“TOUCH-SCREEN” general introduction

You must have seen touch screens at ATMs, cellphones, information kiosks .Touch screen based system allows an easy navigation around a GUI based environment.

Tap on the screen twice for  double clicks, and drag a figure on the screen to move the cursor .We can do almost everything the mouse does, and do away with the additional device(mouse) leaving only the screen.

So “They’re all the rage, they are the buzzword, they are probably the hottest thing in technological cosmos right now!”Falling price and improved technology has fueled the use of these devices in smaller consumer devices like mobile, Tablet PCs and handheld gaming consoles.

The components

There are four popular touch screen   technologies but all of them have three main components.

·        Touch sensitive surface

·        The controller

·        The software driver

>>   The   touch sensitive surface is an extremely durable and flexible glass or polymer touch response surface, and this panel is placed over the viewable area of the screen. In most sensors there is an electric signal going across the screen, and a touch on the surface causes change in the signal depending on the touch sensor technology used .This change allows the controller to identify the location of the touch.

>> The controller is a device that acts as the intermediate between the screen and the computer .It interprets the electrical signal of the touch event to digital signal that computer can understand.  The controller can be placed with the screen or housed externally.

>> The software driver is an interpreter that converts what signal comes from the controller to information that the operating system can understand.

Touch screen sensor technologies

Resistive touch screens

Resistive touch screens have two glasses or acrylic layers, one of them is coated wit is conducting and other is coated with resistive material. When these layers brought in contact the resistance changes and change is registered and location of touch is calculated.

These are durable and resistant to humidity and liquid spills. But they offer limited clarity, and the surface can be easily damaged by sharp objects.

·       Capacitive touch screens

In these devices a glass panel with a coat of charge storing material on its surface .When the panel is touched, a small amount of charge is drawn at the point of contact. Circuit located at each corner of the screen measure the difference in charge and send information to the controller for calculating the position of touch.These are used where the clarity precision is of concern as in laptops and medical imaging

·        Acoustic wave touch screens

This newer technology uses ultrasonic waves that pass over the   screen   . When the panel is touched   , there is a change in the frequency of ultrasonic wave   and the receiver at end of the panel register this change.

Since only glass is used with no coating, there is nothing that wears out.

Infrared touch screens

Infrared touch screens are primarily used for large displays, banking machines, and in military applications.

Infrared touch screens are based on light-beam interruption technology. Instead of an overlay on the surface, a frame surrounds the display. The frame has light sources, or light emitting diodes (LEDs) on one side and light detectors on the opposite side, creating an optical grid across the screen.

When an object touches the screen, the invisible light beam is interrupted, causing a drop in the signal received by the photo sensors.

Optical touch screen

Optical touch screen technology is ideal for large LCD and plasma displays up to 100″ diagonal.

Optical touch screen technology uses two line scanning cameras located at the corners of the screen. The cameras track the movement of any object close to the surface by detecting the interruption of an infra-red light source. The light is emitted in a plane across the surface of the screen and can be either active (infra-red LED) or passive (special reflective surfaces).

Dispersive Signal Technology

Dispersive Signal Technology (DST) consists of a chemically-strengthened glass substrate with piezos mounted on each corner, mated to a sophisticated, dedicated controller. The DST Touch System determines the touch position by pinpointing the source of “bending waves” created by finger or stylus contact within the glass substrate. This process of interpreting bending waves within the glass substrate helps eliminate traditional performance issues related to on-screen contaminants and surface damage, and provides fast, accurate touch attributes.

·      Other technologies

The above are the main technologies, there are others as well like strain gauge and Microsoft’s surface technology etc .Through surface computing you can seamlessly synchronize electronic devices that touch its surface.

Advantage and disadvantage

With improvement of technology of touch screens, precise pointing is   also possible. Touch screens with glass surface can resist dirt, grease, moisture and also household cleaning agents.

Touch screens have some disadvantages  like people with fat fingers may mishit keys , needs to be handle  carefully .Touch screens are complex items and unlike keypad there are many   things which may go wrong .

Future prospect

Many large companies like Microsoft and Apple   have gotten on   the touch screen   bandwagon, multi touch screens in particular. Apple has patented an “Integrated Sensing Display” wherein display elements are   integrated with image sensing elements. If this will put to use, you could have a single device that looked like a monitor for video conferencing, wherein the monitor would be a camera!

