Electronic Schematics in Sketchup

Posted on February 18, 2011 by engineerzero

Sure, your electronics graphics program can make 2D schematics. But can you do this?

“Why would I ever want to do that?” you ask. Well, say that you’re putting together a presentation and want to hi-lite specific parts of the circuit, like so:

Sang is now calling attention to a specific resistor and the red transparent line is showing what happens when pin 12 goes high. The angle of viewing calls attention to the input side of the circuit.

Well, I think it makes a circuit schematic look visually appealing as opposed to Zzzzzzzzzzz. But maybe that’s just me.

As for what this circuit does, well, I’m working on a presentation.

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Mount Saint Helens Seismic Data Visualization

Posted on February 18, 2011 by engineerzero

This is an attempt to visualize data from recent seismic activity around Mt. Saint Helens. Nothing fancy, I simply used Google Sketchup and imported the quake map off the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network page for around 2PM Thursday Feb 17, 2011, then made cylinders proportional to the depths (which are given on the PNSN page). Yellow means in past two weeks, blue in past two days, red in past two hours.

And what have we learned? Hmm, good question. Well, it does kind of look like whatever is under there is moving swiftly west and upward.

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The Volcano Beside Me

Posted on February 17, 2011 by engineerzero

As a native of the Seattle region, I have often found it disconcerting to hear about killer weather, of tornadoes, hurricanes, cold snaps, and heat waves that leave death tolls in their wake. All we have to complain about around here is the rain, which usually is just a drizzle, so maybe we should feel blessed.

But then we have a volcano. In 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupted, spewing billions of tons of ash mainly over the eastern portion of the state. Well, maybe it’s not that big a deal, for although Seattle is only about a hundred miles north, we weren’t inconvenienced — except to stock up on disposable paper dust masks in the event of a dump of volcanic dust.

But then my grandfather wasn’t so fortunate. His town of Yakima was buried under inches of ash. He climbed onto the roof to sweep it off with nothing more than a wet handkerchief for a dust filter. The dust, the exertion, his age (76), and a lifetime of smoking combined to cause a fatal heart attack.

So it is with personal concern that I read that on Valentine’s Day, the area around Mount Saint Helens had its strongest earthquake in thirty years.

Here are a couple screen captures from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network page. The first shows the geographical location of the volcano relative to Seattle:

The second is enough of a close-up to separate the event dots:

There are a lot of event dots. Yellow means in the past two weeks, blue in the past two days. When I got up this morning, there was a red dot, which meant a quake had occurred in the past two hours.

For perspective: the quake that occured on Valentine’s Day was magnitude 4.3, equal to an explosion of 2000 tons of TNT, enough to blow up a small city had it occurred on the surface rather than 5.5 kilometers underground.

This morning’s quake of 2.4 is equal to only about a couple tons of TNT, but then the depth has risen to four kilometers.

In the news this week has been Yellowstone Park, the site of a supervolcano which in past cyclical eruptions has wiped out 90% of life on Earth. And as seismologists like to say, “It’s due.” Here’s the Youtube video of the CNN report.

In contrast, I’m surprised at how little coverage there has been about Mount Saint Helens. Yellowstone erupted 600,000+ years ago, so statistically the odds that it will erupt this year are low. But Mount Saint Helens had a major eruption only three decades ago, and the odds that it will erupt this year appear to be high enough for concern rather than just speculation. In my ignorance about seismology, I can wonder if the increasing pressure under Yellowstone could vent itself laterally via Mount Saint Helens.

The Seattle Times article about the Valentine’s Day Saint Helens earthquake doesn’t mention that it was the biggest in thirty years, and the comments are quite complacent and even cavalier. Young people. For me, though, it’s been thirty years since I thought local volcanic eruptions were cool.

If there is another major eruption, the winds may blow differently this time, but I guess there’s not much I can do other than put dust masks on my shopping list.

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Why Microsoft Could Die Within Five Years

Posted on February 16, 2011 by engineerzero

I was just watching a slide show presentation about the new Windows Phone 7. The effort looks competent. But that’s not enough to keep Microsoft from dying.

