Monthly Archives: June 2018

Preventing or Mitigating Whisker Growth in PCBs

Growth of whiskers puts PCB assembly at considerable risk, since whiskers interfere with components, and this automatically qualifies a good product as a defective one. Although a growing tin whisker may seem harmless, it can pose a very real threat to both the product as well as to the human operator. In PCB assembly, one of the most common problems that whiskers create is a short circuit or arcing. This can cause breakdown of electrical equipment, as well as harm people from the arcing. Either way, it ultimately leads to a loss in time and money.

The impact of whisker growth on global PCB assembly results in ruined circuitry, broken equipment, and overall shoddy artisanship. Therefore, it is very important to address the issue of whisker growth. For mitigating or preventing whisker growth, the following precautions may help.

As pure tin coating is the basic reason for the growth of whiskers, avoiding the use of pure tin plating on PCBs and other components is the most obvious method. However, as this action falls in the realm of manufacturing, it is not always possible to implement at the PCB assembly level. Most manufacturing companies do utilize alloys to help stabilize the tin coating to mitigate tin whisker growth, but it is better to be cautious.

If there is a high risk of whisker growth, it may be possible to outsource the PCB/component to a contract manufacturing company to re-plate the area. To avoid tin whiskers, it is highly advisable to let the external manufacturing company strip away the current plating, and reapply newer plating.

Application of a coating or housing foam encapsulation on the whisker prone area can help to prevent problems of growth in the future. However, this method depends on several factors, including type of foam encapsulating coating used, the amount applied, and the intensity of infection of the whisker prone area. In actual practice, the foam encapsulating coating normally helps to prevent short circuits.

An alternate method is to relieve the stress on the area by using hot oil reflow, or by conducting a new reflow soldering job.

Most reliable assembly manufacturers are aware of tin whiskers, and are willing to help with any whisker growth problem. Several turnkey assembly manufacturers are also certified and make sure they use alloys in place of pure tin components for mitigating whisker formation. Of course, faulty and counterfeit components do raise the risk of causing tin whiskers, but working with US-based manufacturing and assembly companies normally ensures an overall higher standard of quality.

New Research on Preventing Tin Whiskers

New research in preventing growth of tin whiskers points to the use of an additional metal coating on the tin layer. Depositing a thin layer of nickel as an electroless metal deposition seems to be the most practical method. Although tin whiskers can penetrate most metal in days, a hundred-atom thick, about 35 µm, of nickel forms a virtually impenetrable layer. A thicker layer of nickel not only retards the growth of tin whiskers, it truly prevents their formation permanently. However, this requires a two pass electroplating process, one for depositing the tin layer, and the next for depositing the nickel layer on it.

A Cheaper Alternative for Batteries—Sodium Ion

A vast majority of electronic equipment running on batteries rely on the Lithium-ion technology for their electrode material. Since Lithium is relatively rare, its mining and refining make it an expensive material to use. This has led scientists to search for a cheaper alternative, and they have turned to the cheapest substance available, the common salt. A team from Stanford has developed a battery based on Sodium-ion whose cost per storage capacity is far lower than that of the existing batteries based on Lithium-ion.

Salt, being nearly omni-present in our oceans, together with its ability to carry charge, is a near-perfect candidate for low-cost energy storage. Many forms of Sodium-based batteries are now available, some with a unique design of anode made from a carbonized oak leaf to a more standard format for use in laptops. According to the lead researcher of the Stanford study, Zhenan Bao, although Lithium offers a superior performance, its rarity and high cost is leading people to search for materials such as Sodium to build low-cost but high performance batteries.

The research team uses a battery with Sodium salt cathode and a Phosphorous anode—materials that are abundant in nature. Near the cathode, Sodium ions combine with oppositely charged myo-inositol ions. To improve the charge-recharge cycle, the researchers had to study the forces at work at atomic-level, when Sodium ions detach and attach from the cathode.

The newly developed Sodium-ion battery has a reversible capacity of 484 mAh/gm, which translates to an energy density of 726 Wh/Kg. The research team claims the energy efficiency of the new batteries to be greater than 87%. Regarding the cost comparison between similar storage capacity batteries, the team says the new Sodium-ion battery will cost less than 80% of the cost of a Lithium-ion battery of similar storage capacity.

