LVDTs are fun! I bought one for a project a few years ago (since abandoned), and have been slowly designing my own readout electronics for them. Three revisions later, and the performance is very good - to the point that I've bought more increasingly precise measurement gear to benchmark how it's performing. Currently, I'm testing it against some good glass scale linear encoders, and a capacitive gauge with a single-digit nm noise floor.
Interesting. What applications are you using it for? (If you are okay discussing it.) diy calipers? Active feedback to a more complex mechanical system? As part of an optical system? It would be interesting to hear how these are being used. Especially from someone experience using/building them.
I was using it to build a dilatometer - an instrument for measuring thermal expansion curves of materials. Theoretically simple, in that you take a sample of something and measure how long it is while sweeping the temperature around. In practice, you need very stable ~um measurements and lots of care to make sure all other length changes around the sample cancel.
In the real-world, they're often used for precision gauging for in-process metrology.
As a consequence of the aging members, a lot of churches (particularly the less virulent mainstream protestant flavor) around here are merging congregations and getting demolished, to be replaced with more apartment buildings. Sometimes the parishioners will fight the good fight and get concessions made for affordable housing or other social goods.
Don't worry, if you don't know what BIM is, you don't need BIM and you should be thankful about your previous life choices. Weirdly, no one in BIM really seems to agree on what BIM actually is either.
"Droplet superpropulsion in an energetically constrained insect"(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36376-5 ) is a great paper from the same authors - I came across it last year when I was deep in a project involving droplet manipulation on superhydrophobic surfaces. Nature is wild!
Indeed. It reminds me of that species of planthopper whose rear legs have interlocking "gears", allowing the insect to jump with both legs together in perfect synchrony:
I second this; this is super bad advice. CO2 systems are comparatively safe from an eye damage perspective - unless you take a direct hit, (...don't, seriously, that's what interlocks are for...), 10.6um is strongly absorbed by your eye and you'll get superficial thermal damage, maybe cataracts or a corneal burn, but it won't get focused on to your retina so serious vision loss is unlikely. Polycarbonate safety glasses have a crazy high optical density at 10.6 and are suitable protective eyewear.
The situation for visible diode lasers is much worse. Sure, the power tends to be lower, but they're still powerful enough that looking at a diffuse reflection will result in dangerous power densities on your retina. Unfortunately, the brain is really good at hiding this sort of damage, so it's possible to not notice until it's too late.
1.064um fiber lasers are the worst of both worlds. Very high powers, invisible so you have no idea how much stray light is getting out or if you're staring at a reflection, and expensive + hard to verify safety glasses.
I like doing things with high power lasers (next up for the collection is probably a 355nm ns system?), but am glad that I had to take a lot of laser safety training before I bough my first big laser source.
Sounds like quite a good solution actually, low latency and all. Do you know if they fitted any filter over the headset cams to protect those just in case?
I don't know about that. Paying yourself a nice salary, having a stable job doing something you probably (at least at one point) find interesting, and having lots of autonomy seems like a pretty nice gig.
Yeah, but that lineage of banjos became 17-fret tenor banjos in the teens, which are still really nice instruments if you play Irish trad tenor and don't need the volume of a 23-fret. So, not all a bad thing.
