Author: Al Williams

4507 Articles

Creating Antimatter On The Desktop — One Day

September 28, 2018 by 28 Comments

If you watch Star Trek, you will know one way to get rid of pesky aliens is to vent antimatter. The truth is, antimatter is a little less exotic than it appears on TV, but for a variety of reasons there hasn’t been nearly as much practical research done with it. There are well over 200 electron accelerators in labs around the world, but only a handful that work with positrons, the electron’s anti-counterpart. [Dr. Aakash Sahai] would like to change that. He’s got a new design that could bring antimatter beams out of the lab and onto the desktop. He hasn’t built a prototype, but he did publish some proof-of-concept simulation work in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.

Today, generating high-energy positron beams requires an RF accelerator — miles of track with powerful electromagnets, klystrons, and microwave cavities. Not something you are going to build in your garage this year. [Sahai] is borrowing ideas from electron laser-plasma accelerators (ELPA) — a technology that has allowed electron accelerators to shrink to mere inches — and turned it around to create positrons instead.

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Antennas That You Install With A Spray-Can

September 27, 2018 by 30 Comments

With the explosion in cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and other radio technologies, the demand for antennas is increasing. Everything is getting smaller and even wearable, so traditional antennas are less practical than ever. You’ve probably seen PCB antennas on things like ESP8266s, but Drexel University researchers are now studying using titanium carbide — known as MXene — to build thin, light, and even transparent antennas that outperform copper antennas. Bucking the trend for 3D printing, these antennas are sprayed like ink or paint onto a surface.

A traditional antenna that uses metal carries most of the current at the skin (something we’ve discussed before). For example, at WiFi frequencies, a copper antenna’s skin depth is about 1.33 micrometers. That means that antennas have to be at least thick enough to carry current at that depth from all surfaces –practically 5 micrometers is about the thinnest you can reasonably go. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are trying to make something thin and flexible, it is pretty thick. Using MXene, the researchers made antennas as thin as 100 nanometers thick — that’s 10% of a micrometer and only 2% of a conventional antenna.

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Three Part Deep Dive Explains Lattice ICE40 FPGA Details

September 27, 2018 by 15 Comments

It is no secret that we like the Lattice iCE40 FPGA. It has a cheap development board and an open source toolchain, so it is an easy way to get started developing low-cost, low-power FPGA designs. There are a few members of the family that have similar characteristics including the top-of-the-line UltraPlus. [Steve] from Lattice and [Michael Klopfer] from the University of California Irvine have a three-part video series that explain the architecture of the devices. Altogether, the videos are about an hour long and — of course — they use the official tools, not IceStorm. But it is still a great time investment if you have an iCE40 board and you want to understand what the chip has under the hood.

The first part is fairly short and talks a lot about applications. There’s also a nod to the hobbyist use of FPGAs. Keep in mind that the iCE40 FPGAs come in different sizes and variants, so don’t get excited when you see them mention a RISC-V — that isn’t going to fit in your iCEStick, that we know of. The iCEstick has a HX-1K onboard, which is the high-performance variant with 1,280 logic elements, as opposed to the low-power (LP) version.

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Learn Verilog In Your Browser

September 26, 2018 by 13 Comments

We are big fans of tools in the browser for education. You have a consistent environment maintained by someone else, you don’t have to install anything, and you can work from any computer you happen to find yourself. The HDLBits site has a great set of Verilog “exams” that would be a big help to anyone trying to learn or brush up on their Verilog skills.

The site offers a range of topics that go from the silly (output a constant 1 or 0) to full-blown state machines and testbenches. The site isn’t tutorial in nature, instead it offers a problem, an optional hint, and an editing window with some code already in place. You add your code and hit submit. Behind the scenes, the site runs Intel Quartus and Modelsim to test your work. It will either show you the results or tell you that you failed.

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Nim Writes C Code — And More — For You

September 25, 2018 by 57 Comments

When we first heard Nim, we thought about the game. In this case, though, nim is a programming language. Sure, we need another programming language, right? But Nim is a bit different. It is not only cross-platform, but instead of targeting assembly language or machine code, it targets other languages. So a Nim program can wind up compiled by C or interpreted by JavaScript or even compiled by Objective C. On top of that, it generates very efficient code with — at least potentially — low overhead. Check out [Steve Kellock’s] quick introduction to the language.

The fact that it can target different compiler backends means it can support your PC or your Mac or your Raspberry Pi. Thanks to the JavaScript option, it can even target your browser. If you read [Steve’s] post he shows how a simple Hello World program can wind up at under 50K. Of course, that’s nothing the C compiler can’t do which makes sense because the C compiler is actually generating the finished executable, It is a bit harder though to strip out all the overhead yourself.

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Infection? Your Smartphone Will See You Now

September 24, 2018 by 8 Comments

When Mr. Spock beams down to a planet, he’s carrying a tricorder, a communicator, and a phaser. We just have our cell phones. The University of California Santa Barbara published a paper showing how an inexpensive kit can allow your cell phone to identify pathogens in about an hour. That’s quite a feat compared to the 18-28 hours required by traditional methods. The kit can be produced for under $100, according to the University.

Identifying bacteria type is crucial to prescribing the right antibiotic, although your family doctor probably just guesses because of the amount of time it takes to get an identification through a culture. The system works by taking some — ahem — body fluid and breaking it down using some simple chemicals. Another batch of chemicals known as a LAMP reaction mixture multiplies DNA and will cause fluorescence in the case of a positive result.

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Easy GUI Front Ends For Arduino, Rasberry Pi, And More With MyOpenLab

September 21, 2018 by 24 Comments

If you want to integrate a nice graphical interface with a microcontroller or single-board computer for a useful piece of custom equipment, how will you go about it? MyOpenLab is a platform that makes it easy to design virtual interfaces your electronic builds. If you want controls and readouts for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Android, or anything with a serial port, this is worth a try.

MyOpenLab reminds me of LabView. Not so much modern LabView with all of its add-ons and extras, but LabView back when it did just a few things but did them really well. The open source MyOpenLab project has been around for a while. The website and documentation are not in English, which may have kept some people from giving it a try, but the software itself is available in German, English, and Spanish. I took the plunge and found the language barrier didn’t cause me trouble.

As an example of what you can do, image you want to build a custom bench tool. You build virtual device (they call it a “VirtualMachine”) that uses your computer as the control panel and readout, and your electronic project as the physical interface. In myOpenLab your device will consist of two parts: a diagram and a front panel. Some things only live on the diagram, like a timer or a connection to an Arduino. But some things live on both like switches, LEDs, graphs, and so on. You can connect all the little boxes together to build up applications. They can stand alone, but the power comes in being able to connect to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi (or a few other options) for I/O.

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