Developer’s kit and reference design: Battery operated, ready-to-use kit includes a TRACKER NSE-5310 miniature position sensor (TSSOP package), along with a SQUIGGLE micro motor to provide precise motion, and New Scale's Pathway Software. Kit serves as mechanical and electrical reference design; all components can be easily removed for integration into your prototype. Learn more
Improper disposal of electronics products that contain toxic materials can cause harmful environmental impacts. Computer monitors and older television picture tubes can contain up to four pounds of lead. Other toxic materials found in electronics products include chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc, and brominated flame retardants. Reuse or recycling of electronics can lead to safe management of these hazardous materials when a product reaches the end of its useful life.
Donating electronic items for reuse provides positive environmental and societal benefits. Reuse and refurbishing electronics provides environmental benefits by preventing waste, extending useful life and keeping products from entering the waste stream until a later time. Society benefits from donation because schools, nonprofit organizations, and lower-income families are able to reap the benefits of computers and other electronics that they otherwise could not afford.
Waste reduction can also be achieved by purchasing greener products. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides a list of attributes that describe environmentally preferable electronics products:
• Contain fewer toxic constituents.
• Use recycled materials in the new product.
• Are energy efficient (e.g., showing the Energy Star label).
• Are designed for easy upgrading or disassembly.
• Use minimal packaging.
• Offer leasing or takeback options.
• Have been recognized by independent certification groups (such as TCO or Blue Angel) as environmentally preferable. [3]
If reuse is not an option and a product is no longer functional, recycling can help to alleviate negative environmental impacts of electronics waste. Recycling electronics can help to reduce energy use and pollution produced from the manufacture of new products. Recycling also aids in the preservation of valuable and limited virgin resources.
More than 100 million pounds of materials from electronics are collected annually by recyclers. County recycling drop-off centers, electronics recycling companies, some electronics retailers and electronics manufacturers accept electronics for recycling. The Electronic Industries Alliance provides a resource to find local and national electronics reuse and recycling programs. In addition, some original equipment manufacturers (OEM), including Apple Computer Corp., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have initiated computer recycling programs.
The process of recycling e-waste involves dismantling products into metals, plastics and circuit boards for component recovery. Material is fed into a hopper then travels up a conveyor and is dropped into a mechanical separator, which is followed by a number of screening and granulating machines. The entire recycling machinery is enclosed and employs a dust collection system. [4]
Standards related to electronics recycling include regulatory requirements for generators of cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and circuit boards. Cathode ray tubes, the glass video display component found in television and computer monitors, are considered hazardous when discarded because of the lead found in CRTs. When electronics containing CRTs are left in landfills, lead can leak out into the ecosystem. Various state regulations deal with the management of CRT. Massachusetts and Florida have implemented regulatory streamlining, electronics recycling infrastructure development, time-limited state funding to encourage recycling. California regulates CRTs hazardous material and bans their disposal in landfills. The EPA-proposed federal rule concerning cathode ray tubes streamlines management requirements for recycling used CRTs and glass removed from CRTs in order to encourage reuse and recycling.
Used computer monitors and televisions disposed of by households or resold/donated are not considered hazardous waste and are not regulated under federal requirements. Businesses and other entities that generate less than 100 kilograms (roughly 220 pounds) per month of hazardous waste, including CRTs, receive a small quantities exemption and are not regulated by federal requirements. Facilities that generate large quantities of hazardous waste (over 100 kilograms per month) are subject to federal regulations. CRTs must be manifested and sent as hazardous waste to permitted landfills. CRTs sent for recycling are also regulated by federal law.
The EPA has also proposed a final rule which adds mercury-containing equipment to the federal list of universal waste to encourage better management of these materials and compliance with hazardous waste requirements. The Universal Waste Rule exempts certain wastes which contain hazardous materials, such as batteries, pesticides, mercury-containing equipment, such as thermostats and lamps containing fluorescent bulbs, from having to meet all requirements of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The intent of the rule is to lower administrative and regulatory burdens to encourage recycling and proper disposal of hazardous waste materials.
There are various state and international ideas regarding who is responsible for the cost of recycling electronics. In Washington, a state law was recently passed which requires manufacturers, as opposed to consumers or government, to pay for the collection, transportation, and recycling of computers, monitors, and TVs from consumers, small businesses, schools, small government entities, and charities. [5] The European Union has enacted legislation, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, placing the burden of recovery and recycling costs on manufacturers. California has enacted Advanced Recovery Fee legislation that holds consumers responsible for recycling costs by adding a charge at time of purchase of a new television or computer monitor to fund a statewide recycling program.
EPEAT, a project of the Green Electronics Council, is a tool designed to help large volume institutional purchasers evaluate, compare and choose monitors, desktop and notebook computers based on environmental attributes. EPEAT also provides manufacturers with performance criteria for environmentally responsible design of products. EPEAT is the implementation of IEEE Standard 1680, which “defines environmental performance standards for personal computer products, including desktop computers, notebook computers, and computer monitors that are marketed to institutions, and includes key concepts and implementation procedures relating to reduction or elimination of environmentally sensitive materials, materials selection, design for end of life, life cycle extension, energy conservation, end of life management, corporate performance and packaging.” [6]
The 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment held in May of 2006 provided a forum for professionals involved from academia, industry and public policy areas to discuss electronics recycling and other topics related to electronics and the environment. The conference focused on life cycle assessment, nanotechnology, ethical issues, energy generation and supply, policy and business, design for energy efficiency, economic models, green manufacturing, material recovery, design for the environment, small tech manufacturing, industrial ecology, final disposal, international outlook, and material challenges.
