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| Let's drop in on Wily and
look over his shoulder at his latest project.... |
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Corona Monitor
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| Wily was just about to have
some lunch when his phone rang. It was from a local medical equipment
company. They made kidney dialysis machines. They also made lots
of the non-reusable blood filters, which were used on their machines.
The filters were rather complex canisters of plastic sheets, all glued
together. To enhance the glue adhesion, the company ran the plastic
sheets through a special machine, which bombarded the material with a high
voltage 40KV 20KHz discharge. This “corona discharge” broke up the
plastic bonds on the surface, allowing the glue to stick.
The company had been using their corona
machine for several years without too many problems. .... |
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Wily Widget,
the Lone Inventor
with Gadget & Gizmo |
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WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW is a....Candle Flame Powered Battery
Charger |
| Thermoelectric devices have
been around for a long time. By running electrical current through
them, one side gets hot while the other gets cold. Many are used to
cool sodas in a cooler, keep a computer’s processor cool and have even
been used on spacecraft. When run backwards, by applying heat to
them, they can also produce electricity. I would sure love to see a well
designed thermoelectric generator, which could produce some electricity
from the heat of a candle flame. I would only expect a watt or two of
power at most from this system,.... |
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con't on page 6 |
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Strange Science
By: Dave Johnson
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| Strange Heat
Production: About 30 years ago I was part owner of a research and
development company. We were trying to develop a number of inventions
as well as provide consulting engineering services. We had a PhD
physicist helping us with some of the more sticky technical issues.
One day the physicist showed me a copy of an engineering report he had
obtained from a well-known engineering company in the Denver area. The
company asked us to review and comment on the report. The report
described a strange heat phenomenon, which had stumped some of their top
engineers.... |
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New Products 2009
New product announcements are made nearly every
day. I subscribe to many trade journals and each is filled with
hundreds of flashy advertisements. But, only a few of those product
ads catch my eye. Since I’m a circuit designer, I especially like
those components that trigger many new application ideas in my mind.
Sometimes it is the smallest products that are the most useful. I
often discovered new products in surplus electronic catalogs. The
surplus companies often buy up stock that came from companies that went out
of business. Bad marketing or bad management may have killed a
perfectly good product idea. Their loss can be your gain if you can
spot the bargain.
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Charging Alkaline
Batteries
By: Dave Johnson
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| A standard
flashlight, which uses an incandescent lamp and alkaline batteries, will
usually become useless when the battery voltage drops below a certain point.
We have all experienced switching on a flashlight only to be greeted by a weak
yellow glow from the bulb instead of bright white light.... |
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PCB Fabrication Problems
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| I got a frantic call from one of
my old clients. About three years earlier I had designed a detergent
soap mixing control circuit for them. The circuit monitored the
alkalinity of a soap and water mixture and by controlling the water flowing
into the mixing tank; the circuit could maintain a fixed soap concentration.
They sold a few thousand mixing systems per year. They typically bought
about 500 printed circuit boards at a time and soldered the surface mounted
components onto.... |
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con't on page
3 |
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Bad Fluorescent Night Light |
| The wife knows that I’m
constantly searching for that perfect night light design. When she saw
these in a twin blister pack, she knew they had my name on them. I
really liked the style and size. The package said that they consumed
only 1.6 watts, which was only 40% of the typical 4 watt incandescent night
light style lamp. Being fluorescent, they should also produce more light
and last longer than the typical 6 months I usually got from the standard
incandescent 4 watt lamps. |
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