IMAGES OF CHANDRAYAN-1

Photo Gallary of Chandrayaan-1 and PSLV-C11

 

 

	Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft undergoing pre-launch tests
	Moon Impact Probe integration with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft
	Moon Impact Probe
	Readying Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft for Thermovac test
	Fully integrated Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft (left) and loading it to Thermovac Chamber (right)

PSLV-C11 Liftoff

	PSLV-C11 Liftoff
	PSLV-C11 Liftoff
	PSLV-C11 Lift0ff

PSLV-C11 On Launch Pad

	PSLV-C11 on Launch Pad
	PSLV-C11 on its way to launchpad
	PSLV-C11 on its way to launchpad from Vehicle Assembly Building
	PSLV-C11 comming out from Vehicle Assembly Building
	PSLV-C11 at Vehicle Assembly Building

PSLV-C11 Third and Fourth Stages

	Close-up view of PSLV-C11 fourth stage
	PSLV-C11 Vehicle stacked up to fourth stage
	Hoisting of third and fourth stages of PSLV-C11

PSLV-C11 Second Stage

	Hoisting of PSLV-C11 Second Stage
	PSLV-C11 Second Stage with its VIKAS engine

PSLV-C11 First Stage

	Loading of PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment
	PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment on its way to Vehicle Assembly Building
	Positioning of PSLV-C11 First Stage Nozzle End Segment over launch pedestal

PSLV-C11 Strap-on

	Unloading a PSLV-C11 strap-on from transporter at Vehicle Assembly Building
	Fully Assembled First Stage surrounded by strap-ons of PSLV-C11

 

 

 

source: www.isro.org

BE PROUD OF BEING INDIAN

Saras Aircraft, NAL, India

Chandrayaan ISRO Moon Mission

Dazzling Display of Space Prowess !

Indo-Russian Tactical Transport Aircraft – MRTA

 

Aero India 2007 LCA display

HSDTV from DRDO (INDIA)

ISRO eyes world record with rocket launch

Big bang

The Creation of Universe

COOL WALLPAPERZ

Scientists beaming after test of big atom smasher

GENEVA — A small blip on a computer screen sent champagne corks popping among physicists in Switzerland. Near Chicago, researchers at a “pajama party” who watched via satellite let out an early morning cheer.

The blip was literally of cosmic proportions, representing a new tool to probe the birth of the universe.

The world’s largest atom smasher passed its first test Wednesday as scientists said their powerful tool is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the “big bang,” which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything.

A scientist looks at computer screens after the first protons are injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during its switch-on operation near Geneva. Particle physicists were celebrating after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first test with flying colours. [Agencies]

Rivals and friends turned out in the wee hours at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., in pajamas to watch the event by a special satellite connection. Joining in from around the world were other physicists – many of whom may one day work on the new Large Hadron Collider.

Tension mounted in the five control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as scientists huddled around computer screens. After a few trial runs, they fired a beam of protons clockwise around the 17-mile tunnel of the collider deep under the rolling fields along the Swiss-French border. Then they succeeded in sending another beam in the opposite, counterclockwise direction.

The physicists celebrated with champagne when the white dots flashed on the blue screens of the control room, showing a successful crossing of the finish line on the $10 billion machine under planning since 1984.

“The first technical challenge has been met,” said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. “What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it’s for the physicists to show us what they can do.

“They are ready to go for discoveries,” Aymar said. “Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we’re looking at essential questions for mankind.”

A European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientist controls a computer screen at the Cern’s control center, during the switch on operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 near Geneva, Switzerland. [Agencies]

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider’s two largest detectors – essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons – are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

It is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle – the Higgs boson – which is sometimes called the “God particle” because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom’s nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC provides much greater power than earlier colliders.

Its start came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes – subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

“It’s nonsense,” said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, which also received support for the project by leading scientists such as Britain’s Stephen Hawking.

Fermilab scientists and guest enjoy a a champaign and scrambled egg breakfast at Fermilab Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, in Batavia, Ill., after watching the launch of the Large Hadron Collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history — remotely from the underground facility on the Swiss-French border. [Agencies]

Gillies said the only risk would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel. No one would be endangered because the tunnel is evacuated when beams are being fired.

No such problem occurred Wednesday, although the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million. Japan, Canada, Russia and India – also observers – are other major contributors.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, said Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time.

Maiani and the other three former directors-general attended Wednesday’s experiment.

Protons and Champagne Mix as New Particle Collider Is Revved Up

BATAVIA, Ill. — Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of Champagne into the future on Wednesday.

After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.

At 4:28 a.m., Eastern time, the scientists announced that a beam of protons had completed its first circuit around the collider’s 17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border. They then sent the beam around several more times.

“It’s a fantastic moment,” said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception in 1994. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.

An ocean away from Geneva, the new collider’s activation was watched with rueful excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which has had the reigning particle collider.

Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers, and three local mayors gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new high-energy physics. They applauded each milestone as the scientists methodically steered the protons on their course at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Many of them, including the lab’s director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even nightcaps bearing Fermilab “pajama party” patches on them.

Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe was beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.

