Archive for 'Engineering'
Groups
Since I’ve enjoyed the recent mathematical discussions on my friends‘ blogs, I have decided to reciprocate by writing my own exciting post about math! Today’s topic is about the fundamental mathematical structure of abstract algebra… the group. A group is defined as a pairing (G,*) where G is a set and * is a binary [...]
Posted: November 12th, 2007 under Engineering.
Comments: 8
Free as in Freedom
Today is an auspicious day, for today is the day that I will address a wonderful topic that is very important to me. That topic is, of course, the Linux operating system. Linux was created in the early 90′s by computer science student Linus Torvalds as a free, open-source alternative to UNIX. Today, various software [...]
Posted: October 17th, 2007 under Engineering.
Comments: none
Questions
As I was doing laundry yesterday, a thought occurred to me… how much does it cost (in terms of utilities) to wash and dry a single load of clothing?Being the obsessive person that I am, I knew that the question would continue to haunt me until I found an answer. So today I did some [...]
Posted: September 29th, 2007 under Engineering.
Comments: 6
Zero-cross Detector
My Christmas Light Show Project requires electronic dimming of lights. This is accomplished by phase-control of solid state relays. Thus, it is important to synchronize the microcontroller to the power mains (i.e. the controller should be able to operate in-phase with the AC line in the house). To do this, I built a zero-cross detector, [...]
Posted: July 11th, 2007 under Engineering.
Comments: none