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| Let's drop in
on Wily and look over his shoulder at his latest project.... |
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Soap
Dispenser Monitor |
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Wily was taking out the
trash to the dumpster behind his house when his cordless phone rang.
It was from a medical company who had a problem. The company
manufactured a wide variety of products. One of the products was an
antibacterial soap dispenser which was used in hospitals. The company
wanted a method to indicate when a 2 liter bottle of soap was empty. They
tried several methods to detect when the bottle was empty but none of the
methods proved robust enough. Wily was intrigued. He asked for more
information... |
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con't page 7 |
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Wily Widget,
the Lone Inventor
with Gadget & Gizmo |
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| WHAT
THE WORLD NEEDS NOW is a....AC
to DC Power Supply with 40KV Isolation |
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This request came from a
company who needed an unusual power supply. They required a low power
DC supply assigned to a high voltage power supply, which was elevated above
earth ground by 20KV. The power supply needed to be connected to the
20KV supply. They said that their circuit performed some logic
function and communicated to a computer through an optical fiber interface.
The logic circuit could operate using a voltage from 2 to 3 volts and only
needed a couple milliamps of average DC current. The kicker with this
system was that to insure no arcing, they wanted the supply to be able to
withstand 40KV with respect to earth ground. Wow!... |
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con't on page 6 |
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Human Walk
Energy Harvesting Generator
By: David Johnson
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There have been many
different experimental methods used to try and harvest some energy from the
body motion of a walking human. Some techniques use piezoelectric wafers, some
use bouncing magnets inside coils and some use some other complex mechanism.
I would love to see some
experiments performed using the system illustrated below. I believe that
this method will prove to be much more efficient at extracting some energy
from the human walk.... |
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story con't on page 4 |
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Gapped
Ferrite Pot Core Inductor
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I got a frantic call from a
company who builds powerful ultrasonic cleaning machines. Their machines
use banks of 50 watt piezoelectric 40KHz transducers. Up to 6 can be
driven by a single driver board. For years they were doing fine. Then,
for some reason the last batch of boards they were getting from their assembly
house were not working right. The units might work for a while but would
then suddenly stop. In each case one or more of the MOSFET power
transistors which made up the driver circuit would be shorted and the unit’s
fuse would be open. They could not figure out why these units were
failing. |
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story
con't on page
3 |
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Bad Floor Sweeper |
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I while back I bought an
electric broom type floor sweeper. We needed something simple and light
weight to pick up dog hair, crumbs and dust from the hard wood floors and the
various throw rugs. The “Swivel Sweeper” seemed like it would be perfect
for this light duty application. After giving the 7.2v battery pack a
full over night charge, I turned the thing on and put it to work. It
seemed to do OK in picking up small bits and dog hair and it was easy to use..... |
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story con't on page 5
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Portable Solar Power System for Fence Installers |
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I while back,
I was watching a crew of two people install a fence along a
street near my house. The main power tools they were using
were a Skill type circular saw and a couple cordless drills.
They had a large flat bed truck with a small gasoline generator
chugging along to supply the 120vac needed for the saw and to
charge the batteries for their cordless drills. They
started their day early in the morning and worked until the late
afternoon. I figured they put in a solid 8 hours of work
each day..... |
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story con't on page 2 |
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