It's nice day for a ride to the beach. You grab your stuff jump and in the car. Ooops - last night you forgot to charge your phone and you've only got about 30% but...... No worries, the beach is a 90 minute drive away which should be more than enough time for your phone to charge.
Monday, September 4, 2017
Automobile USB Phone Charging
Friday, August 11, 2017
The Future of Wireless is Fiber
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Cactus Cell Tower (Image source: www.extremetech.com) |
- Current International Telecommunication Union (ITU) specifications for 5G specify a total download capacity of at least 20Gbps and 10Gbps uplink per mobile base station.
- In contrast, the peak data rate for current LTE cells is about 1Gbps.
- Under ideal circumstances, 5G networks will offer users a maximum latency of just 4ms, down from about 20ms on LTE 4G networks.
- The 5G specification also calls for a latency of just 1ms for a stepped up service called ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC).
Fiber to the tower is a critical enabler of 5G wireless services including The Internet of Things.
For more information see Preparing the Transport Network for 5G: The Future Is Fiber and check out the rest of the OP-TEC August 2017 edition and previous monthly newsletters here.
Posted by
Gordon F Snyder Jr
at
11:12 AM
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Labels: Education, fiber, Internet of Things, optics, STEM, Technology, Wireless
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Wisconsin and Taiwan's Foxconn
- Foxconn is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company headquartered in Tucheng, New Taipei, Taiwan.
- Foxconn currently has 12 factories in nine Chinese cities along with factories in Asia, Brazil, Europe, and Mexico.
- The company is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer by revenue that, as of 2012, produced approximately 40 percent of all consumer electronics products sold.
- Foxconn is the largest private employer in China and one of the largest employers worldwide.
- Major customers comprise all the biggies including Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, Google, and Dell.
- In reaction to a spate of worker suicides in which 14 people died in 2010, a report from 20 Chinese universities described Foxconn factories as labor camps and detailed widespread worker abuse and illegal overtime. The company claims these issues have been resolved.
- The complex will be located at a 1,000-acre site in southeastern Wisconsin.
- This will be the first liquid crystal display manufacturing facility in North America and that has environmentalists a little freaked out.
- It will take four years to build and will employ up to 10,000 construction workers over those four years.
- The factory floor area will cover 20 million square feet.
- Up to 13,000 workers could eventually be employed and paid an average of $53,875 a year, plus benefits.
- Will generate estimated $181 million in state and local tax revenue annually, including $60 million in local property taxes.
- Wisconsin will kick in $3 billion in state incentives over 15 years.
- Wisconsin is not projected to break even on the incentive package for at least 25 years (that's 2042).
Posted by
Gordon F Snyder Jr
at
3:54 PM
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Labels: Chinese, Electronics, Foxconn, Industry, manufacturing, Technology, Wisconsin
Monday, May 2, 2016
STEM Studies: The Future of Engineering
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc9D9VmAguhpp3f_PvssNXqCXgoYmHymRUlYHSnu-E5zkZt4IfnQEQEj1f1Vw2rhCV9-b3Qc0HTf1xrvwgIKK38Uy09BuqQXByfEhT-CTUp0MKpfEqJbfDKF6-uHM4T_RWHuxdMLPvLUSU/s200/Lauren-Willison-Author-Image+%25282%2529.png)
Posted by
Gordon F Snyder Jr
at
4:21 PM
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Labels: Careers, Engineering, Math, Mathematics, Science, STEM, Technology
Friday, November 20, 2015
SUNY Poly Utica Computer Chip Commercialization Center (Quad-C)
Yesterday before a meeting at SUNY Poly Utica I had the chance to go on a tour of the almost completed Computer Chip Commercialization Center (Quad-C) building located on campus. Here's a few specs on the facility:
- 253,000 sq. ft. including 56,000 sq. ft. of Class 100 and Class 1000 capable cleanroom space.
- Will host phase one public-private partnerships highlighted by a consortium spearheaded by SUNY Poly CNSE that includes leading technology companies such as Advanced Nanotechnology Solutions Incorporated (ANS), SEMATECH, Atotech and CNSE partners, including IBM, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron.
- Annual operating budget to exceed $500 million
- Projected to result in the creation of 1,500 high-tech jobs, groundbreaking academic programs, and cutting-edge workforce training opportunities.
- The cleanrooms are stacked - not something you see much of outside of highly populated places like Singapore.
Those 1,500 new jobs will have an average annual salary of $91,000, and an estimated annual payroll of more than $136 million once full-scale production is achieved. I am a strong believer in public-private partnerships and the SUNY Poly CNSE effort is one of the most successful I've had the opportunity to see.