To obtain more performance from the Sodium-ion battery, the research team is planning to work more on its phosphorous anode. In addition, to be able to dictate the size of the Sodium-ion battery necessary to store a certain amount of energy, the team also plans to examine the volumetric energy density in comparison to that of Lithium-ion batteries.

Faradion Limited, of Sheffield, UK, has developed Sodium-ion technology that offers energy densities in batteries far exceeding those of other known Sodium-ion technologies. In addition, their new technology produces energy densities that exceed those from popular Lithium-ion materials such as Lithium iron phosphate. Faradion makes current collectors in their Sodium-ion batteries from Aluminum rather than from the more expensive copper that Lithium cells use.

According to electrochemical tests Faradion has conducted, they list the advantages of the Sodium-ion materials over conventional Lithium-ion materials as follows—better rate capability, better thermal stability (safer), improved transport safety, improved cycle life, and similar shelf life. Further, Sodium-ion material processing is similar to that followed for Lithium-ion materials at every step, beginning from synthesis of the active materials to the processing of electrodes.

Innovate UK co-funds a project for Williams Advanced Engineering, where the novel Sodium-ion technology from Faradion is currently being employed to build 3 Ah prismatic cells. Williams is further incorporating these cells into batteries for commercial use.

A Music Server on Your Raspberry Pi

If you are looking to create a music server on your Raspberry Pi (RBPi), Volumio may be a suitable choice. Although several websites give perfect instructions for setting up the RBPi as a media center for watching films and video series, very few provide solutions for audiophiles who would prefer to have a server dedicated to music.

Volumio is available as a Raspbian distribution. Using the application, one can manage the entire music library on a single device attached to the RBPi. Being very easy to use, Volumio supports all types of audio files—Vorbis, AAC, FLAC, mp3, and more. It even works with several DAC expansion cards. The team behind Volumio maintains it providing updates at least once a month, and this shows their seriousness in supporting this wonderful product.

The best way to get Volumio is to download it from their website. It is available as a Raspbian image, and it is necessary to download the image and decompress it. You will need a micro SD card to flash the uncompressed image—use one with a 16 GB capacity. Flashing requires a PC running Linux, Windows, or MAC. There is no need for an Ethernet cable, as Volumio works with a Wi-Fi connection.

It is advisable to use an RBPi3 with Volumio. On the first run, Volumio proceeds to install the application, which can take up quite a few minutes. In the selection presented, choose Wi-Fi and Volumio will try to connect with a network. If it does not find any network, or the network is inaccessible, Volumio will proceed to create its own hotspot. You can access this hotspot from your PC with the name Volumio and password volumio2. Typing the IP of your RBPi3 or the address volumio.local/ will take you to its web interface.

Once you are able to connect to Volumio on your PC, visit the Network tab, and move to the Wi-Fi Network section, where you can enter the code of security. Now you are fully equipped to run Volumio on your RBPi3, and add all your songs.

This is again a very simple process, and the recommendation is to have an external hard drive for this. Simply store all your songs on the external hard drive and let the RBPi3 use it. Navigate to Browse, then to Music Library, and select USB, which will allow you to see the hard drive. Alternatively, access the contents of the hard drive directly from the Album or Artist sections. Another possibility is to use a Network Attached System (NAS). For this, you must access the section My Music.

Still another possibility is to play the titles of Spotify, and you can do this by adding a plugin. This requires you to navigate to the Plugins section, and installing it from there. Once the installation finishes, activate Spotify on the RBPi.

Volumio is compatible to DLNA and AirPlay. Therefore, it is possible to broadcast audio streams from an iPhone. As Volumio offers a digital output, adding a DAC expansion card to the Raspberry Pi brings further gain in quality and listening pleasure.

Is It Necessary to Ground Cable Trays?

Within a cable tray system, one may use an Equipment Grounding Conductor (EGC), or use the body of the cable tray itself to ground the system—provided the cable tray is made of metal. There are no restrictions as to where one installs a cable tray system. Since the function of the EGC is to provide electrical safety, the EGC is the most important conductor in the electrical system. Therefore, one has three options for grounding in a cable tray wiring system:

  • Use an EGC conductor within or on the cable tray
  • Use individual EGC conductors on each multi-conductor cable
  • Use the metal cable tray itself as the EGC

Irrespective of the option used, one must follow proper bonding practices to ensure the cable tray system is effectively grounded.

