Electronics & Software

Several prior developments are combined. Some developments reported in prior NASA Tech Briefs articles on primary electrochemical power cells containing lithium anodes and fluorinated carbonaceous (CFx) cathodes have been combined to yield a product line of cells optimized for...

Optical injection locking has been demonstrated to be effective as a means of stabilizing the wavelength of light emitted by a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) that is an active element in the frequency-control loop of an opto-electronic oscillator (OEO) designed to implement an atomic...

In a proposed method of determining the resistances of individual DC electrical devices (e.g., batteries or fuel-cell stacks containing multiple electrochemical cells) connected in a series or parallel string, no attempt would be made to perform direct measurements on individual devices....

The widest available operational amplifier, with the best voltage and current noise characteristics, is considered for transimpedance amplifier (TIA) applications where wide bandwidth is required to handle fast rising input signals (as for time-of-flight measurement cases). The added amplifier inside the...

A performability-oriented conceptual framework for software rejuvenation has been constructed as a means of increasing levels of reliability and performance in distributed stateful computing. As used here, “performability-oriented” signifies that the construction of the framework is...

The R4SA GUI mentioned in the immediately preceding article is a user-friendly interface for controlling one or more robot(s). This GUI makes it possible to perform meaningful real-time field experiments and research in robotics at an unmatched level of fidelity, within minutes of setup. It provides such powerful...

A neural-network mathematical model that, relative to prior such models, places greater emphasis on some of the temporal aspects of real neural physical processes, has been proposed as a basis for massively parallel, distributed algorithms that learn dynamic models of possibly complex external...

A logical connection between the survivability of living systems and the complexity of their behavior (equivalently, mental complexity) has been established. This connection is an important intermediate result of continuing research on mathematical models that could constitute a unified representation of...

An inter-symbol guard time has been proposed as a means of synchronizing the symbol and slot clocks of an optical pulse-position modulation (PPM) receiver with the symbol and slot periods of an incoming optical PPM signal. (Such synchronization is necessary for correct identification of received...

Two developments improve the utilization of flash memory devices in the face of the following limitations: (1) a flash write element (page) differs in size from a flash erase element (block), (2) a block must be erased before its is rewritten, (3) lifetime of a flash memory is typically...

A miniaturized instrumentation package comprising a (1) Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, (2) an inertial measurement unit (IMU) consisting largely of surface-micromachined sensors of the microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) type, and (3) a microprocessor, all residing on a single circuit...

A computer program converts, into a format suitable for processing on Earth, files of downlinked telemetric data pertaining to the operation of the Instrument Deployment Device (IDD), which is a robot arm on either of the Mars Explorer Rovers (MERs). The raw downlinked data files are in comma-separated-value...

This data- and event-driven persistent storage system leverages the use of commercial software provided by Oracle for portability, ease of maintenance, scalability, and ease of integration with embedded, client-server, and multi-tiered applications. In this role, the Service Management Database (SMDB)...