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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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1 week ago
Rocket’s Return: The UK Space Launch Industry Then and Now
In 1971 the UK joined a very select group of countries by sending an artificial satellite into Earth orbit using a UK-built rocket. Then it gave up. Until now. Are we on the brink of starting again, this time launching from home soil?
1 month ago
The Intelligence of a Swarm
The behaviour of swarms of insects and birds has always fascinated scientists because it appears to demonstrate collective intelligence way beyond that of an individual member. Engineers are now trying to exploit this phenomenon using robots.
2 months ago
Ready for Blast-Off!
The Open University students' Rocket-1 is in New Mexico being prepared for the Spaceport America Cup competition this week.
2 months ago
New Constellations in the Sky
SpaceX has just launched 60 satellites into low Earth orbit as a test run for a future ‘constellation’ containing as many as 12000. Before that a CubeSat, KickSat-2 put 105 tiny ‘Sprite’ satellites into orbit. Isn’t Space too crowded already?
3 months ago
When Redundancy is a Good Thing
The recent crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight EA302 involving the latest version of the Boeing 737 airliner highlights how small changes in design can lead to a catastrophe. In this case, safety had become optional.
3 months ago
Who’s afraid of Intelligent Machines?
Fictional robots have always been supremely intelligent and physically much stronger than feeble humans. The reality is that yes, they can be made more robust than us, but as intelligent? Nowhere near. So, should we be afraid of them?
4 months ago
Getting into Digital Signal Processing Part 3: DACs and Reconstruction
The previous article in this series, Getting into Digital Signal Processing: Sampling & Aliasing, covered the process of converting a continuous analogue signal into a series of digital samples. This time we’ll look at the reverse process.
5 months ago
Getting into Digital Signal Processing Part 2: Sampling & Aliasing
In the first part of this series, Getting into Digital Signal Processing: A Basic Introduction, I talked about why we might choose digital over analogue signal processing. Now let’s start on the how.
5 months ago
Porting FORTHdsPIC to a MikroElektronika Clicker 2 Board
Stalwarts of DesignSpark may remember my occasional posts on ‘Bare-metal coding’ based on my project to create an embedded version of Forth for the Microchip dsPIC33 DSC device. Here I try it on a Clicker 2 board with the EP version of the chip.
6 months ago
The SBC: What is it and do I need one?
Every electronics project nowadays seems to need a digital computer at its heart. The ‘Single Board Computer’ (SBC) is frequently offered as the solution. But what is an SBC and is it really the best choice to solve your digital problems?
6 months ago
Spinning the wheels: Selecting a PMDC motor
My post ‘Spinning the wheels: interfacing PMDC motors to a microcontroller’, covered interface hardware and the use of PWM for speed control. Now let’s look at selecting the right motor for the task in hand.
7 months ago
Getting into Digital Signal Processing: A Basic Introduction
The real world is analogue! So why is every machine or instrument around us in the home or at work increasingly described as 'Digital'? To answer this question, we had better establish what we mean by the word: 'Analogue'.