If an EGC cable is installed within or on the cable tray, use grounding clamps to bond it with each or alternate cable tray section. The grounding clamps ensure an electrical connection exists between all the sections of the cable tray system. In addition, the grounding clamps also serve to anchor the EGC to the cable tray, so that the EGC is not thrown out of the cable tray due to magnetic forces generated during fault current conditions.

For cable trays made of Aluminum, a bare copper EGC should preferably not be used, as a moist environment has the potential to start electrolytic corrosion of the tray. In such cases, an insulated conductor is a better choice, with tin or zinc plated connectors for bonding to the cable tray, raceways, or equipment enclosures, after removing the insulation of the conductor at such places.

According to industrial standards, when cable trays are used as equipment grounding conductors, there is a minimum requirement for both steel and aluminum cable trays. For circuits with ground-fault protection above 600 amperes, steel cable trays are not recommended for use as EGC. However, one can use aluminum cable trays as EGC for circuits that have ground-fault protection above 2000 amperes.

The standards further clarify that if the cable tray cannot be used as a protective device because of its maximum ampere rating limitations, a separate EGC may be included along with the cable assembly. Alternatively, each cable assembly may include an EGC. Where the cable tray system is in the form of discontinuous segments, it is recommended to use vertical adjustable splice plates to link the various segments. As non-metallic cable trays cannot work as a conductor, they should preferably have a separate EGC along with the cables. In addition, wire mesh cable trays are not to be used as an equipment grounding conductor, as the wire mesh is not a reliable continuous conductor.

For wire-mesh cable trays supporting cables with a built-in equipment grounding conductor along with control or signal cables, one must provide a low impedance path on the tray to a non-system ground for reducing noise and removing induced or stray currents. It is usually not necessary to provide a separate grounding cable attached to the wire mesh of the cable tray.

What is BiCMOS Technology?

CMOS and Bipolar are two of the pioneering technologies of the electronics field. Components fabricated with the CMOS technology dissipate lower power, have smaller noise margins, and are physically smaller. On the other hand, components fabricated with the bipolar technology operate at higher speeds, switch faster, and offer good noise performance. By combining the two, scientists have created the BiCMOS technology that offers a combination of advantages from both processes. For instance, BiCMOS offers higher speeds compared to that of CMOS, and lower power dissipation compared to that of bipolar. However, the penalty comes in the form of added process complexity and it adds to the cost. Both CMOS and bipolar issues need optimization of impurities, and this increase in process complexity results in higher costs compared to that of conventional CMOS.

Scientists have worked out the optimum approach to fabricate high performance BiCMOS devices. They have found it best to start with a baseline CMOS process and add the bipolar process steps. This produces an optimum BiCMOS process flow, emphasizes reliability and process simplicity, while maintaining compatibility with the CMOS technology.

There are several advantages of the BiCMOS technology. The higher impedance of the CMOS circuitry facilitates the analog amplifier input design, while bipolar transistors define the rest. BiCMOS can stand wide temperature variations and process variations, which make this technology more economical. BiCMOS devices can source and sink much higher load currents because of the MOS part, while it handles higher speeds because of the bipolar part. BiCMOS can drive high capacitance loads with lower cycle times. As the source and drain can be interchanged, BiCMOS demonstrates bidirectional capabilities, which makes it suitable for IO intensive applications.

BiCMOS technology has its drawbacks as well. The fabrication complexity is higher because both CMOS and bipolar technologies are involved. This increases the cost of fabrication also. However, as BiCMOS devices have higher density, the amount of lithography required is lower.

BiCMOS technology is versatile for several applications. Its higher speed makes it suitable for AND functions of high density. It easily replaces devices formed with earlier technologies such as CMOS, ECL, and bipolar, for instance, in some cases BiCMOS has higher speed performance compared to that from bipolar. A single chip with the BiCMOS technology can span the analog-digital boundary. Their high impedance input makes BiCMOS a very good candidate for applications such as sample and hold, adders, mixers, ADCs, DACs.

STMicroelectronics integrates RF, analog, and digital parts on a single chip. Their BiCMOS SiGe technology reduces the number of external components drastically, while optimizing the power consumed by the chip. The advantages of the integration are significant as earlier, only more expensive technologies were able to achieve this level of performance.

