A mechanism that causes a device to be turned on or off, adjusted or moved. The motor and mechanism that moves the head assembly on a disk drive or an arm of a robot is called an actuator. See access arm.
 | Reproduced with permission from Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. Copyright (c) 1981-2009 The Computer Language Company Inc. All rights reserved. |
Additional Resources
- Western Digital debuts 2TB, 7200RPM enterprise-class hard drives
- Western Digital on Tuesday announced that it is now shipping 2TB, 7200RPM enterprise-class desktop hard drives with WD's 500 gigabytes-per-platter technology. The company's family of Caviar Black drives (pictured, below) is intended for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the 2TB WD...
- Blog posts 2009-09-01
- Review: Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 3GS
- A guest blog post by Vic Orly: The iPhone 3GS is awesome except for one thing: its battery life, or lack thereof. My battery experience had been awful. Recently, I was on a flight from Chicago O'Hare to San Diego with my new 32GB...
- Blog posts 2009-08-11
- The RUNES Middleware for Networked Embedded Systems and Its Application in a Disaster Management Scenario
- Due to the inherent nature of their heterogeneity, resource scarcity and dynamism, the provision of middleware for future networked embedded environments is a challenging task. This paper presents a middleware approach that addresses these key challenges; it also discusses its application in a realistic networked embedded environment. This application scenario...
- White papers 2008-07-24
- Pervasive and Mobile Computing
- This paper considers generation of graphs that represent specific scenarios that appear in wireless ad hoc, actuator, sensor and Internet networks. Most simulation studies for these networks use connected random unit disk graphs generated by placing nodes randomly and independently from each other. However, in real life usually networks are...
- White papers 2008-05-09
- Intelligent side-impact protection for cars
- European researchers have developed a car body that thinks intelligently and protects its occupants before a side-impact. These future cars will be equipped with radar sensors and cameras integrated in the doors. If another car is about to collide with your own vehicle, the system will detect it 200 milliseconds...
- Blog posts 2008-03-15
- QoS Challenges and Opportunities in Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks
- A Wireless Sensor/Actuator Network WSAN is a group of sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed and interconnected by wireless networks. Sensors gather information about the state of physical world. Actuators react to this information by performing appropriate actions. WSANs thus enable cyber systems to monitor and manipulate the behavior...
- White papers 2008-02-21
- Capturing ambient intelligence
- According to Wikipedia, 'ambient intelligence AmI refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people.' In 'Ambient intelligence: snowboarding to the new frontier,' ICT Results reports that ambient intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. This is why...
- Blog posts 2008-01-15
- AmICom - Middleware Support for Ambient Communication
- Intelligent environments are based on services that are deployed on hardware nodes that communicate among each other. Generic and light-weight communication middleware for service interaction is the basis of the ubiquitous idea. Actuator, sensor and information systems as well multimedia devices are distributed over a set of hardware nodes. If...
- White papers 2008-01-01
- Fuzzy Logic Control Based QoS Management in Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks
- Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks WSANs are emerging rapidly as a new generation of sensor networks. Despite intensive research in Wireless Sensor Networks WSNs, limited work has been found in the open literature in the field of WSANs. In particular, Quality-of-Service QoS management in WSANs remains an important issue yet to be...
- White papers 2007-12-06
- null
- nullFDISKFdisk will zero out the drive but there are means of recovering data from drives that have been erased that way. All it takes is time and money.Fdisk won't cut itSorry there but even using fdisk and a reformat will not make the data unrecoverable. You actually need to...
- Discussion threads 2007-11-12
- Western Digital 'GreenPower" drive halves power consumption
- The Western Digital "GreenPower" WD10EACS 1 terabyte hard drive is one the cheapest hard drives you can buy at this capacity ($300 including shipping) but it's also the most energy efficient. The drive has a technical specification of 4 watt idle which I measured fluctuating between...
- Blog posts 2007-10-19
- Wireless Sensor/Actuator Network Design for Mobile Control Applications
- Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks WSANs are emerging as a new generation of sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will enable an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the unreliability of wireless communications and the real-time requirements of control applications raise great challenges for WSAN design....
- White papers 2007-10-09
- That damned recessed iPhone headphone jack
- I don't know what Apple was thinking when they released the iPhone with a recessed headphone jack that prevents customers from using almost any set of earphones or earbuds that they already own. Surely someone mentioned this little fact in the beta testing? Focus groups? Oh yeah,...
- Blog posts 2007-09-06
- Seagate's new line of hard drives
- Seagate's new line of hard drivesWhat about SPEED?????We're reaching the point where hard drives are actually big enough (at least for current uses!) and small enough (the 1.8" 60G in a pocket size drive for streaming is a neat idea), but they're not getting any faster! Other than WD's...
- Discussion threads 2007-09-06
- Spinning Sensors: Middleware for Robotic Sensor Network
- This paper proposes Spinning Sensors, a middleware system for creating robotic sensor network applications. This middleware enables application programmers to easily write application software which utilizes both sensors and actuators in their network. In the Spinning Sensors model, a sensor node is attached to a robotic actuator to change its...
- White papers 2007-09-04
- Performance Evaluation and Prediction of a Bluetooth Based Real-Time Sensor Actuator System in Harsh Industrial Environments
- This paper deals with a performance evaluation of a Bluetooth based industrial real-time sensor actuator interface for stationary and mobile applications. The investigations were carried out in harsh industrial environments in the presence of parasitic machine emissions, intentional and unintentional interferers. The air paths were obstructed by moving machine parts...
- White papers 2007-07-06
- WD's surprising little drive
- IIRC, it was just 15 years ago that Maxtor shipped the first 1 GB, 3.5" drive. The usual things happened: database admins all swore it was "too big," techies said it cost too much, and regular users wondered if they could ever fill it up.DBA's still kvetch about disk size...
- Blog posts 2007-06-07
- Circuitry (Cracking open a Maxtor hard drive)
- Circuitry Cracking open a Maxtor hard driveFunnyOf the 12 or so drives I have taken apart, I have never mangled the read/write heads.Image 19. ShellNot much to the shell? Sorry, wrong. The shell may in fact be the most difficult piece to manufacture in quantilties. Consider this,...
- Discussion threads 2007-04-27
- Diagnostic Network Patch System for SHM and Intelligent Infrastructure
- As a diagnostic system for Continuous Structural Health Monitoring and Intelligent Infrastructure (CSHM&II), the Diagnostic Network Patch DNP system has been developed to detect and monitor the flaws and faults of the structure of composites and metallic materials. As a device of interrogating guided acoustic waves in a structure, each...
- White papers 2007-04-01
- Making sense of "mean time to failure" (MTTF)
- Last week researchers at Carnegie Mellon University published a paper which examined the real-world reliability of hard drives. It concluded that hard drive failure rate was much higher by a factor of about fifteen times higher than that expected based on mean time to failure MTTF information supplied by...
- Blog posts 2007-03-12
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