As an idea for technology, my dad and I decided to build a little robot. The robot consisted of two motors, a battery holder, two switches, paper clips, and rubber tubing. Connecting all these things together in a certain way, would make the bot move around, but when the feelers touched an obstacle, the bot would move in other direction. To get the main components needed for this little beetle bot, we decided to take apart my old Robopet, which wasn’t really working anymore. We had wires, two small motors, and a battery holder, but this still wasn’t enough. We went to the electronics store to buy two small switches. Then, while doing some spring cleaning in my room some time later, I found an old mini cooper electronic car. We took that apart too, and saved all the parts in case we needed them for something else. We took an on/off switch from the car, and three wheels to add a little personal touch. We did everything almost the same, electronic circuit wise, except that we added an on/off switch. Halfway through construction we realised that our super glue wasn’t holding properly the bits of plastic together, so went out and bought a hot glue gun, which worked very well. Here is where the mistakes started. Everything was soldered, glued, ready. We didn’t test it, but we poured hot glue all over the wires to make them stay down. Then we got the feelers ready, and let her rip! But our little beetle bot, first of all, wasn’t going as fast as we taught he was going to go, and when he bumped into obstacles, such as a wall, he just stopped. I suppose there are some different factors which affected the failure of the obstacle avoiding feature we were trying to create, firstly, there wasn’t near enough power in the motors, and we realised we must have something wrong with the wiring, so took all that wasted hot glue off, and rechecked everything. Everything was in its proper place, but using a multimeter, we found that the switches weren’t reversing the polarities like they should, they were completely stopping the current. We also found that there was some resistance in the motors, which probably explains the obvious lack of speed. Conclusion: a fail objective wise, but a win in gaining experience with hot glue guns, soldering and general electronic circuit workings.

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HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is basically a language for computers which can tell what you want your website to look like. Using HTML you can decide to move that border a couple of centimeters to the right, or change the colour of that text, or even add images and links. In this post I’ll just be focusing on the image tag (kind of “grammar” needed to put an image on your website) and the anchor tag.

• The anchor tag is called ‘anchor’, because it is used to attach a link to an image or text, i.e. you ‘anchor’ on a link. It is basically for when you click on an image or line of text, a link (which was attached) will open. There are specific details you can change. For example, you can decide if the link will open into a new tab or window, or even on the same page. You can also choose to open it in a new tab/window, depending on what the person clicking has put in his/her settings. In order to say what the link is ‘anchored’ onto, the tag has an open and finish. Here is an example:

 <A HREF="http://fany.savina.net" target="_blank"> This is a link to my website. </A>

HREF indicates what the link is.

Target is whether it will open in a new window, or stay on the same page.

"_blank" means it will open in a new window but will depend on the users settings. Then comes the actual text that will be linked. And then the tag finishes to indicate that only the text within it has a link.

• Next is the image tag. This is pretty simple. It is for adding an image to a document or page. You can decide the size of the image (width, length), if you want a link, what the image is, where it is placed, etc.  Here is an example:

<img src="http://fany.savina.net/favicon.ico" width="100">

src is an abbreviation of 'source'. This is to give the location of your image in your server. If the computer doesn't know where to look for the image, then he won't find it and won't be able to display it.

width="100" is (duh) to define the width of the image. You can also define the length, but you must know what lengths and widths go together for your picture (If your picture is originally a rectangle but you give proportions of a square, such as 100x100, your image will be deformed). The proportions are always in pixels. You can add something to say it is in centimeters or inches, but if nothing is put, the computer assumes it is in pixels. By the way, the image I gave was the file for my little house (the one next to the title of this website up above).

So now you know about these two tags. If you want to use them but with different options, there are plenty of sites which offer all the settings you could possible have and what they do, how to use them etc. Just search something like ‘how to use an anchor tag?’ or ‘how to customise an img tag?’. Thanks for reading and I hope you found this useful! Have fun adding those links and images!

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Hertz, is a company which rents out cars, but the hertz I will talk about is the unit of frequency. Frequency is defined as a number of cycles per unit time, meaning the number of times an event repeats in a given amount of time. When we say one hertz, we mean that an event was repeated once in one second. The abbreviation for hertz is Hz. We always use one second as the amount of time.
Hertz was named after a German physicist named Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Heinrich was the first to demonstrate satisfactorily the existence of electromagnetic waves. He did this by building a machine that could produce and detect radio waves. The name was proposed in the late 1920′s by German scientists in honour Heinrich. It replaced the previous name, cycles per second (cps), in 1933.

