Electronic devices

Amplifier (7)
Antenna (16)
Circuits (153)
Consumer electronics (27)
Data logger (3)
Electrode (63)
Electronic converters (2)
Electronic device (26)
Electronic equipment (2)
Logic gate (1)
Microchip (5)
Receiver (3)
Sensor (260)
Transmitter (4)

Synopsis: Electronics: Electronics generale: Electronic devices:

#Other personal health sensors that use Bluetooth include the Cardiopad, an electrocardiography (ECG) machine developed to monitor heart activity in patients in remote areas of Cameroon,

Sensors could be linked via Bluetooth to sprinkler systems to automatically optimise moisture levels. The ability to use just the right amounts of water and fertiliser to produce a good harvest without wasting resources can improve crop yields and rural incomes.

They accomplished this by building in a tiny chip-scale commercially available battery into the device.

#New Sensor Easily Detects Greenhouse gases Scientists have created a highly sensitive portable sensor to test the air for the most damaging greenhouse gases.

and the QEPAS sensor findings compared favorably with the lab much larger instrument, Tittel says. his was a milestone for trace-gas sensing,

#Smart sensors that harvest power from sun heat or vibrations European researchers have developed advanced energy harvesting technology that allows wireless sensor networks to power themselves from the sun, heat or vibrations.

wireless sensor networks promise to make our lives more comfortable, safer and more productive. But while many of the challenges to deploying networks of tiny sensor devices have been addressed, one key issue remains:

how to power them. Like any electronic device, sensors need energy to operate. Until now this has largely been solved by hooking them up to the grid

or using batteries, but both approaches have considerable drawbacks. Grid-connected sensors need cables, limiting where they can be used,

and contribute to electricity consumption and CO2 EMISSIONS, while battery-powered ones only last as long as their battery life.

But what if sensors could harness energy directly from their environment from the sun, from ambient heat, from radio waves or vibrations?

The result would be sensors and sensor networks that can be set up anywhere with ease

and in theory would operate perpetually with little or no maintenance or environmental impact. And that is precisely what a team of EU-funded researchers are achieving in the SWAP('Symbiotic Wireless Autonomous Powered system')project.

and expertise to develop the next generation of innovative, autonomously powered wireless sensors. n recent years,

wireless sensor networks have enjoyed a tremendous upsurge and the field has reached a level of maturity, says Professor Michele Rossi from Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche and the University of Padova,

testing and deploying novel technologies that enable sensors to use solar and thermal energy as well as radio waves and vibrations to power themselves.

the SWAP team has developed an advanced sensor platform to validate the approach, and the industrial partners are incorporating the algorithms and hardware innovations into commercial products.

For example, autonomous sensor networks that can be deployed quickly and easily anywhere will greatly improve disaster and emergency management,

Sensor networks already play a crucial role in environmental weather and climate monitoring. Making them better will serve to improve the efficiency of such applications.

Each water-bag is equipped with integrated sensors, powered by a solar cell located on the flat top of the container.

A water quality sensor to assess water purity has been tested in a laboratory with the intention of being fitted to water-bags in the future to ensure safe and clean delivery after transit.

and the high spatial resolution provided by modern SAR sensors has meant that we could observe changes in urban

The new research harnesses technological advances in wireless networking, environmental sensors and soil water movement models.

Thanks to sensors planted across the field, the Waterbee system can continuously monitor water movement in the root zone.

low power consumption wireless sensor network, sending the data to an intelligent web service software application for analysis. Once the numbers are crunched-taking due account for weather and other local parameters-it automatically activates the selected irrigation nodes in the areas

##We made 24 different Ebola sensors and tested them in a day for $21 each.##

(or##input##)a logic gate and an output but they are crafted from parts of cells rather than wires and transistors.

which allows the scientists to rationally design sensors and detectors. Because biological systems are particularly good at sensing changes in the environmentâ##our cells constantly monitor blood sugar

For a new study researchers used used iron-enhanced carbon cooked from hickory chips to successfully remove the toxin.

