higher price last longer? To find out we did a simple accelerated test
| Technology News
Your clothes may soon change colours on touch How would you like to wear fabric that could change colours based on sound or touch? Well, the technology now exists
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Industry News
Indian UPS market to grow at 11 per cent CAGR In its recent India UPS Market Outlook 2018 report, industry research and consultancy firm RNCOS has revealed that, owing to the significant demand for uninterrupted power supply, the Indian UPS market is expected to grow at a healthy rate of 11 per cent from 2014 to 2018
| Next
Issue...
Raspberry Pi
PCB Industry in India
Budget Friendly Oscilloscopes
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