As ST explains, the Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) of BiCMOS has a much higher cut-off frequency compared to bulk CMOS. To attain such frequencies, the bulk CMOS designs need to use far smaller process nodes. This forces design compromises leading to overall lower performances and higher costs. Therefore, the BiCMOS technology offers a better cost profile compared to other alternatives.

Window Blinds Offer Shade and Electricity

Everyone is looking for clean energy, because awareness is growing of the problems the use of fossil fuels is creating. Although alternate forms of energy from wind and waves is viable now, solar energy is more accessible to all, since it needs only a solar cell placed in the sun to start generating energy. SolarGaps from Ukraine offers a new type of window blinds that do double duty. You can control the smart shades by an app on your smartphone, and while they screen your house from the fierce rays of the sun, they capture and store the energy falling on them. The smart shades use an in-built solar tracking technology that can reduce the amount of electricity you consume by an impressive 70%.

At SolarGaps, innovator Yevgen Erik and his team aim to change the way we consume energy in our homes. The designers claim their window blinds can generate power up to 100 Watts per ten square feet of window space. According to SolarGaps, this is enough energy to light up 30 LED bulbs or charge three MacBook simultaneously. It is very easy to setup on the window, since SolarGaps offers complete instructions to get everything up conveniently.

The smart shades begin harvesting energy from the sun almost as soon as they have been setup, and the user can power up a range of household gadgets. To catch the optimum amount of sunlight, SolarGaps offers an app for smartphones that has the option of adjusting the orientation of the window blinds. Along with controlling the orientation, the app also shows the amount of energy produced by the system. Therefore, the user only has to adjust the orientation until it produces the maximum energy.

If you have a battery storage system in your home, connect it to the smart shades to store the energy it produces. This can power up your emergency power supply when you need it, say at night, or when clouds cover the sun in the daytime. Therefore, with the smart window blinds from SolarGaps, you can generate your own electricity and save on your electricity bills. The smartphone app allows the user to monitor and adjust the smart blinds from anywhere in the world.

SolarGaps has fashioned their window blinds from Aluminum, with each blind covered with a set of high-efficiency solar cells from SunPower, a company based in California. The company claims their solar cells can last up to 25 years, and these window blinds are capable of operating in widely varying climates. For instance, the window blinds operate comfortably from -40°C to +80°C.

The company is making solar window blinds in different sizes for accommodating then on all types of windows. The smallest variety, XS, measures 32 inches x 36 inches or 810 mm x 910 mm and costs about $390. A wide range of sizes is available, including small, medium, large, extra-large, and extra-extra-large as well.

SolarGaps is currently targeting homeowners, and their solar window blinds is making green energy easily available to everybody.

How Good are Cobots at Welding?

The manufacturing industry has been using robots widely for several years as a replacement for the human laborer. Recent advances in this field are the Cobots or collaborative robots. They are called collaborative as their design makes them work alongside an individual as a part of a team rather than replacing the humans.

Cobots are good at operations and activities that cannot be fully automated. However, the process speed does not improve for activities such as workers ferrying parts backwards and forwards between themselves on the assembly line with the robots locked away in cages.

Manufacturers such as Ford are already on the cobot bandwagon, and the new robots could transform the way the industry works. The Ford factory has collaborative robots installing shock absorbers on vehicles on the production line along with humans. The cobots work with accuracy and precision, boosting the human productivity, while saving them valuable time and money.

At present, the industry uses four main types of cobots. They are the Safety Monitored Stop, Speed and Separation Monitoring, Hand Guiding, and Power and Force Limiting.

The Safety Monitored Stop is a collaborative feature used when the cobot works on its own, but sometimes needing assistance from an operator. For instance, in an automated assembly process, the worker may need to step in and perform an operation on a part that the cobot is holding. As soon as the cobot senses the presence of the human within its workspace, it will cease all motion until the worker leaves the predetermined safety zone. The cobot resumes its activities only after receiving a signal from its operator.

Speed and Separation Monitoring is similar to the Safety Monitored Stop, with the cobot operating in a predetermined safety zone. However, this cobot’s reaction to humans is different. The Cobot will not automatically stop because of the human presence, but will slow down until its vision detection system informs it of the location of the person or object. The Cobot stops only if the person is within a predetermined area, and waits for the proximity to increase before resuming its operations. This cobot is useful in areas with several workers are present, at it requires far fewer human interventions.