As reported in the journal Water Research Gao ground wood chips that were heated then in nitrogen gas but not burned.

For a new study researchers used used iron-enhanced carbon cooked from hickory chips to successfully remove the toxin.

As reported in the journal Water Research Gao ground wood chips that were heated then in nitrogen gas but not burned.

and flexible electronic devices to harvest solar energysays Luyao Lu a graduate student in chemistry and lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Photonics that describes the result.

The fibers serve as a pathway to allow electrons to travel to the electrodes on the sides of the solar cell. t s like you re generating a street

#Sensor device grabs energy in odd places University of Washington Posted by Michelle Ma-Washington on September 4 2014scientists have built a new power harvester that uses natural fluctuations in temperature

The device harvests energy in any location where these temperature changes naturally occur powering sensors that can check for water leaks

This powers sensors that also are placed on the bellows and data collected by the sensors is sent wirelessly to a receiver.

A number of battery-free technologies exist that are powered by solar and ambient radio frequency waves.

or inside a wall and sensors would be tuned to check for water leaks. Similarly when used inside a bridge the sensors could detect any cracks forming or structural deficiencies.

In both cases the sensors would send a signal to the nearby powered receiver. A temperature change of only 0. 25 degrees Celsius creates enough energy to power the sensor node to read

and send data wirelessly to a receiver 5 meters away. That means any slight shift in an office building s air conditioning or the natural outside air temperature during the course of a day would be more than enough to activate the chemical in the bellows.

The technology uses temperature changes over time as its power source. Devices called thermoelectric generators also leverage varying temperatures for power

but these instruments require a temperature difference at an exact moment such as in a place where one side is hot

The battery sends an electric current through two electrodes that split liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.

Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel

His next goal is to improve the durability of the device. he electrodes are fairly stable

The technology is featured in the journal Advanced Optical Materials. t opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a nonintrusive waylunt says. t can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e reader.

#Small tuning fork lets device find greenhouse gas Scientists have created a highly sensitive portable sensor to test the air for the most damaging greenhouse gases.

and the QEPAS sensor findings compared favorably with the lab much larger instrument, Tittel says. his was a milestone for trace-gas sensing,

#Tiny water sensor embedded in plant stems Cornell University Posted by Krishna Ramanujan-Cornell on October 14 2013researchers are completing soil tests on a water sensor within a fingertip-sized silicon chip

They hope to mass produce the sensors for as little as $5 each. Crop growers wine grape and other fruit growers food processors and even concrete makers all benefit from water sensors for accurate steady and numerous moisture readings.

But current sensors are large may cost thousands of dollars and often must be read manually.

The new chip which is a hundred times more sensitive than current devices is fitted with wires that can be hooked up to a card for wireless data transmission

or is compatible with existing dataloggers. Chips may be left in place for years though they may break in freezing temperatures.

Such inexpensive and accurate sensors can be spaced strategically in plants and soil for accurate measurements in agricultural fields.

For example sophisticated vintners use precise irrigation to put regulated water stress on grapevines to create just the right grape composition for a premium cabernet or a chardonnay wine.

While growers can use the sensors to monitor water in soils for their crops civil engineers can embed the chips in concrete to determine optimal moisture levels as the concrete cures. ne of our goals is to try

and develop something that is not only a great improvement but also much cheaper for growers and others to usesays Alan Lakso professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

The sensors make use of microfluidic technologyâ##developed by Abraham Stroock associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineeringâ##that places a tiny cavity inside the chip.

and then the chip may be inserted in a plant stem or in the soil where it through a nanoporous membrane exchanges moisture with its environment and maintains an equilibrium pressure that the chip measures.

Using chips embedded in plants or spaced across soil and linked wirelessly to computers allows growers toâ ontrol the precise moisture of blocks of land based on target goalssays Vinay Pagay who helped develop the chip as a doctoral student in Lakso s

lab. The Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization is handling the intellectual property rights and patents.

