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Engineer | WGM Consulting
Engineer, PhD, lecturer, freelance technical writer, blogger & tweeter interested in robots, AI, planetary explorers and all things electronic. STEM ambassador. Designed, built and programmed my first microcomputer in 1976. Still learning, still building, still coding today.
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2 weeks ago
Soft Robot Design with Biomimetics
What soft robots lack in hard strength and precision, they make up for with their gentle dexterity handling delicate objects, or their ability to go places other robots cannot reach.
1 month ago
Your new workmate, a Cobot
Industrial robots are big, expensive, inflexible and dangerous to human workers, right? Wrong, the next generation of Collaborative robots or Cobots can operate alongside humans and don’t need to be caged or fenced off.
1 month ago
Cyber Killers: Spectre, Meltdown, Chimera and other Security Horrors
A computer security company has just described very serious security weaknesses in AMD microprocessor devices. This follows similar problems discovered with Intel and ARM-based chips. In this age of automation, just how dangerous are the threats?
2 months ago
Noise, Sensor Fusion and Lost Drones
Motion and environmental sensor technology has come a long way in recent years. Even so, nothing is perfect and autonomous vehicles cannot work safely with a fuzzy view of the world.
3 months ago
Lidar, Radar & Digital Cameras: the Eyes of Autonomous Vehicles
Digital cameras, microwave radar and light radar (Lidar) are being developed at a furious rate to meet the needs of ADAS and the autonomous road vehicle.
3 months ago
Evolution of the Industrial PLC from Controller to Cloud Interface
The industrial revolution has now begun its fourth phase: factories are entering the era of ‘Lights Out’ or fully-automated operation. Industry 4.0 has arrived.
3 months ago
Augmented Reality may really take off in 2018
Augmented Reality (AR) is now moving Virtual Reality on from immersive games into highly-practical applications for the real world.
3 months ago
Are we losing interest in the Internet of Things?
What prompted the question above was a TV commercial for the ‘latest’ must-have gadget for the Connected Home: a camera that allows you to see what’s happening in your living room remotely via a smartphone. Is that the best IoT can do?
10 months ago
The Tolerant Engineer
Following on from 'The Inventor and the Engineer: Hare and the Tortoise', here is some more detail on designing compliant hardware fit for production.
1 year ago
The Inventor and the Engineer: Hare and the Tortoise
The current ‘Gadget’ bubble may be deflating. Can Engineers or Professional Makers turn an Inventor’s dream into a successful product?
1 year ago
RF Communications and the Internet of Things - Part 5
This fifth and final part of my wander through the world of wireless digital communication covers relatively long-range working. By ‘long-range’ I mean up to about 20km as opposed to the really, really long distances described in Part 2.
1 year ago
RF Communication and the Internet of Things – Part 3
In Part 1 I talked about the calculation of a Link Budget in order to determine the transmitter power and receiver sensitivity required to communicate over a given range. Part 2 showed how noise and interference levels determine the maximum data rate achievable.