Thursday, June 26, 2014

Electric Harley?

Some folks will get on the bike thinking "golf cart" and get off thinking "rocket ship".

I learned today of the newest project (and likely a product) at Harley Davidson Motorcycles - a new electric Harley called the LIVE WIRE.  While this is fairly revolutionary in itself - how I learned of it was even a bit odd.  I get a regular email from the ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS website - usually specializing in news about new components, better ways to do things, new test gear and such. They cater to the electronics manufacturers and designers mostly - but as new products can often shape how we build our projects or how the new consumer electronics will work - I usually give a once over to news from this source.
   Imagine my surprise when it lists the ELECTRIC HARLEY as an item!   I put a bit more of the specifications and a link to the story and some pics and videos on the main site - if you you want to check them out. Impressive and very radical motorcycle. Zero to Sixty in under 4 seconds - so its not a golf cart by the way.. lol

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Online Radio & Video Explosion?

     I can remember clearly the first time I was in a restaurant eating lunch with some other IT staff in the big city of Midland and heard some ordinary folks at another table mention "downloading".  I had been doing file downloads for nearly 20 years but had not heard anyone in public mention it.  Back then the Internet was a scarce wisp of what it is now, and an electronic or online BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM or BBS was one of the main ways we shared files, asked questions and played some online games. 
     Facebook was not around, cell phones were rather large and expensive, and Windows 95 was new.  Online streaming radio was pretty rare and video online was typically poor quality or very expensive.  About this same time I did install a fairly nice video conferencing system - the end I put in was about $25,000 if I remember.  It required two expensive high end modems for two ISDN lines with the phone company and a specially built PC with a motorized camera and fancy graphics.  A huge (then) 25" monitor did the video.  The whole rig took a rather large cart to move it around in a conference room. Through it - with a special scheduled call through AT&T we could video conference with another office. If memory serves - it was probably several dollars a minute for the call from the phone company.

    Today a cell phone can do better video conference work.  A laptop and a decent Internet connection is far better than what we had - but again this was almost 20 years ago.   We today see thousands of new videos on youtube every hour.  And anyone can put a video together for nothing and share it.  What a jump from what we had 20 years ago - and so much more than what we could call handheld when i first got interested in electronics in the early 60s.   A nice 7 transistor radio was a couple of weeks of yard work for a boy - and was only AM. We did not have an FM station in our small north Texas town.  But at night we could tune in some grand stations from 600 miles away and hear some real rock n roll. 

    
Compare that now to my newest toy - a USB dongle SDR radio. It can tune in certain types of TV broadcasts in much of the world (not the USA though) and if you use the right software it can listen to from around 30mhz to over 1000 mhz in frequency - catching much in the two way radio and higher frequency ham bands, some satelite signals and aircraft position beacons.  Picture a 14$ gadget you plug into your laptop or PC, and watch to see what planes are in your area - and their direction and alitude - a poor mans radar system. The software is free and the little SDR radios will pick up FM too.  They do more - but that is another story - if you are interested check SDR USB on ebay or look at my article on www.oldhackers.com.