The Chinese Solar Machine Layer by Layer Fire in the Library The Mystery Behind Anesthesia
Roll over, Tom Edison. Drawing on new semiconductor technology, muscular offshoots of those dainty colored dots could shine bright white light that illuminates the world.
In fact, the couch is red. It's always red, and only the light shining on it from dozens of tiny spotlights changes, as Color Kinetics demonstrates the effects possible with its digital lights. Each little lamp contains red, green and blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which light up in varying combinations under computer control. "We're revolutionizing the lighting industry with what we consider a disruptive technology," enthuses company president George Mueller, tall and ponytailed with the Gen-X standard goatee. "It's a new way to create light."
Mueller and his co-founder, Ihor Lys, have married computer software to a decade of advances in LED technology. LEDs have become ubiquitous in daily life, glowing from the faces of VCRs, clock radios and microwave ovens. But these LEDs have been humble indicator lights on all manner of electronic appliances. Once limited in brightness and stuck at the red end of the spectrum, LEDs have become more powerful in the past dozen years. And a breakthrough in the early 1990s created blue LEDs, suddenly making the whole rainbow available and holding up the promise of white-light LEDs-either by blending the output of colored LEDs or by more exotic techniques. Color Kinetics buys LEDs from device makers such as Agilent and Cree and incorporates them in lamps that give off virtually any color-changing a white wall or a store display from pale green to hot pink at a whim.
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Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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