Hertz is used for many things. It is mostly used for radio and audio waves. It also occurs in alternating current. However, it can also be applied to any event. For example, a clock ticks at one hertz, one cycle per second.

This SI unit (abbreviation for International System of Units) was named after a person. As with all other SI units named after proper nouns, the first letter of the symbol is uppercase (Hz). However, when an SI unit is spelled out, it should always begin in lowercase, unless it begins a sentence or has another grammar rule to force it into uppercase (hertz).

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As said in my earlier post, I was building a kitchen timer. I explained the main components needed to make it work and now I got to soldering my first electronic circuit. I had my dad help me out, and according to him, I did a pretty good job, for a beginning beginner  . We started with the middle and worked our way out, until doing the LEDs the whole way around and then the battery. Here are some photos. There aren’t many in between the start and end of the soldering because we didn’t take any pauses, we just kept soldering.

Thanks to Dad who took some of the pictures and sacrificed the morning of his day off for me. And thanks to Mum who made this gorgeous apple pie after that didn’t even last five minutes on the table. Below is a video demonstrating my awesome new timer.

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George Boole was born in Lincoln, England on the 2nd of November 1815. His father had a love for mathematics and he taught George his knowledge. By the age of eight, George wanted to know more than what his father could teach him. A family friend taught him Latin and by the time he was 12, he could translate texts in Latin. Soon he was fluent in German, Italian, and French. When he was sixteen he became an assistant teacher and then by the time he was 20, he had opened his own school. Soon George published his first paper (Researches on the Theory of Analytical Transformations) at age 24. Very soon he saw that he could apply his algebra to solve logical problems. In his 1847 work, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, he argued that logic was mathematics, and not philosophy. This paper won him some respect from others of the same opinion and it also earned him a place in faculty of Ireland’s Queen’s College (now called University College Dublin).
Now that he was free of running his school, he worked harder and in greater detail on his theory. He was determined to find a way to solve logical problems mathematically. He then came up with what could be called some sort of linguistic algebra, and the three most basic operations he had was AND, OR, and NOT. Boole’s system was only on a binary approach, meaning there were only two objects processed (yes-no, true-false, zero-one). Considering his stature, his idea was mostly either criticised or completely ignored. However, Charles Sanders Pierce liked the idea and twelve years after Boole had published it, Pierce gave a brief speech about it and then got to work to expand it, realising the potential use it had in electronic circuitry. He eventually designed an electric logical circuit. He never actually built his circuit, but he integrated ‘Boolean’ algebra into his university logic philosophy classes. Eventually, one of his students, Claude Shannon, liked the idea and continued it.

George Boole published many other papers regarding other subjects, but he is most known for the boolean algebra. Unfortunately, he died unexpectedly on the 8th of December 1864, at the age of 49. He had walked in the rain for a long time to arrive to his class on time. He then lectured in his wet clothes and he died of a harsh cold. Boolean algebra is still used today in electronic circuits.

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On an ongoing project of building a Kitchen Timer, there are many things that I do not know what they are or what they are for. Here is a an explanation for four of these things:

• Capacitor: a capacitor is in a way like a battery. It stores passing energy on a circuit. Unlike a battery, which creates new electrons to store them, a capacitor just stores already existing electrons. Also unlike a battery, a capacitor can completely empty itself within milliseconds. A battery would take at least a few minutes. Capacitors are used in camera flashes because of their ability to charge and decharge quickly. For the flash to be effective, the capacitor gets full, and when the picture gets taken, the capacitor lets all it’s electricity out to create that sudden bright light. A capacitor’s storage can vary and it also depends on the number of volts on the current: a low storage capacitor would be much more efective on a low voltage current, and a high storage capacitor would be better on a high voltage current.
  

  My Integrated Circuit

• Integrated Circuit: an integrated circuit, or most commonly known as a chip, or microchip, is a mini electronic circuit built on a wafer of pure silicon crystals. On top of the wafers are millions or thousands of tiny resistors, transistors and capacitors. They are used in almost all electronic devices and are also in some cars.


My Resistors

• Resistor: resistors restrict the amount of current flowing through a circuit. This could be used for a light, to make the bulb shine brightly, and then to make it dim. Resistors can only ‘resist’ up until a certain number of ohms (SI unit of resistance). To know how much the resistor can stop, colour codes are used. There are bands of colour around the resistors which are used to know each digit in the amount of ohms able to resist. For example, one of the resistors in my kit has the colours: ‘orange’ ‘orange’ ‘brown’ ‘gold’. This should turn out as 3.3 ohms using the colour code here.


