The Ingenious Micro Mechanisms in Your Phone
Really nice treatment of the current crop of MEMS accelerometers and gyros.
Really nice treatment of the current crop of MEMS accelerometers and gyros.
Want to Know How Our Modern Accelerometers and Gyroscopes Work?
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Sooner Boomer
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We used MEMS accelerometers in the mid 90's to measure human performance. They were a lot bigger then...
simply unbelievable how far we have come in making things miniature with such accuracy.
lakeroadster
When in doubt... build hell-for-stout!
Thanks for posting this @OverTheTop, that was awesome. The guy does a fan-freaking-tastic job of explaining something complex... so good in fact a simple minded gear head such as myself can understand it.
... In my best Crocodile Dundee voice, "you call that a gyro?! That's not a gyro! THIS is a Gyro:"
About 1954 vintage Sperry, on board the SS Red Oak Victory ship.
The compass floats on a bath of liquid Mercury:
That's ok, the vacuum tubes that control the servos have more mercury, radioactive nickel, thorium, etc in them. Not to mention lead solder...
Here's the motor generator, 120vDC to 50vAC 70Hz (!)
Yes, it works. .or at least it did, last time we powered up...
About 1954 vintage Sperry, on board the SS Red Oak Victory ship.The compass floats on a bath of liquid Mercury:
That's ok, the vacuum tubes that control the servos have more mercury, radioactive nickel, thorium, etc in them. Not to mention lead solder...
Here's the motor generator, 120vDC to 50vAC 70Hz (!)
Yes, it works. .or at least it did, last time we powered up...
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@cls Love that old sh*t. In the mid '80s I worked on a Navy computer from the 1960's that had NO IC chips, Sperry Univac 1219.
The CPU was the middle upper drawer! Total memory was 24KB in 4KB cubes, 4" x 4" x 8", plug in blocks of core memory in the lower center memory drawer. 18 bit words and 2 uSec cycle time and the whole program was written in Octal machine code. It wasn't even assembler code. We troubleshot it with a logic probe down to the individual gates in the CPU.
Today, you can get 1000 times the capability and speed from a cheap cell phone.
The CPU was the middle upper drawer! Total memory was 24KB in 4KB cubes, 4" x 4" x 8", plug in blocks of core memory in the lower center memory drawer. 18 bit words and 2 uSec cycle time and the whole program was written in Octal machine code. It wasn't even assembler code. We troubleshot it with a logic probe down to the individual gates in the CPU.
Today, you can get 1000 times the capability and speed from a cheap cell phone.
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