Category: Technology

Pi Zero Camera

[From https://picamera.readthedocs.io/%5D

The 1.2 model of the Raspberry Pi Zero includes a small form-factor CSI port which requires a camera adapter cable to attach a camera module to a Pi Zero:

  1. Remove the existing camera module’s cable by gently lifting the collar on the camera module and pulling the cable out.
  2. Next, insert the wider end of the adapter cable with the conductors facing in the same direction as the camera’s lens.
  3. Finally, attach the adapter to the Pi Zero by gently lifting the collar at the edge of the board (be careful with this as they are more delicate than the collars on the regular CSI ports) and inserting the smaller end of the adapter with the conductors facing the back of the Pi Zero.

Your setup should look something like this:
2.2. Testing

Now, apply power to your Pi. Once booted, start the Raspberry Pi Configuration utility and enable the camera module:
_images/enable_camera.png
You will need to reboot after doing this (but this is one-time setup so you won’t need to do it again unless you re-install your operating system or switch SD cards). Once rebooted, start a terminal and try the following command:

raspistill -o image.jpg

If everything is working correctly, the camera should start, a preview from the camera should appear on the display and, after a 5 second delay it should capture an image (storing it as image.jpg) before shutting down the camera. Proceed to the Basic Recipes.
If something else happens, read any error message displayed and try any recommendations suggested by such messages. If your Pi reboots as soon as you run this command, your power supply is insufficient for running your Pi plus the camera module (and whatever other peripherals you have attached).

Power and Charge Wirelessly

[From Wikipedia] Wi-Charge is an Israeli company developing technology and products for far-field wireless power transfer using focused infrared beams. Wi-Charge was founded in 2012 by Victor Vaisleib, Ori Mor and Ortal Alpert. The company is developing a unique far-field wireless power technology based on infrared laser beams. In 2015, Wi-Charge demonstrated its first prototype capable of charging small electronic devices.[1] In 2017, the company claimed to obtain compliance with international safety standards. During CES 2018, Wi-Charge demonstrated simultaneous charging of multiple devices from a single transmitter.[2] Wi-Charge claims to deliver power using focused beams of invisible infrared light. The system consists of a transmitter and a receiver. Transmitter connects to a standard power outlet and converts electricity into infrared laser beam. Receivers use a miniature photo-voltaic cell to convert transmitted light into electrical power. Receivers can be embedded into a device or connected into an existing charging port. The transmitter automatically identifies chargeable receivers and start charging. Several devices can charge at the same time. According to Wi-Charge it can deliver several watts of power to a device at several meters away.[3] The core technology is based on a distributed laser resonator which is formed by the retroreflectors within the transmitter and the receiver.[4] This unique concept allows the charging of multiple devices without any moving components and if an opaque object enters one of the beams the corresponding power transfer is turned off automatically.

A schematic description of typical wireless power transfer using a laser beam. A transmitter converts electricity into a light beam and a receiver on the other side converts the light back to electricity.

Foldable Glass



[From Venturebeat.com] Whether it’s named or used anonymously, Corning’s Gorilla Glass has been a key ingredient in smartphones since the first iPhone — except for folding phones, where the screens are covered in flexible plastic. The reason: Corning says that it’s still working on flexible glass that will meet the specific needs of smartphone users, a development process that could take a couple of years.
Though it went largely uncredited as a development partner for the first iPhone, Corning’s work to create a smartphone screen up to Apple’s standards was down to the wire. In fact, the iPhone’s switch from a plastic screen cover to glass was announced well after the device’s memorable on-stage debut. Over the years, the partnership yielded a series of scratch- and oil-resistant glass panes that could be made harder, thinner, more flexible, or shatter-proof — except not all at the same time.

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For years, Corning was working on a thinner solution — called Willow Glass — that was envisioned specifically for the curved bodies of future wearables. But, according to Wired, the company’s now trying to create an ultrathin, highly and repeatedly bendable glass suitable for folding devices. Unlike plastic, which will eventually develop permanent and visibly distorted creases in its folding zones, the glass will remain in its original shape.
The major challenge now is to simultaneously get the glass to a tight bend radius while enabling it to withstand drops — Corning says it can do one or the other at this point, but not both. For now, the glass can bend to a 3-5mm radius around 200,000 times, but not survive a serious drop event. The company aspires to create a 0.1mm thick glass that can bend to a 5mm radius without breaking.