Posted by
Gordon F Snyder Jr
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2:24 PM
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Labels: Education, Engineering, nanotechnology, New York, Photonics, technician, Technology
Friday, November 13, 2015
Automobile Collision Avoidance: Ultrasonic Sensors
It's been a while and I wanted to expand a little bit on my June intelligent car post and discuss collision avoidance technology in a little more detail. All collision avoidance technologies use sensors that collect information that is processed by onboard computers in the car. Let's talk about ultrasonic parking sensors today.
Ultrasonic parking sensors are typically mounted in the bumpers and used for parking systems. Effective distance for a transducers depends on the circuit and signal sequencing that is being used so the sensitivity varies across different devices. Parking sensors are designed for relatively short parking distances of 0-5 feet.
You may have noticed them on car bumpers and wondered what they were. Here's a close-up picture of one on an Audi A4 (pic source: goo.gl/fOhcQy). They are about the size of a nickel.
Distance is commonly indicated by a sequence of beeps and the closer the obstacle is to the sensor the faster the sequence of beeps until a continuous tone is emitted indicating that your bumper about one foot (or less) away from the obstacle. Here's a short 58 second demonstration video demonstrating BMW's Park Distance Control (PDC).
Ultrasonic means above the audio frequency range and these sensors typically operate somewhere between 40 kHz and 70 kHz. In future posts I'll describe camera, radar, and lidar systems.
Posted by
Gordon F Snyder Jr
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1:57 PM
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Labels: automobile, avoidance, collision, Education, parking, technician
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
An Experience With An Intelligent Car
Yesterday I attended an excellent advisory board meeting for a National Science Foundation funded eBook project called E-MATE at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ. Mike and Kelly are doing some really cutting edge ground-breaking work in the development of electronic instructional materials and it was an excellent meeting. I need to do some writing here about the work they are doing. Today though – I want to write about cars.
Diane was away and I had the chance to drive her car (a 2014 Volvo XC70) back and forth to the meeting. We leased this car in December 2013 and she’s the primary driver. Yesterday was my first opportunity to take this car solo (solo is the key word here) on a road trip of almost 500 miles. The car is loaded with just about every option including the technology package and I’ve been chomping at the bit to really give the technologies a test, especially after seeing one of the autonomous Google self-driving cars in downtown Mountain View a few weeks ago.
Volvo does not offer a self-driving package (yet) but my experience - it is pretty darn close to self-driving with the technology package that adds adaptive cruise control, automatic high beam control, frontal collision warning, automatic braking for frontal collision crash mitigation, a driver inattention monitor, blind-spot warning system, active xenon headlights, and lane-departure warning to an already incredibly safe and comfortable car.
Now - driving from Massachusetts to New Jersey on a weekday is always an experience – New York City cannot be avoided unless you want to add hours to the trip and that means bumper-to-bumper traffic, crazy drivers and lots of intense time behind the wheel.
I was so impressed with the car – stop and go for at least a couple of hours and no need to hit the brakes or the accelerator. It took some time to get used to – I had to “trust” the car but once I did – amazing! An alarm that goes off if the car starts to drift outside the lane (unless a directional has been used). Sensors that monitor and determine whether the driver is becoming tired and inattentive. Cameras that watch for speed limit signs and indicate when the speed limit has changed. A blind spot warning system that indicates a car is coming up from behind on either side. Sensors that monitor oncoming traffic and control high beams.
Does the car drive itself – no – not yet but it is pretty close. Did I push the technology? I don't think so. I let the car do what it is designed to do. What did I do? I pretty much steered and adjusted the cruise control up and down. I did not have to use the accelerator or brakes unless I wanted to on the highway, whether I was going 70 mph or in a stop and go traffic jam.
As an FYI Volvo in 2017 will start testing 100 "production-viable" autonomous self-driving cars in Sweden with real drivers like you and me. These test cars have 28 cameras, lasers, sensors, and radar units along with integrated computers and communications systems that make up the self-driving system. How soon will we have the chance to purchase a self-driving car? Right now it is looking like 2020.
With my new position at the Center for Optics and Photonics Education and my past position at the Information and Communications Technologies Center, cars (and a lot of other devices) are really hitting a sweet tech spot for me. Infrared lasers, optical sensors, integrated GPS, radar and cameras collecting large amounts of data, onboard computers processing the data, communicating back to the car and driver and making intelligent "pretty-big-data" decisions. Super cool stuff and I’ll be writing over the summer about some of these individual technologies and how they work.
Now for me – it is back to my older Toyota product with none of the car sensor and intelligent technologies (it does have a back-up camera and Bluetooth). I have to remember when I’m driving my car all of the “intelligence” is up to the driver. Ohhhh Noooo :)