Source: Cornell Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license

Here is the proof. xperts say the achievement will galvanize efforts to find successors to silicon chips which could soon encounter physical limits that might prevent them from delivering smaller faster cheaper electronic devices. arbon nanotubes CNTS have long been considered as a potential successor to the silicon transistorsays Professor

Jan Rabaey a world expert on electronic circuits and systems at the University of California Berkeley.

For decades progress in electronics has meant shrinking the size of each transistor to pack more transistors on a chip.

leader in chip research. He called the Stanford work major benchmarkin moving CNTS toward practical use.

But with billions of nanotubes on a chip even a tiny degree of misaligned tubes could cause errors

and director of SONIC a consortium of next-generation chip design research. he Wong/Mitra paper demonstrates the promise of CNTS in designing complex computing systemsshanbhag says adding that this will motivate researchers elsewhere toward greater efforts in chip design

and looks like a chemistry experiment with two electrodes one positive the other negative plunged into a bottle of wastewater.

Inside that murky vial attached to the negative electrode bacteria feast on particles of organic waste

and produce electricity that is captured by the battery s positive electrode. e call it fishing for electronssays Craig Criddle a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford university.

As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the battery s negative electrode colonies of wired microbes cling to carbon filaments that serve as efficient electrical conductors.

and convert it into biological fuel their excess electrons flow into the carbon filaments and across to the positive electrode

After a day or so the positive electrode has absorbed a full load of electrons and has largely been converted into silver says Xing Xie an interdisciplinary researcher.

and pen of the Astronaut 4 are equipped also with sensors to detects signs of mastitis.

they can create ultra-sensitive detectors for explosives such as TNT, as well as at least two different types of pesticides.

This means that bees and their stingers could become important to making better environmental sensors.

The new sensors are hypersensitive to explosives with the ability to detect even single molecules of the chemicals,

The sensors can provide experts with a ingerprintof each explosive as well as the state of its breakdown.

But the sensors aren just useful for explosives the researchers found that the coated nanotubes can also detect two pesticides that contain nitro-aromatic compounds.

This means the sensors can be useful not only to anyone from airport security officials to military troops,

but also could be useful environmental sensors. It certainly an interesting use of venom especially after we recently saw that scorpion venom can be used to create pesticides.

Strano has filed for a patent on the sensor, and the team is still working out a compression system to ensure that any molecules in the air come into contact with the tubes

But the team is hopeful that the sensors could become a commercial product in the near future.

and football-field sized antennas.####For#space-based solar power (SBSP), there would be two basic steps,

The microwave transmission that would deliver SBSP s electricity from an orbiting antenna to terrestrial rectennas would be##2 million times the power of that produced by the microwave oven.##

And the transmitter would be immediately shut down if there was any interruption at the earth station.##

A small Photo Voltaic solar panel provides power for the micro controller, sensors, various valves, etc.

That s important for the battery and other electronics and sensors. Once the robot can stay aloft on its own,

Sensors, Food, Automation and Engineering. Sensors help agriculture by enabling real-time traceability and diagnosis of crop, livestock and farm machine states.

Food may benefit directly from genetic tailoring and potentially from producing meat directly in a lab. Automation will help agriculture via large-scale robotic

Sensors Air & soil sensors: Fundamental additions to the automated farm, these sensors would enable a real time understanding of current farm, forest or body of water conditions.

Scientifically viable in 2013; mainstream and financially viable in 2015. Equipment telematics: Allows mechanical devices such as tractors to warn mechanics that a failure is likely to occur soon.

Crop sensors: Instead of prescribing field fertilization before application, high-resolution crop sensors inform application equipment of correct amounts needed.

Optical sensors or drones are able to identify crop health across the field (for example, by using infrared light).

Scientifically viable in 2015; mainstream in 2018; and financially viable in 2019. Infrastructural health sensors:

Can be used for monitoring vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges, factories, farms and other infrastructure.

Coupled with an intelligent network, such sensors could feed crucial information back to maintenance crews or robots.

With satellite imagery and advanced sensors, farmers can optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources at ever larger scales.

