Part I deals with the fundamental concepts of a typical smart system and its constituent components....

Microelectromenchanical systems (MEMS) is a revolutionary field that adapts for new uses a technology already optimized to accomplish a specific set of objectives. The silicon-based integrated circuits process is so highly refined it can produce millions of electrical elements on a single chip and define their critical dimensions to...

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Winning Design! LEGO Mindstorms NXT Design Patterns for Fun and Competition is about design that works. It’s about building with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT for fun, for education, but especially for competition. Author James Trobaugh is an experienced coach and leader in the FIRST LEGO League. In this book, he shares his hard-won...

Geometric algebra (GA) is a powerful new mathematical system for computational geometry. Although its origins can be traced back to Hermann Grassmann (1844), its development as a language for space–time geometry with applications to all of physics did not begin until 1966. Suddenly, in the year 2000 it was recognized that a specialized...

This book is about designing practical data structures. The practical orientation of this book is due, in no small part, to the fact that I was first trained as a mechanical engineer, and so my tendency is to design things from an engineering point of view, always balancing the ideals of theory with the reality of practice. The engineer in...

The ever decreasing price/performance ratio of microcontrollers makes it economically attractive to replace more and more conventional mechanical or electronic control systems within many products by embedded real-time computer systems. An embedded real-time computer system is always part of a well-specified larger system, which we call an...

Computer users spend a lot of time doing simple, mechanical data manipulation - changing the format of data, checking its validity, finding items with some property, adding up numbers, printing reports, and the like. All of these jobs ought to be mechanized, but it's a real nuisance to have to write a specialpurpose program in a...

Recognizing patterns is at the core of man's attempts to understand the universe that we inhabit. Through the development of sensors and instruments, we have extended our ability to gather data far beyond the range and scale of man's natural senses. As a result we are now able to gather data on phenomena occurring in the far reaches...

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the...

The GIMP project was started in 1995 by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers under the auspices of the GNU Project. The first release was in January 1996, The latest version of GIMP, version 2.6.1, was released on December 21, 2010. Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, GIMP...

Significant advances in optical fiber technology have created a need for an up-to-date book about optical fiber fusion splicing. Over the past 15 years, a variety of new optical fibers including rare-earth-doped fiber, dispersioncompensating fiber, dispersion-matched fiber pairs, and microstructured fiber have been introduced. These...