Features

Underwater Adhesives Retrofit Pipelines with Advanced Sensors

NASA Technology B y the time the gas you fill your car with hits the engine, it’s been through quite a journey. Even apart from its transformation from organic matter into fossil...

Product of the Month

National Instruments, Austin, TX, has released the PXI-based Wireless Test System (WTS) that combines a PXI vector signal transceiver (VST) and multicore processing technologies to offer a single platform for...

Imitative Robotic Control: The Puppet Master

Service Robots Use Flat Motors to Provide Reliable, Safe Motion

Unlike industrial robots for manufacturing, service robots come with their own specification requirements aimed specifically at the end user, and the most discriminating user at...

Encoders Ensure Position Accuracy of Linear-Torsion Tester

Instron (Norwood, MA) manufactures materials testing equipment and accessories that are used to test samples ranging from components for jet engines to medical syringes. The company’s...

Piezo Drive

The Ensemble QDe™ desktop nanopositioning piezo drive from Aerotech (Pittsburgh, PA) was designed for seamless use with the Ensemble family of drives and controllers. The QDe connects to any Ensemble controller network, enabling...

Linear Stage

Bell-Everman (Goleta, CA) offers the SLS Light sealed linear stage that keeps contamination such as manufacturing debris, particulate, or liquid contaminants outside of the stage housing. The stage measures 80 x 120 mm, and has...

Position and Angle Measurement

The BML series from Balluff (Florence, KY) offers absolute position and angle measurement for installation or direct integration into drive and positioning systems. The magnetically encoded systems with...

Linear Guide System

PBC Linear (Roscoe, IL) released the Compact Series low-profile linear guide system for repeatable linear motion in tight spaces. The system features a 23-mm standard height, and can be configured to adapt to specific...

Linear Encoder

MICRONOR (Newbury Park, CA) introduced the MR303 linear position sensor system for OEM motion control applications. With 100-μm resolution and 50-μm accuracy, the encoder is suitable for medical, MRI, robotic, and industrial...

Rotary Encoders

POSITAL (Hamilton, NJ) released programmable incremental rotary encoders, enabling performance characteristics such as resolution (number of pulses per turn) and incremental pulse direction (A before B or B before A) to be...

PWM Servo Drives

ACS Motion Control (Bloomington, MN) offers the NPMPM Series of dualaxis EtherCAT NanoPWM™ pulse width modulation servo drives. When utilized with the optional 10-MHz laser encoder interface and ServoBoost™ control...

Brushless DC Motors

PITTMAN® Motors, a business unit of AMETEK Precision Motion Control (Harleysville, PA), introduced the EC042B brushless DC motor series. The high-torque-density model is designed as a general-purpose servomotor. Its NEMA 17...

Drives

NORD Gear Corp. (Waunakee, WI) offers the SK 180E drives for applications that do not utilize the scope of functionality found in frequency inverters. The drives focus on the functionality necessary for pumps and conveyor technology....

Kenneth O’Connor, Coatings Engineer, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD

Kenneth O’Connor has worked with NASA Goddard engineers to develop a nanotextured coating with hydrophobic properties. The technology minimizes dust, liquid,...

Products of Tomorrow

The technologies NASA develops don’t just blast off into space. They also improve our lives here on Earth. Life-saving search-and-rescue tools, implantable medical devices, advances in commercial aircraft safety,...

Collaborative Robots Transform Traditional Assembly

Few production arenas are changing as quickly as small parts assembly. The electronics industry, in particular, has seen demand skyrocket past the supply of skilled labor. As conventional...

Computer and Displays Help Control and Maneuver Crew Transportation System

Space-qualified boards and subsystems Aitech Defense Systems Chatsworth, CA 888-248-3248 http://rugged.com/space-products The Boeing Company selected Aitech Defense...

CubeSat Launches With 3D-Printed Components

Windform XT 2.0 3D printing material CRP USA, LLC Mooresville, NC 704-660-0258 www.crp-usa.net A team of students from the University of Kentucky and Morehead State University developed the KySat-2...

Flight Controller Software Protects Lightweight, Flexible Aircraft

NASA Technology Since its founding in 1958, NASA has made profound contributions to aviation, including advancing our understanding of flight mechanics—the study of forces...

Using a Wide-Band Tunable Laser for Optical Filter Measurements

The concept of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) in fiber optic communication networks gained traction when optical amplifiers became available. Able to amplify an...

Product of the Month

CD-adapco, Melville, NY, has released STAR-CCM+® v10.04 simulation software that features a new finite element-based Solid Stress Solver, enabling both computational solid mechanics and computational fluid dynamics from a...

Implementing Color Machine Vision Inspection Systems

Color provides critical information that can improve the reliability of many machine vision inspection applications and make it possible to inspect many products that cannot be inspected in...

Product of the Month: Combiner Block™

The new APC Combiner Block™ from American Photonics Co. (Sarasota, FL) replaces the first turning mirror in many CO2 laser machines to add three new capabilities: a visible alignment laser, a Half...

Quantum Cascade Laser Driver

Electronic noise from quantum cascade laser drivers has long limited the detection threshold of chemical sensors. That may no longer be a problem. Wavelength Electronics (Bozeman, MT) has introduced the QCL LAB...

Silicon Avalanche Photodiode Module

Excelitas Technologies Corp. (Waltham, MA) recently launched the new HeliX™ Silicon Avalanche Photodiode (Si APD) Module, employing its leading-edge Si APD detectors to deliver enhanced performance...

Universal Fluorescence Illumination System

The new Lumen 1600-LED from Prior Scientific (Rockland, MA) is the latest product in Prior’s expanding microscopy illumination product line. The Lumen 1600-LED offers individual control for 16...

Machine Vision Software

To meet the demands of automated visual inspections in the electronics assembly process, EVT (Karlsruhe, Germany) has developed the “ChipControl” command set for its EyeVision image processing software. ChipControl...

High-Speed Streaming Camera

AOS Technologies (Baden, Switzerland) has introduced the PROMON SCOPE G2, a portable high-speed streaming camera system that helps technicians quickly isolate problems to get ailing equipment back up and running....