Whether it’s fair or not, people hate Microsoft. In order to overcome that hate and get people to buy its products anyway, Microsoft has always had to appear invincible and dominant. Well, that’s not going to happen this time.

A decade ago, Microsoft was the biggest company in the world. But now Apple is the biggest company in the world and Google is not far behind. Microsoft can’t win the Battle of the Smartphones by outspending its rivals.

Maybe that wouldn’t matter if Microsoft had brand loyalty. But it doesn’t. It has brand hatred.

First, everyone suspects that Microsoft is the ringleader of an Upgrade Conspiracy that forces everyone to buy new software and new machines with questionable improvement in performance. Then there’s Microsoft’s lackadaisical, ad-hoc approach to security issues as a profit center. And so there is zero brand affection for Microsoft.

As far as I can tell, Windows Phone 7 is competent. But with people actively hating Microsoft, it has to do better. Given a choice between two products that are equal in everything except that one of them is made by a company that consumers hate, hate, hate, the market will tend to not choose the product made by the company that everyone hates, hates, hates.

This time the company can’t outspend, it can’t dominate. It has to fairly compete with a superior product, or Phone 7 will go the way of Zune. And I don’t think it can do that. I don’t think it knows how.

“So Microsoft loses the smartphone market, how does that mean the end of the company?”

Well, because Microsoft could ignore and/or mock Linux when Linux was this tiny province of hacks at the fringe of computerdom. But with Android, Linux has a user base that is growing larger than Microsoft’s. Microsoft can’t ignore the challenge, it has to fight. But it can’t fight something better. Not when the bucks behind Android are bigger.

Android isn’t just smartphones, it’s also tablets. And that gives it a beachhead into the traditional computer market. If you have Android on your tablet, you’ll be more inclined to have it on your laptop and desktop as well. Assuming there are laptops and desktops for much longer.

Meanwhile, China has already embraced Linux because, frankly, the Chinese suspect that the US government makes Microsoft put stuff into Windows to spy on every PC user. And the Chinese aren’t the only ones who think this. Whether this is true or not, in marketing it is perception that matters. So there goes global marketing share.

So the writing is on the wall. Microsoft is outclassed financially, has a huge branding problem, is vulnerable to viruses, is suspected of snooping. To continue on top, Microsoft would need an original idea, and we’re talking Microsoft.

I think Microsoft is already dying, as it has lost its corporate primacy to Apple and where once it was renown for having no debt at all, it has started accumulating debt. The signs of decay have been there for years. It’s not just ‘Microsoft is Evil.’ The very idea of One Company Fits All has been outgrown by the global computer industry, and there’s no longer a place for a company whose de facto mission statement was Total World Domination.

Bill Gates must have seen this.

Microsoft could well be dead within five years. I won’t take bets on this because after all the government might bail out Microsoft as too big to fail, and I don’t want to parse endless verbal and legal technicalities of what constitutes ‘death’ for a corporation. Also, my nephew loves XBox Live, so maybe some parts of Microsoft will live on.

But the company as a whole is losing its grip on the computer industry as a whole, and it’s got a lot farther to fall, and that’s what it will be doing because it has nothing to grab onto to break its fall. Think of Microsoft as Napoleon and Android as Russia, and cue the orchestra for the 1812 Overture.

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PC control of RC toy via Arduino

Posted on February 15, 2011 by engineerzero
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China’s Drought and Spirulina

Posted on February 13, 2011 by engineerzero

New York Times: U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought

The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday the state news agency Xinhua said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

World wheat prices are already surging, and they have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate United Nations report last week said global food export prices had reached record levels in January. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.

China and the rest of the world may want to look into increasing the production of spirulina as a food source. As wikipedia describes, spirulina was identified in 1974 by the UN as the ‘best food for the future.’

In the words of one advocate:

Spirulina is a cyano-bacteria, 3 billion years old. Growing spirulina sees production doubling every 36 hours. It is made of 65% of highly digestible proteins, is the largest natural source of comestible iron, is full of beta-caroten , and contains all 8 essential amino-acids for human nutrition.