References
[1] “EU Ban Opens E-Waste Market.” Red Herring, July 2, 2006.
[2] "e-Cycling." Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/ecycling/index.htm
[3] "How to reduce electronics waste." Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/ecycling/basic.htm
[4 "Electronic waste." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-waste
[5] “Who Pays for E-Waste?” IEEE Spectrum, July 2006.
[6] IEEE Standard for Environmental Assessment of Personal Computer Products, Including Laptop, Personal Computers, Desktop Personal Computers, and Personal Computer Monitors. IEEE Std 1680™-2006.
As simple as it sounds, that pretty much sums up a device being developed by a team led by Edoardo Charbon, of the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. In a paper presented at an imaging conference in Kyoto, Japan, this week, the team say that their so-called "gigavision" sensor will pave the way for cellphones and other inexpensive gadgets that take richer, more pleasing pictures than today's devices. Crucially, Charbon says the device performs better in both very bright light and dim light - conditions which regular digital cameras struggle to cope with.
While Charbon's idea is new and has a patent pending, the principle behind it is not. It has long been known that memory chips are extremely sensitive to light: remove their black plastic packages to let in light, and the onrush of photons energises electrons, creating a current in each memory cell that overwhelms the tiny stored charge that might have represented digital information. "Light simply destroys the information," says Martin Vetterli, a member of the EPFL team.
A similar effect occurs aboard spacecraft: when energetic cosmic rays hit a cell in an unprotected memory chip they can "flip" the state of the cell, corrupting the data stored in the chip.
What Charbon and his team have found is that when they carefully focus light arriving on an exposed memory chip, the charge stored in every cell corresponds to whether that cell is in a light or dark area. The chip is in effect storing a digital image.
All very clever, you might say, but why would anyone want to do that? The answer is that the two types of sensor chips used in today's digital cameras store the brightness of each pixel as an analogue signal. To translate this into a form that can be stored digitally, they need complex, bulky, noise-inducing circuitry.
The charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors used on early cameras and camcorders, and the cheaper and more modern complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) type both operate on a similar principle. On each, the area that forms an individual pixel can be thought of as a small charge-containing "bucket". The size of the charge contained in one of these buckets depends only on the amount of light falling on it.
In a CCD, the contents of each bucket of charge are "poured" into the bucket next door, and then the next until the signal reaches the edge of the chip. There, an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) typically assigns it an 8-bit greyscale value, ranging from 0 to 255. In a CMOS sensor, the charge is converted to a voltage local to each pixel before being shunted off to an ADC at the edge of the chip - where it too is assigned a greyscale value between 0 and 255
A memory chip needs none of this conversion circuitry, as it creates digital data directly. As a result, says Vetterli, the memory cell will always be 100 times smaller than CMOS sensor cells; it is bound to be that way because of the sheer number of signal-conditioning transistors the CMOS sensor needs around each pixel. "Our technology will always be two orders of magnitude smaller," he says.
So for every pixel on one of today's sensors, the memory-based sensor could have 100 pixels. A chip the size of a 10-megapixel camera sensor will have 100 times as many sensing cells if implemented in memory technology - hence the choice of the gigavision name.
But don't expect a gigapixel camera any time soon. Unlike the pixels in a conventional sensor, which record a greyscale, the cells in Charbon's memory-chip sensor are simple on-off devices: they can only store a digital 0 or 1, for which read either light or dark. To build a sensor that can record shades of grey, EPFL engineer Feng Yang, who presented the Kyoto paper, is developing a software algorithm that looks across an array of 100 pixels to estimate their overall greyscale value.
It's a technique called spatial oversampling - and while it's early days, he's getting somewhere. "It's turning out to be a lot more accurate than the greyscale values you get from regular CMOS sensors," says Vetterli. "Analogue to digital conversion gives only poor estimates of the actual analogue light value."
Toshiba's new middleweight T100 Series laptops will hit shelves on October 22, coinciding with the release of Windows 7. Both the 11.6 inch and 13.3-inch models come in at under 4 pounds and feature a LED backlit widescreen displays, built-in webcam with face recognition, HDMI port, up to 9 hours of battery life and the company's very useful "Sleep-and-Charge" technology, which lets you power up portable devices when the laptop is turned off.
The 13.3-inch Satellite T135 and the smaller T115 both run on Windows® 7 Home Premium operating system, use DDR3 RAM and feature 802.11b/g/n wireless. The hard drives - which start at 250GB (5400 RPM) - are protected by Impact Sensor technology which detects sudden movement and “parks” the heads of the HDD to minimize any damage before the laptop hits the floor.
Both models also feature full-sized keyboards, multi-touch control pads and come in red and black finishes (a white finish os also available for the T135). The pricing is also worth noting - the T135 starts at US$600 and the T115 starts at $450.
Here's a run down of the key specs:
The Toshiba Satellite T115 carries the same specifications except it's lighter at 3.49 lbs., has an 11.6-inch diagonal display and a choice of Intel® Pentium® SU4100 processor or Intel® Celeron® 743 processor.
©2009 New Technologies | by TNB