Dr. Oddone, who earlier in the day admitted it was a “bittersweet moment,” lauded the new machine as the result of “two and a half decades of dreams to open up this huge new territory in the exploration of the natural world.”

Roger Aymar, CERN’s director, called the new collider a “discovery machine.” The buzz was worldwide. On the blog “Cosmic Variance,” Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan called the new collider “a why machine.”

Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, had called it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.

But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz about particle physics. “This is something that people can talk to their neighbors about,” he said.

The only thing physicists agree on is that they do not know what will happen — what laws and particles will prevail — when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.

“That there are many theories means we don’t have a clue,” said Dr. Oddone. “That’s what makes it so exciting.”

Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.

But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider were a car, then what physicists did Wednesday was turn on an engine that will now warm up for a couple of months before anyone drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of five trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.

Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on all those gathered here.

Once upon a time the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab’s Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, antiprotons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts apiece, was the world’s largest particle machine.

By year’s end, when the CERN collider has revved up to five trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time toward the Big Bang.

In 1993, the United States Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. In the United States, particle physics never really recovered, said the supercollider’s former director, Roy F. Schwitters of the University of Texas in Austin. “One nonrenewable resource is a person’s time and good years,” he said.

Dr. Oddone, Fermilab’s director, said the uncertainties of steady Congressional financing made physics in the United States unduly “suspenseful.”

CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countries with a stable budget established by treaty. The year after the supercollider was killed, CERN decided to build its own collider.

Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531 million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Dr. Oddone said that Americans constitute about a quarter of the scientists who built the four giant detectors that sit at points around the racetrack to collect and analyze the debris from the primordial fireballs.

In fact, a remote control room for monitoring one of those experiments, known inelegantly as the Compact Muon Solenoid, was built at Fermilab, just off the lobby of the main building here.

“The mood is great at this place,” he said, noting that the Tevatron was humming productively and still might find the Higgs boson before the new hadron collider.

Another target of physicists is a principle called supersymmetry, which predicts, among other things, that a vast population of new particle species is left over from the Big Bang and waiting to be discovered, one of which could be the long-sought dark matter.

The festivities started at 2 a.m. Chicago time. Speaking by satellite, Dr. Evans, the collider project director at CERN, outlined the plan for the evening: sending a bunch of protons clockwise farther and farther around the collider, stopping them and checking their orbit, until they made it all the way. He noted that for a previous CERN accelerator it had taken 12 hours. “I hope this will go much faster,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, the displays in the control room showed that the beam had made it to its first stopping point. A few minutes later, the physicists erupted in cheers when their consoles showed that the muon solenoid had detected collisions between the beam and stray gas molecules in the otherwise vacuum beam pipe. Their detector was alive and working.

Finally at 3:28 Chicago time (10:28 a.m. at CERN), the display showed the protons had made it all the way around to another big detector named Atlas.

At Fermilab, they broke out the Champagne. Dr. Oddone congratulated his colleagues around the world. “We have all worked together and brought this machine to life,” he said. “We’re so excited about sending a beam around. Wait until we start having collisions and doing physics.”

Images of CERN Experiment

 

 

 

CERN Experiment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A view of the LHC (large hadron collider) in its tunnel at CERN (European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland. One huge scientific experiment being launched Wednesday, September 10, 2008 is described as an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe, or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell Doomsday for the Earth. The first beams of protons will be fired around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel at the launch on Wednesday to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets. It will still be several weeks before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro “black holes” they theorize could endanger the planet. (AP)

 

 

 

 

 

CERN Experiment
People stand next to the giant magnet Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) being placed underground in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator at CERN, the European Particle Physics laboratory, in Cressy near Geneva, France. (AP)

 

 

 

CERN Experiment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A general view of the island SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) of the CERN Control Centre (CCC) where the operators prepare the commissioning of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at the European Particle Physics laboratory (CERN) in Prevessin, France, at the Swiss border, near Geneva. (

AP)

 

 

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The photo shows the tunnel of the LHC particle accelerator at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. (AP)

 

 

 

CERN Experiment 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Project leader for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Lyn Evans, left, speaks with Carlos Fernandez Robles, right, engineer, in the island LHC of the CERN Control Centre (CCC) at the European Particle Physics laboratory (CERN) in Prevessin, France, at the Swiss border, near Geneva. (AP

 

 

CERN Experiment  

 

 

 

 

 

A technician working in a computing center of the CERN, the worlds largest particle physics laboratory of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland. (AP)

 

 

CERN Experiment 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A view of the LHC (large hadron collider) in its tunnel at CERN (European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland. One huge scientific experiment being launched Wednesday, September 10, 2008 is described as an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe, or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell Doomsday for the Earth. The first beams of protons will be fired around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel at the launch on Wednesday to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets. It will still be several weeks before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro “black holes” they theorize could endanger the planet. (AP)