This is from his page in Google Sketchup 3D Warehouse, where he provides the following drawing of a Spirulina production plant which he says is actually in operation:

The alga is grown in a race-track shaped pool with a paddle device to keep the growth media stirred. Other than that, the setup looks pretty simple — something that could be temporarily constructed in a couple weeks at very low cost to feed millions in the event of a threatened global famine. The person who designed and built this plant has his website listed on the Warehouse page, if you’re interested in contacting him.

I bought some spirulina tablets (they look exactly like the picture at the top of this entry) at my local supplements store, and haven’t really noticed the taste, which is supposedly objectionable. Well, I am swallowing the tablets rather than chewing, but it seems to me that you could mix this stuff in with bread dough in order to stretch out the wheat, and no one would complain too much. At least not enough to riot about. Hint, Third World Leaders, Hint.

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In Defense of Thomas Edison

Posted on February 12, 2011 by engineerzero

Hey, it’s Edison’s birthday and Google’s doodle today is about Edison. And the Tesla Cult is angry about it.

When I was growing up, Thomas Edison was regarded as a hero. His reputation has been tarnished in recent years by what can almost be called a Tesla Cult. I was carried along by the Tesla Cult for a while, and then I realized one day that none of Tesla’s inventions actually worked.

Okay, that’s a little strong, but the Tesla Mystique is mainly flash and not much substance. You say, “But he invented AC electric power!” No, actually, others were experimenting with it at the time, and anyhow AC power is what comes naturally off a generator as the shaft spins between the poles.

Once you realize that Tesla didn’t even invent what is his primary claim to fame, the entire Tesla Myth quickly deconstructs itself.

After all, Tesla also claimed to have invented a death beam. Well, it’s been a hundred years, and where is it? And what about his claims to broadcast power economically, and about being able to extract energy from the atmosphere? He also claimed to have received intelligent signals from Mars. You would think that in a century afterwards, someone on this planet would have caught up with him.

Based on his propensity to make grandiose claims for inventions that never materialized, I have my doubts about Tesla’s character, frankly.

Now, you may have heard the story about how Edison once employed Tesla and said that he would give fifty thousand dollars if certain problems could be solved. Tesla solved the problems and instead of paying up, Edison replied, “You obviously don’t understand the American sense of humor.” And maybe you’re thinking that this story proves that Edison was the jerk and Tesla the great inventor.

All right, but who’s telling us this story? Tesla. And as we’ve just realized, Tesla was prone to make things up. So maybe the truth is that Edison decided to let Tesla go because Tesla wasn’t productive, and in order to salve his pride, Tesla made up the story about how Edison cheated him.

The typical response of the Tesla defender is, “It’s a conspiracy, man! He did invent all kinds of great things! He was a man ahead of his time! It’s just that the government confiscated all his plans when he died.” And so today his plans for a system to pull limitless free electrical power from the atmosphere reside in that warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

When Tesla died, he had been living in a hotel room for years without paying the bill. Don’t you think he could have come up with just one little invention during that time to cover his expenses? How about consulting work? The greatest electrical genius of all time, and he can’t get consulting work? Something’s not adding up here.

I have a conspiracy theory too about Edison and Tesla. My theory is that the big financiers back in that day were trying to set up an electricity trust just like they’d set up a railroad trust and a steel trust. But to do that, you need to neutralize the dominant figure in the electrical power industry, Thomas Edison. And how do you topple a man who not only owns all the patents but is regarded as a planetary hero?

Well, one day you and your cronies are sitting around smoking stogies at the Gentleman’s Club, and one of you says, “Hey, you know, there’s talk in the engineering community about how AC power is better than DC power. And it just so happens that Edison thinks AC power is dangerous, so all his patents are for DC devices. If we could get someone to champion AC power, then we could build AC power transmission grids and run Edison out of business.”

In Tesla they found their man — someone who obviously despised Edison and wouldn’t let a little thing like truth get in his way. So the Trusters made Tesla their champion — and dare you question his reputation, why that just means that you’re stupid and evil.

Tesla had a good run as the poster boy for the Power Trust folks, but then Edison saw the writing on the wall and capitulated, and then the Power Trusters had no further use of Tesla and stopped financing him and promoting him, and so Tesla dwindled into an obscure old age of unpaid hotel bills and pigeon-love (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it does suggest he had lots of free time on his hands whereas Edison was working diligently up to his death).