Further understanding of crop variability, geolocated weather data and precise sensors should allow improved automated decision-making and complementary planting techniques.

The hypothetical combination of dozens or hundreds of agricultural robots with thousands of microscopic sensors,

from the filament in a light bulb to the silicon in a computer chip. Whether we 3d print them

It gathers data from sensors placed throughout fields that measure the temperature and moisture levels in soil and surrounding air.

#Graphene electrode promises stretchy circuits: Nature News A transparent, flexible electrode made from graphene could see a one-atom thick honeycomb of carbon first made just five years ago replace other high-tech materials used in displays.

It could even be used instead of silicon in electronics. Byung Hee Hong from Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, Korea,

etched into the shape needed to make an electrode, onto pieces of polymer. The polymers they used are transparent,

Thinner is better The team made the electrodes by using nickel as a catalyst on

the resulting electrodes are transparent, and Hong says that makes the material ideal for use in applications such as portable displays.

His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain

But the electrodes are less likely to be used in bendy electronics at least in the short term

and its head is a small video camera. The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.

The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.

Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting

But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones) and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.

You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that every few nanoseconds modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery explains Joel Dawson Eta Devices chief technology officer

and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology. That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high.

When trialed in a base station last year Eta Devices module became the first transmitter for 4G LTE networks to achieve an average efficiency greater than 70 percent Dawson says.

Eta Devices has entered also conversations with major manufacturers of LTE-enabled smartphones to incorporate their chips by the end of next year.

If all midsized carrier networks were to replace current radio amplifiers with Eta Devices technology he says the reduction in greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking about 5 million cars off the road.

The AMO technology was a new transmitter architecture where algorithms could choose from different voltages needed to transmit data in each power amplifier

A paper detailing the technology was presented at that year s IEEE Radio frequency Integrated circuits Symposium. That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding

which adjusts voltage to power amplifiers on the fly. But by adjusting that voltage continuously ET efficiency falls apart for 4G LTE

The team used a digital video camera to record the filamentsmotion as they hit the belt,

customers use software to select third-party drone vehicles and components such as sensors, cameras, actuators, and communication devices configure settings,

and infrastructure with drones that require specific cameras and sensors as potential early customers. A company from scratch Airware roots date to 2005,

But companies developing cameras, sensors, and communication links for drones also stand to benefit, he adds,

Typically, leaks are found using aboveground acoustic sensors, which listen for faint sounds and vibrations caused by leakage,

or in-pipe detectors, which sometimes use video cameras to look for signs of pipe breaks. But all such systems are very slow

and can miss small leaks altogether. Now researchers at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi arabia have devised a robotic system that can detect leaks at a rapid pace and with high accuracy by sensing a large pressure

That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),

At present, the 3 mph top speed of the device is imposed by the propulsion motors, not the detector itself,

and provides real-time data thanks to using exoelectrogens as sensors. hese bugs are generating electricity,

explains Buck, who invented Cambrian sensor technologies. With Ecovolt, Silver says, Cambrian aims to make treating

Strano and the paper lead author, postdoc and plant biologist Juan Pablo Giraldo, envision turning plants into self-powered, photonic devices such as detectors for explosives or chemical weapons.

The researchers are also working on incorporating electronic devices into plants. he potential is really endless Strano says.

Lean green machines The researchers also showed that they could turn Arabidopsis thaliana plants into chemical sensors by delivering carbon nanotubes that detect the gas nitric oxide,

it alters the tube fluorescence. e could someday use these carbon nanotubes to make sensors that detect in real time, at the single-particle level,

By adapting the sensors to different targets, the researchers hope to develop plants that could be used to monitor environmental pollution,

#Toward tiny, solar-powered sensors The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards he Internet of thingsthe idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment,

and even livestock would have embedded their own sensors that report information directly to networked servers,

however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes or, even better,

this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.

All of those operations also share a single inductor the chip main electrical component which saves on circuit board space

the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,

To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan,

whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip. Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance.

