Dear Reader,
 If you are a regular reader, you'll remember that last month we published our 100th newsletter. We asked for you to send us a note if you've been reading since the beginning (or close to it). I appreciate all of the long-term readers who sent me notes and I'm especially pleased to acknowledge Tony Brancato of Tel-Tru Manufacturing who began reading with the third issue of the newsletter in May of 2003. Congratulations Tony for being our longest running continuous reader. Tony also pointed out that he went back to the archives and read the first two issues that he had missed - so he has actually read every one of the BEI monthly newsletters. Thanks again, Tony. Whether you are new to BEI or have been a long-time customer or partner of ours, we thank-you for your business. Contact us any time if we can be of assistance. |
| Good Enough to Eat? |
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 Delicious? no not really. Nutritious?, afraid not. But you could say it was tantalizing, maybe even mouth-watering.
When our BEI Sensors, Europe design group set out to make an encoder for the Food & Beverage industry, they really did it right.
Do you need 316 stainless steel? - check. IP69K? - yep. How about operation to 100 degrees C? No problem. They also included heavy duty bearings, high resolution capability and a streamlined design to minimize pooling after hosing.
If your work takes you to the sort of environments that include caustic washdown, harsh chemical exposure or salt water environments you should take a closer look at this encoder. Despite the food and beverage pedigree, this model is at home where other encoders fear to tread.
So click the picture and treat yourself to a pdf specification. It just might be the only encoder you'll ever need.
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| Thinking Man's Inventor |
 "Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
"People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things."
"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
"Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them."
"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else."
"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."
Many of you may already know of R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller. He was a modern Renaissance man who made made a name for himself by the shear will and strength of his intellect. He is probably best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome and the dymaxion car. He also gave us such memorable phrases as "spaceship earth" and "doing more with less". As he matured he dedicated his life to invention and discovery and sought to push the boundaries of "what one person could do in this world."
Click the picture to read a biography of this extraordinary man.
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| Can You Solve It? |
It's always a good idea to view basic principles from time to time as this example shows.
We got a call from a college student who was using one of our sensors in a lab experiment. He had confirmed that the operating voltage was five volts and that he had an adequate power supply. He bench tested the encoder to make sure it was operational before installation, he even "beeped out" the connections point-to-point to check continuity.
He then installed the encoder and was getting no response in his system. He checked and rechecked and bench tested again, but to no avail. Finally he called. After going over his set-up we asked two critical questions: What cable was he using and how long was the cable run. What did his answers reveal?
A) He had "about 100 feet" of cable and was using "a bundle of speaker wire" that he had lying around. His speaker wire cable was using 28 gauge wire, nominal resistance of 0.065 ohms per foot or 6.5 ohms for 100 feet. With a current draw of 100mA (0.1 Amps), the voltage drop would have been 0.1 X 6.5 = 0.65 volts. Meaning that he only had 4.35 volts at the encoder, below the 5% tolerance. It might have been OK, but then there was an additional voltage drop carrying the data back to his controller, not to mention any noise on the line as well plus any resistance in the connections themselves. Using the continuity tester on his DMM: "beeping" the line only reveals continuity, not overall resistance.
Once he understood the problem, he got a "proper" cable and the problem cleared up. |
| Crazy Machines |
 You may not have heard of "Rube Goldberg", or even realized that there is an annual competition to build the "best" Rube Goldberg machine. You probably didn't even know that there was a World Record to be had for designing and building the most complex one. Well - you've heard about it now!
Rube Goldberg, for the uninitiated, was a cartoonist whose forte was illustrating ways to perform simple everyday tasks in the most complicated and whimsical manner possible. If you've ever played the game called "Mousetrap", then you get the idea.
In the Spirit of Rube, Purdue University found a way to illustrate the history of the world from the big bang through to Armagedon and then rebirth, by building a complex mechanization that requires 244 individual steps. It's a sight to behold. So click on the picture, above and watch this amazing video. |
THANK YOU
We appreciate you giving us your time each month to read our newsletter and give us your feedback. As always, let us know what we can do to help. We're just a phone call or an email away.
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| Spotlight |
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These days we expect information at our fingertips. To help your time-to-market BEI has CAD files for the most popular encoder models. Configure and download 1250 variations on six model families directly to your CAD program. Click the picture above to see the Express Encoder models that are available, then click the download icon to access the CAD drawings. Fair warning - you will need to register (takes about 30 seconds) to download drawings.
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