My Transistor

• Transistor: a transistor is a device used to 1) amplify or 2) switch electronic currents. 1, when it amplifies, it takes in a feeble, or small, current on one side and transforms it into a stronger, bigger current and it goes out the opposite way it came. It basically boosts up the input current to create a larger output current. 2, when it switches, the small current entering has the ability to allow or deny a larger current from entering the transistor. Basically, the smaller current can turn the bigger current on or off, like a switch.

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As a sort of experiment, I decided to see how much certain appliances in my house cost my parents. At first, as a control, I unplugged everything and I even switched off the fridge. This is to prevent another thing consuming electricity and compromising the results. On my list of appliances was: 1) the electric kettle, 2) the toaster, 3) all the integrated lights turned on, 4) the projector, sound system, and blu-ray player, (everything needed to watch a movie). I tried each one individually, switching them off as I was finished with them to make sure the next appliance was the only thing consuming. The way I got my results was that I timed myself for one minute and counted how many times I saw the red line (black in my case) on the rotating piece of metal under the numbers indicating the watts consumed. I tried each appliance three times to make sure I got an average and here is what the results looked like:

Here is an average of the rotations:

On the electric meter, it was indicated that 187.5 revolutions (rotations of the line) was equal to 1 kilo watt. This means that if the line revolved 187 and a half times, the numbers on top would be bigger by one unit. To find out how many watts were used in only one turn, I did a simple 3 rule. 1000 watts is equal to 1 kilo watt.

per turn

And then, I calculated how much each appliance used in watts by multiplying the number of watts per rotation with the number of turns I counted for the appliances..

Kettle=

Toaster=

Lights=

Projector and Co.=

I then went on to find out how much it cost money-wise. On a recent electricity bill, I saw the price at:

14.10 cents per kilo watt.

The problem was that my previous calculations weren’t in kilo watts but in watts. Once I had the watts, I had to simply divide by 1000 to convert them to kilo watts, and multiply by the price (14.10 cents) and then convert the price to euros (divide by 100).
Here is a table with the appliance, the number of watts consumed, and the price:

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Electricity is a general term for a wide range of events resulting from the presence or flow of an electric charge. These events could be things commonly known such as lightning or static electricity, but an other event possible could be electromagnetic fields. People have been aware of the shocks they received from electric fish and eels for a long time. Old Egyptian texts found named these fish as ‘Thunderers of the Nile’ and they were proclaimed as the ‘protectors’ of all fish. Later on, Ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic physicians wrote about these fish. They knew of the numbing effect of the shocks, and they knew the shocks could move with conducting objects. These electric fish were used as medicine to cure gout or headaches. The theory was that the sudden shock would shake away the sickness. Thales of Miletos made a series of observations around the year 600 BC concerning static electricity. He believed the static was because the objects he rubbed became magnetized because of friction. After him, electricity was no more than an abstract curiosity for millennia until 1600. In the early 19th century, the work became more precise and extensive experiments and observations were made. In the late 19th century, electricity was discovered and it became a tool in science and modern life instead of a scientific curiosity. People like Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison showed up and electricity became a necessary force for the Second Industrial Revolution.

Electricity comes from atoms. The protons and neutrons create the center, the nucleus. The protons are positively charged and electrons, which rotate around the nucleus, are negatively charged. The neutrons, hence the name, are neutral. They are not charged. The actual electricity comes from when the electrons move from one atom to the other. Negatively-charged electrons are always attracted to positively-charged protons.

Some atoms are excellent at conducting because there are tracks which the electrons follow. The electrons mostly stick to the closest track to the nucleus because it requires less energy. If the track the most extended to the outside is clear enough of other electrons, the electrons can jump from one track to another and exit their previous atom to enter a new one. These atoms are Conductors. If the track isn’t clear or if the atom holds on tightly to it’s electrons, the electrons cannot move and no electricity is created. Another reason why some atoms conduct better than others is because of their Atomic Number. This number is written on the periodic table of the elements, and it basically tells you how many protons are in the nucleus of one atom from that element. The positively-charged protons attract negatively-charged electrons, making the passing from one atom to the other more tempting and once the electrons are moving, the attraction makes it easier for them to move.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity,http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/info/conductors.html,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_number,http://www.pcguide.com/ref/power/ext/basicsWhat-c.html

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