Whether that radius is tight enough for next-generation foldables remains to be seen, but the inability to survive a drop would be a non-starter for smartphones and tablets  — especially for users of premium devices. Recently announced plastic-screened Samsung and Huawei foldables are slated to hit the market at $2,000 or more, insanely steep prices even for devices that could survive three or four years of normal use.
As the Wired report notes, the bigger problem for plastic-screened devices is that they won’t look as good as the glass smartphones customers are accustomed to. That was the reason Apple was willing to hold out until the last minute for a viable glass solution: The color transmissibility and scratch resistance of glass are visibly superior to plastic. Samsung and Huawei limited media handling of their devices at their launch events and Mobile World Congress booths to obscure these differences, but early foldable phone customers will certainly notice them and may well wish that they waited for later models with next-generation glass.

Quartz Data Storage

[From XME Science] 

Digital storage is incredibly easy and practical, but it has the downside of being prone to data loss. A book stored on your hard drive might last less than a hardcover. After four years, 11% of hard drives will fail. Solid state drives last a tad longer, but after a number of read-write cycles these too will inevitably fail. Cloud storage is your safest bet at the moment, but you’re at the whim of a third party. Now, for most practical purposes this can be fine, but if you need to store important data for … hundreds of years? This might seem absurd, but national archives are very serious about it and invest a lot in networks that backup data over and over. There might now be a more elegant solution after a team reports how they managed to cram 360TB worth of five-dimensional (5D) digital data onto a small quartz disk. The researchers claim the data is stable for as long as 13.8 billion years at temperatures up to 190 degrees Celsius.Southampton University researchers fired femtosecond laser pulses onto a structure of quartz at the nanoscale to write data. They made three layers of nano dots, each layer separate by only five microns. Another laser pulse fired on the structure measures the polarisation of the light. Changes in polarization can be used to read data.

“Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures,” reads a press release.

A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is referred to as unpolarized light. The light emitted by the sun, by a lamp in the classroom, or by a candle flame is unpolarized light. Such light waves are created by electric charges that vibrate in a variety of directions, thus creating an electromagnetic wave that vibrates in a variety of directions.

Databases

Doyle’s Space · Post
Databases
Posting as doylex

I have always been interested in Databases. What got me started? My Mother collected all sorts of stuff like, records, cds, books, baseball cards to name a few. She had stacks and stacks of paper with hand written lists of all these items and the things she was needing (wanting) to add to her collection. There was a computer store in Roswell Mall in Roswell, Georgia that I would check out occasionally for games. This is where I saw Symantec’s Q&A Database program. I immediately thought this would be a cool way to organize her collections. It was relatively inexpensive and I learned it quickly. Using it in DOS on my Compaq Portable I created databases for each of her collections. She was into it and entered lots of the data herself. I printed out her lists to take out to stores when purchasing new collectibles. My boss, Dan McGinn-Combs, at Management Science America, where I worked in Hardware Support, was impressed and bought Q&A. He had me create in-house databases. It was great to collect data for reports and graphs, what management wanted to see. Later he would send me to classes on Microsoft Access, which I would continue using to create databases. My largest project was to create a help-desk database.



Here is some more information from WIKI:
Formally, a “database” refers to a set of related data and the way it is organized. Access to this data is usually provided by a “database management system” (DBMS) consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database (although restrictions may exist that limit access to particular data). The DBMS provides various functions that allow entry, storage and retrieval of large quantities of information and provides ways to manage how that information is organized. The 1980s ushered in the age of desktop computing. The new computers empowered their users with spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 and database software like dBASE. The dBASE product was lightweight and easy for any computer user to understand out of the box. C. Wayne Ratliff, the creator of dBASE, stated: “dBASE was different from programs like BASIC, C, FORTRAN, and COBOL in that a lot of the dirty work had already been done. The data manipulation is done by dBASE instead of by the user, so the user can concentrate on what he is doing, rather than having to mess with the dirty details of opening, reading, and closing files, and managing space allocation.”[19] dBASE was one of the top selling software titles in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Q&A was a database and word processing software program for IBM PC-compatible computers published by Symantec and partners from 1985 to 1998. It was written by a team headed by Symantec founder Dr. Gary Hendrix,[1][2] Denis Coleman, and Gordon Eubanks. Released by Symantec in 1985 for MS-DOS computers, Q&A’s flat-file database and integrated word processing application is cited as a significant step towards making computers less intimidating and more user friendly. Among its features was a natural language search function based on a 600 word internal vocabulary

Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately. Microsoft Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases.[3] Software developers, data architects and power users can use Microsoft Access to develop application software. Like other Microsoft Office applications, Access is supported by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), an object-based programming language that can reference a variety of objects including the legacy DAO (Data Access Objects), ActiveX Data Objects, and many other ActiveX components. Visual objects used in forms and reports expose their methods and properties in the VBA programming environment, and VBA code modules may declare and call Windows operating system operations.
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