Although a Hand Guiding cobot works just as a regular industrial robot does, it has additional pressure sensors on its arm device. The operator can therefore teach the cobot to hold an object hard enough and to move it fast enough without damaging the object, while securely working with it. Production lines that handle delicate components find Hand Guide cobots very useful for careful assembly.

Power and Force Limiting cobots are among the most worker-friendly machines. They can sense unnatural forces in their path, such as humans or similar objects. Their joints are programmed to stop all movement at such encounters, and even reverse the movement.

As many skilled workers retire, and replacements are rare, the American Welding Society is working with Universal Robots, to produce a new attachment to their UR+ line of cobots with welding capabilities. The robot moves along the start and stop path of the desired weld, and welds only the specified stitch areas.

Keeping Your Raspberry Pi Cool

Any PC motherboard is practically useless until you add some cooling and other accessories. This is because modern processors require cooling as they generate heat when operating. This is regardless of whether the processor is an x86, x64, an ARM based system such as the Raspberry Pi (RBPi), any other Linux or Android chipset, MIPs, or belonging to any other design.

The general explanation is the internal circuitry within the processor is microscopic and does not have the adequate surface area to dissipate the heat it generates while operating. Therefore, heat buildup within the IC can be detrimental, affecting its performance, unless the heat is removed. Designers usually build-in some safeguards against temperature rise to make the processor fail-safe. For instance, the PC has this feature as a part of the BIOS, and combined with the power management software at the OS level, keeps the CPU from being fried.

The RBPi single board computers run on an ARM chipset that follows the Reduced Instruction Set Computing or RISC architecture. Unlike the x86/x64 chipsets that follow the Complex Instruction Set Computing or CISC architecture, ARM chipsets do not need BIOS, but instead rely on a text file to feed it BIOS-like instructions when booting up. Notwithstanding the differences, the RBPis are as much a computer as those based on the Intel or Apple chipsets are, and prone to much the same issues of heat generation.

A research team at Microsoft, working on AI models and methods of shrinking image recognition to run on RBPi SBCs, has found a simple but effective way to reduce the heat the RBPi CPU generates while running their processor intensive workloads.

An internal protection on the RBPi3 disables it from overclocking when the ARM CPU reaches a core temperature of 85 degrees Celsius. In severe cases of overheating, the internal protection may also shut down the CPU. However, such interruptions are a real problem for any complex machine learning model programs the tiny device is running.

It is usual for a user to place a small heat sink on the RBPi3 CPU to help it to dissipate the heat and keep it cool. However, as the team at Microsoft discovered, this cooling is not adequate for some intensive workloads. According to the principal researcher Ofer Dekel at Microsoft, the cooling kits offered for the RBPi include heatsinks for the CPU and other components, but this is not adequate. Infrared images of the board point out that more work is necessary in cooling the processor.

Adafruit already supplies a miniature fan running on 5 VDC that users can mount on top of the RBPi CPU. However, for those mounting the RBPi on a 7-inch touchscreen display, this tiny fan can be a hindrance.

Therefore, the Microsoft team designed and 3-D printed a different fan mount. The design allows them to mount the Adafruit cooling fan directly on to standoffs available on the 7-inch display. With this arrangement, although the fan is pointing directly at the CPU, it is positioned at an angle beside the CUP rather than sitting directly on top.

What is an i-Robot?

The level of CO2 in our atmosphere is increasing at alarming levels, affecting all life on Earth either directly or indirectly. For instance, it is related to global warming risks, reducing the quantity of ice in the polar regions, which in turn changes the level of seas all around as the ice melts. This has significant consequences on several human activities such as fishing. It also affects the submarine environment adversely, together with the associated biological sphere. For long, scientists have been monitoring the marine environment and studying the status of the seas.

However, the harshness of the marine environment and/or the remoteness of the location preclude many explorations under the sear by vehicles driven by the mother ship. Scientists are of the view robots could effectively contribute to such challenging explorations. This view has led to the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles or AUVs.

One such AUV is the Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Mission or SAUVIM, and is expected to address challenging tasks as above. The specialty of SAUVIM is its capability of autonomous manipulation underwater. As it has no human occupants and no physical links with its controller, SAUVIM can venture into dangerous regions such as classified areas, or retrieve hazardous objects from deep within the oceans.

