A blog about mechatronics

Itaipu dam has the second largest rated capacity of all hydropower plants in the world, next after Three Gorges Dam in China. However, as the Paraná river has a more even flow throughout the year, the Itaipu dam in the end is the hydropower plant in the world that supplies the most energy. A normal year, this plant alone supplies more than 150% of the nuclear plants in Sweden together. The dam was built and is operated within a binational co-operation between Paraguay and Brazil, that then divide the energy in between them, The ground where it stands has a somewhat international status. Traveling in Brazil, I off course had to see this dam with my own eyes. Let's see some pictures I took.  I photographed this overview picture of the dam for a start.  The dam seen from the side. It doesn't look to vast here, but it's 7235 meters long in total. The turbines outlets are underneath the water surface and cannot be seen here.  This is the outlet of cooling wa...

Last summer in Sweden 2014 we had like five days straight with temperatures around 28 celsius (82 fahrenheit) during the day. Such temperature is considered more or less extreme and during such circumstances things go bad for some of us frozen swedes. Yeah, you read correctly, that is extreme for many of us. You're laughing right? Come here when it's -5 celsius instead and see who has the last laugh ;) Alright, I'm exaggerating a little. bit Most people like temperatures as such. But I believe I found an exception here. Most housings in Sweden don't feature a cooling system, which is reasonable. I mean, it would be sort of the same thing as opening a sand shop in the desert of Sahara. However, sometimes maybe there is a need for sand even in Sahara. Some fellow engineering student (I guess), suffering in his rented student housing in Gothenburg, found a remedy to his hardships. Down at the yard there was a storage room for solid waste were disposed fridges ocassion...

Being abroad I'm using Skype regularly. During calls with some people, the call starts just fine but is drenched in low frequent noise after a while. From some instrumental recordings I've done using my laptops internal mic, I knew that it has quiet a lot of background noise. What if that noise is transferred to the other persons speaker, amplified, fed back into my speaker, fed back into my mic again and added to the background noise it produces already, back to the other persons speaker and back again creating an unstable positive feed-back loop? The theory was easily proved in practice. By using head phones, the feedback loop was broken and the high levels of noise disappeared. The software engineers at Skype could probably have good use of the noble teachings of Nyquist to get rid of this. I bet though that a simple noise gate could do the trick. There is one such avaliable online as a plugin but Skype hasn't incorporated that in to their software yet as standard.