Now, the low point of the Tesla Cult’s attack against Edison is the assertion that Edison wantonly tortured animals by electrocuting them in order to claim that AC power was dangerous, so that he could continue to make money from DC power. “Torturing innocent animals for greedy profit! How low can you get!”

Well, in the first place, the animals selected were going to be put to death anyhow because they had either attacked humans or were approaching the end of their lifespans. What Edison was doing was more humane than the slaughterhouse — which is to say, what millions of people are complicit in every time they have a hamburger.

And even more importantly, Edison was tragically and prophetically right. He was trying to warn us as graphically as possible that AC power is much more dangerous than DC power. Literally, he was trying to stop a human genocide at the hands of the electrical power industry.

The danger was and is so great that in 2001, 411 people were electrocuted accidentally in the US. The number of deaths from accidental electrocution runs to thousands for the entire world each year, and perhaps totals around a million since the dawn of the electrical age. And most of these people died from being electrocuted by AC power, which even its proponents acknowledge is more lethal than DC.

“But we have to use AC power because it’s more efficient for transmission over long distances.” I have always accepted this as true, but then there’s this disturbing admission in the wikipedia article on power transmission lines: “High-voltage direct current (HVDC) technology is used only for very long distances (typically greater than 400 miles, or 600 km) . . . .”

Let’s admit it, I and probably you as well lack the training and experience and financial facts to know for sure whether AC or DC power is cheaper over long distances. We have to trust the electrical power industry cost accountants. And did they ever factor in the relative public safety risk that Edison was so concerned about?

But there’s one thing I do know for sure, and that’s which of these guys spent more time grooming his hair:

And I guess I also know which one of these dudes is proud of his extremely popular invention . . .

. . . and which is trying to distract with flash and noise from the fact that he doesn’t have a marketable invention . . .

Well, I do admit Tesla Coils are cool. But as far as jumping all over Edison versus Tesla, it’s been a century and we don’t know what really happened between the two men, so maybe we should just give it a rest. Then maybe we could take the time we save from not bickering and spend it instead on making inventions of our own. And you know, that might even be cooler than a Tesla Coil.

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Reed Switch and Transistor

Posted on February 10, 2011 by engineerzero
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Near Miss versus Near Collision

Posted on February 9, 2011 by engineerzero

Just so everyone is clear, a near collision is a miss, and a near miss is a collision. But what are we to make of this Google count:

Anyhow, if the Internets are going to be that inaccurate, then I feel okay about putting up this image even though the shadows are wrong and all that:

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Plane Near-Collision in Sketchup

Posted on February 8, 2011 by engineerzero

In the news this morning was a story about a near collision of a 777 American Airlines jetliner with a pair of US Air Force C-17 cargo planes. Here’s what the graphic looked like on ABC News:

Well, I realize that the important thing is that everybody is safe, but insofar as better graphics can help us better understand what happened and how to avoid it in the future, let’s talk about graphics.

The above graphic is fine for a major television network — twenty years ago. But compare it to what I can throw together in a few minutes after a visit to the Google Sketchup 3D Warehouse:

I would recommend that news media graphics departments look into using Sketchup resources. Now, there are a lot of graphics software packages that can render better than Sketchup, but consider the possibilities opened up by the resources available in Google Sketchup 3D Warehouse and Google Earth. I was able to not only download a model of a 777 jetliner, it was already in American Airlines livery too!

Also, there are third-party rendering engines that can make Sketchup models look very realistic, so perhaps even in rendering it’s Advantage Sketchup. I think the real advantages with Sketchup, however, is that you can easily move around in the model to get a more dramatic and informative view, and that with a little training anyone (even reporters themselves) can use Sketchup. And it’s free, that’s important too to the departmental bottom line!

(Perceptive observers will note that the C-17 wheel wells are missing both the wheels and doors. The model I downloaded was in wheels-down configuration and it wasn’t a simple matter of deleting the wheels to put it in wheels-up configuration as happened with the 777 model. I could fix this if I had the time — and if I was being paid.)

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