This milestone is a technological challenge, as it gives the robotic system the capability to perform intervention tasks such as physical contact with unstructured environment but without a human supervisor constantly guiding it.

SAUVIM, being a semi-autonomous vehicle, integrates electronic circuitry capable of withstanding the enormous pressure deep ocean waters generate. In general, it can operate in the harsh environmental conditions—low temperatures of the deep oceans—in a reliable and safe manner. Ensuring the effectiveness of such robots requires a high level of design and accurate choice of components.

As SAUVIM operates semi-autonomously, it needs huge energy autonomy. For this, Steatite, Worcestershire, UK, has introduced a new solution in the form of long-life batteries, ones capable of operating in submarine environment. These Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) battery packs, a result of the first phase of a 24-month project, improves the endurance and speed of autonomous underwater vehicles when deep diving.

Primary advantages that Li-S batteries offer are enhanced energy storage capability to provide improvements in operational duration, despite being constructed from low-cost building materials.

The National Oceanography Center in Southampton, UK, completed the first phase of the Li-S battery project, after repeatedly testing the cells at pressure and temperatures prevailing in undersea depths of 6 Kms. According to the tests, Li-S cells can deliver performances similar to those at ambient conditions, while their effective Neutral Buoyancy Energy Density or NBED is almost double that offered by Li-ion cells used as reference. Life tests, performed on a number of Li-S cells demonstrate they can reach over 60 cycles with slow discharge, and 80 cycles with fast discharges.

The energy within an AUV is limited, which also limits its endurance. Therefore, to conserve the available energy, speeds of AUV are usually kept low at 2-4 knots. Therefore, to enhance or expand this operational envelope, it is necessary to increase the energy available within the vehicle, and the Li-S batteries do just that to increase the vehicles range and speed.

Where are AREE Rovers Going?

NASA is planning new types of rover explorers for observing extreme environments, such as the surface of Venus. They plan to build simple yet robust vehicles. AREE is their acronym for Automaton Rovers for Extreme Environments.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars has been roving and exploring the planet’s surface for the last five years. Among rovers, Curiosity is at the top position. It uses special systems for rejecting heat, X-band receiver and transmitter for communicating directly with Earth, an Electra-Lite radio (UHF) for communicating with the Mars Orbiters, instruments for mineralogy and chemistry, instruments for simple analysis, and much more.

According to Jason Derleth, NASA prefers to do the absolute maximum when sending a rover into space, such as making sure the rover can contribute as much to science as is possible. Jason is the head of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC).

However, Venus is vastly different from Mars. Although very similar to Earth in its size, mass, and density, Venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere—a mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide. This raises the temperature on the surface of Venus to over 450°C, which is hot enough to melt lead or high enough for paper to spontaneously combust. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 92 bar or 1,334 psi, with a density enough to crush a submarine.

In the past, some robots have succeeded in reaching Venus. These were the Soviet Union’s Venera and Vega landers, and the Pioneer probe from NASA. Although they were successful in reaching the planet’s surface, they could function only between 23 and 127 minutes before the oppressive environment snuffed out their electronics.

With the AREE rovers, NASA is trying a new concept, inspired by mechanical clockwork computers and tanks used in World War I. A NASA program, NIAC, is funding the AREE rovers. It is offering small grants for developing early stage technology, which allows engineers to work on long-term ideas for properly developing the technology.

For instance, the most recent funding from NASA related to the development of a rough prototype of the rover concept, which will take about three years. Jonathan Sauder was the first to propose the concept. In 2015, Sauder had observed mechanical computers using levers and gears for performing calculations rather than rely on electronics.

The AREE rovers would be using these analog techniques mainly to survive the harsh environments on Venus. They would traverse the planet’s surface moving on tank treads that overcame the rough terrain. As wind gusts on Venus are high, they would turn wind turbines located at the center of the rover to supply it with the necessary power. The robot would capture the power from the turbines inside springs before distributing it to the other subsystems of the robot. Think of a windup watch, the idea is very similar.

Curiosity has several cameras to measure, map, and guide it over the Marian terrain. However, the electronic functionality of the AREE rovers will be purposely kept simple. Although AREE’s design will make it robust enough to withstand unexpected bumps and drops, it will integrate a simple optical reflector to transmit data to the orbiting satellite.