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Tesla vs Edison - AC vs DC - What's Changed?

Posted by Joe George at

Current Wars More than one hundred years ago when commercial power distribution was just beginning, two inventors Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla competed to see who could better supply electrical power economically and efficiently.Edison picked Direct Current (DC) for his first foray into commercial power distribution and Tesla picked Alternating Current (AC). It was a rancorous public battle; but Tesla was right, and not just by a little bit. AC power has the distinct advantage that its voltage can be easily increased or decreased with a transformer. This allows the voltage to be increased to thousands of volts for long...

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Eureka caused a Pivot to Home Automation

Posted by Joe George at

It has been a while since our last post due to the "Pivot". Our initial concept for our products was easy to use modules that could be snapped together to build cool stuff quickly. That hasn't really changed but the focus of the modules is now home automation.Last year we watched the SyFy TV series Eureka on Netflix. The show is set in a fictional town in Oregon called Eureka that is inhabited by scientific geniuses. One of the characters in the show I liked the most was SARAH. SARAH is the artificial intelligence that controlled the sheriffs house. Most...

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Our Own URL Shortening - emus.us

Posted by Joe George at

Engimusing has been working hard developing our three initial product lines. One of the product lines is on a 48mm x 48mm (1.9" x 1.9") format. The other two are on a 20mm x 20mm (0.79" x 0.79") format as shown in the image. Many of our boards are packed tightly and it is very hard to fit the descriptive silkscreen text between all the pads and holes. Fortunately we have the Internet now days so if the board has a URL we can find the documentation. Since URLs can get pretty big some smart people came up with URL...

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Multitasking - Oh How Terrible :)

Posted by Joe George at

Human multitasking is getting a lot of bad press lately. The point is that if you are trying to do more than one thing at once it isn't very efficient. You may even get less done than if you do the tasks one at a time. I think the capability for multitasking varies greatly. I have had employees that could solder quickly and reliably while carrying on an animated conversation with the person next to them. Others can not work and talk at the same time at all. Then there are those who can't talk while driving without looking at...

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Modules and Busses

Posted by Joe George at

It is ideal when we design modules if we can generalize the interface between them so that they communicate in a standard way. This has traditionally been done using a bus protocol. In the early days large circuit cards were required for functions that now are contained in a small part of an integrated circuit. So there may have been multiple memory cards that plugged into a backplane using a standard bus protocol. All the I/O options were also plug in cards. Even the processor required a card of its own. As circuitry has decreased in size, more functions have...

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