El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes.

who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at the chip manufacturer Maxim Integrated. f youe only coming in with a small amount,

he adds. t really kind of a full system-on-a chip for power management. And that makes it a little more complicated

#Nanoparticle network could bring fast-charging batteries (Phys. org) A new electrode design for lithium-ion batteries has been shown to potentially reduce the charging time from hours to minutes by replacing the conventional graphite electrode with a network of tin-oxide nanoparticles.

Batteries have called two electrodes an anode and a cathode. The anodes in most of today's lithium-ion batteries are made of graphite.

if biochar a byproduct of the a process that converts plants materials into biofuel could be used in place of expensive activated carbon to make electrodes for supercapacitors.

The technique that treats biochar electrodes for supercapacitors can also be used in making displays explained Fan who was a research scientist at Wintek more than 10 years ago.

#Ultra-thin high-speed detector captures unprecedented range of light waves New research at the University of Maryland could lead to a generation of light detectors that can see below the surface of bodies walls and other objects.

Using the special properties of graphene a two-dimensional form of carbon that is only one atom thick a prototype detector is able to see an extraordinarily broad band of wavelengths.

A research paper about the new detector was published Sunday September 07 2014 in Nature Nanotechnology.

Lead author Xinghan Cai a University of Maryland physics graduate student said a detector like the researchers'prototype could find applications in emerging terahertz fields such as mobile communications medical imaging chemical sensing

however in part because it is difficult to detect light waves in this Range in order to maintain sensitivity most detectors need to be kept extremely cold around 4 Kelvin or-452 degrees Fahrenheit.

Existing detectors that work at room temperature are bulky slow and prohibitively expensive. The new room temperature detector developed by the University of Maryland team

and colleagues at the U s. Naval Research Lab and Monash University Australia gets around these problems by using graphene a single layer of interconnected carbon atoms.

Using a new operating principle called the hot-electron photothermoelectric effect the research team created a device that is as sensitive as any existing room temperature detector in the terahertz range

Graphene a sheet of pure carbon only one atom thick is suited uniquely to use in a terahertz detector

The concept behind the detector is simple says University of Maryland Physics Professor Dennis Drew.

The speed and sensitivity of the room temperature detector presented in this research opens the door to future discoveries in this in-between zone.

Graphene has been used among other things to design FETSEVICES that regulate the flow of electrons through a channel via a vertical electric field directed into the channel by a terminal called a gate.

In digital electronics these transistors control the flow of electricity throughout an integrated circuit and allow for amplification and switching.

An Mos2-based ph sensor achieving sensitivity as high as 713 for a ph change by one unit

and even complete electronic circuits.""The researchers have demonstrated already that the junction interacts with light much more strongly than the rest of the monolayer,

Smartcitizen. methese sensor enhanced hive designs are open and freely available online the data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations allowing for a further comparison and analysis of the hives.

T. C. Chang Professor of Computer science at Columbia Engineering, has invented a prototype video camera that is the first to be fully self-poweredt can produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene.

Digital imaging is expected to enable many emerging fields including wearable devices, sensor networks, smart environments, personalized medicine,

At the heart of any digital camera is an image sensor, a chip with millions of pixels.

Nayar, working with research engineer Daniel Sims BS'14 and consultant Mikhail Fridberg of ADSP Consulting, used off-the-shelf components to fabricate an image sensor with 30x40 pixels.

and charge the sensor's power supplyhe image sensor continuously toggles between image capture and power harvesting modes.

Nayar notes that the image sensor could use a rechargeable battery and charge it via its harvesting capability:"

"But we took an extreme approach to demonstrate that the sensor is indeed truly self-powered

""A few different designs for image sensors that can harvest energy have been proposed in the past. However, our prototype is the first demonstration of a fully self-powered video camera,

"he continues.""And, even though we've used off-the-shelf components to demonstrate our design, our sensor architecture easily lends itself to a compact solid-state imaging chip.

We believe our results are a significant step forward in developing an entirely new generation of cameras that can function for a very long durationdeally,

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