MIT Tech TV
Videos for Engineers

MIT has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the country's top engineering school. They were one of the first to make videos of undergraduate classroom instruction sessions available at no cost to the public (nothing is free - the tuition payers picked up the tab) through OpenCourseWare. For the past few years,

hundreds of videos have been produced and posted that demonstrate various fundamental physical processes. One cool video shows how a Faraday cage keeps an electric field outside the enclosure from affecting the field inside the enclosure where, in this case E=0, and vice versa. A Van de Graaff generator supplies the electric field while a Ben Franklin doll with strands of metal tinsel attached is used as the UUT (the store must have been sold out of Michael Faraday and Robert Van de Graaff dolls). We exploit the same principle in the form of folded sheet metal shields on PCBs all the time to keep RF energy from interfering with other circuitry in the vicinity. Then, entire assemblies are shielded to prevent energy from being radiated to the outside world, as well as to keep outside world energy from influencing the performance of our circuits.

Ben Franklin Saved by a Faraday Cage

The Wimshurst Machine

Resonant RLC Circuit

Temperature Effect on Resistance

Magnet Affecting CRT Display

(I used to demo this to my kids back when TVs used CRTs)

Videos for Engineers - RF Cafe Website This archive links to the many video and audio files that have been featured on RF Cafe.

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RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...