Season 1 features the following:
- Robotic arms
- Lithium ion batteries
- MRI scanners
- Incandescent light bulbs
- Computer circuit boards
- Airplanes
- CD/DVD
- Magnets
- Hard disk drives
- Computer chips
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HOW DO THEY MAKE IT: Season 10
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Robotic arms
Robotic arms
A robotic arm resembles a human arm. It has a shoulder, an elbow, a wrist and a hand. The shoulder is actually a stationary base to which the wrist is attached. An engineer first designs all the parts of a robot using a computer. Those parts turn into bases which includes a steel or aluminium material. The material is put in shape with the help of a computer-guided press. Each joint of the robotic arm is programmed for a specific range of movement. The combination of these movements also manipulate the end effecter. An electrical wire is plugged inside the shoulder and link up the wires from the circuit board in the base – around 48 wires are used.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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Lithium ion batteries
Lithium-ion batteries are used in all portable electronics today. Be it your humble rechargeable flashlight or your smartphone, Lithium-ion batteries are the only means of powering it because of its efficiency and longer life span. So how do they make these batteries? Find out.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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MRI or Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners are used in radiology to investigate the anatomy and physiology of the human body for both health and disease investigation. An MRI scanner makes use of magnetic fields and radio waves to finally form images of the body. The imaging technique is used in hospitals for medical diagnosis, staging of disease and follow-up without exposure to ionizing radiation. The MRI machine incorporates a powerful magnet, liquid helium gas and intelligent wireless and imaging technology. Making an MRI machine is a huge task and a single machine takes hours of painstaking manufacturing in the factory. Check the video below which explains each component and how they are made.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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The world is already using CFL lamps and tubes today and is slowly shifting to more energy efficient LED lamps and tubes. However, before CFL lamps and tubes, the incandescent bulb was the only method of lighting up a room or an area. These bulbs were made using a special wire encased in a glass chamber filled with a particular gas. When electricity is passed through this wire, it would turn red hot and start emitting light. The incandescent bulbs are still used in many places today. These include automobiles and a few electrical appliances, such as the refrigerator and the microwave oven. Check out the video below which shows you how they manufacture the famous incandescent bulbs on a large scale.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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Computer chips and other electronic components are what make up the entire circuit. However, these need to be mounted on a platter or a board and wired up to form a circuit. Each of these boards is sandwiched between copper plates, and later the copper is etched to form tracks for the circuit. Components are later added and soldered accordingly. For simple electronic circuit boards, the PCB can be made by hand. But large complex PCBs for computers (motherboards) and other cards need to be manufactured using complex processes since the components are tiny and plenty. So how do they precisely make these motherboards on a large scale?
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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Airplanes are essentially pressurised cylinders zooming through the air 10km above the ground. They take us to work and vacation, and in general, move us from point A to point B, faster than any other existing transport in the world. Here’s how a modern commercial jet aircraft is built.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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CD/DVD:
It won’t be too long when CDs and DVDs will soon be extinct as flash drives are getting cheaper and they are more efficient as data storage options. The DVD disc is nothing but a high-density compact disc, which can store up to 8GB of data. A Blu–ray disc is also a form of a high-capacity DVD disc, capable of storing data up to 50 GB. These discs, CD, Laser, DVD and a Blu-ray, works on the principle of light and data is stored in the form of pits. Each of these pits creates a break in the laser beam, which reads the data as zeros and ones (0 and 1). The optical disc can be written at home using a DVD or Blu-ray writer. Each disc takes anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the amount of data to be written and the speed of the writer itself. However, when millions of discs are needed to be manufactured, each disc is stamped and not written individually in a factory. Check out how these optical discs are manufactured.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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You may not realise it, but most gadgets and appliances around you have magnets as an essential component.
Although magnets occur in nature, but only about two centuries ago, scientists figured out how to make them using metal and electricity. Watch this video to know how magnets are actually made.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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Data is the most important need for any computer to run. Data is stored on a medium, which is either soft or hard. Soft drives such as floppy drives are no more used since they are slow, hold very small amounts of data (max of 250MB) and are easily destroyed. Hard drives are now used in almost every computer system out there. Each drive can hold up to a massive 4 TB of data, and they are not stopping there. They are one of the fastest and most reliable medium for data storage and cost lower than their counterparts (Floppy, CD, DVD and even SSD). So how is a hard drive made? Check out each component of a hard drive and how they make it.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
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Computer chips:
Integrated circuits, or ICs, are used in every electronic equipment out there. From your simple wrist watch to a smartphone, and from a toaster to a spaceship, everything uses one of more of this simple, yet highly complicated piece of intelligence—the IC chip. Each IC chip is a super compact circuit board on a die no larger than your thumb. In certain cases, they are as small as a grain of salt. Larger chips are found in computers, while one of the tiniest one is found in an RFID or NFC chip. Each chip is made of silicon, the sole ingredient of an IC. The process is not as simple and cheap as we would think. Making a single chip requires a lot of initial designing, and the final product goes through a few too many processes. Check out how a CPU, the brain of any computer, is made.
Also check out ‘A HACK A DAY’, which brings you various tips, tricks and hacks related to technology.
