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Tainan university develops device for wire inspection

A Tainan university has developed a low-cost, compact wire inspection device that will revolutionize the way construction contractors and machine makers check their wiring assemblies, a local newspaper reported yesterday.

The Southern Taiwan University of Technology (STUT) has arranged to have a local manufacturer mass produce the device, which saves time and manpower by checking the status of a group of wires simultaneously rather than wire by wire as normally occurs at present.

Researchers at the university said the gadget, dubbed the “digital wiring inspector,” is comprised of a signal transmitting unit and a signal analyzing unit.

The transmitter, placed at one end of the wires, sends individual signals through each wire to the analyzer at the other end. The analyzer indicates which lines are functional and which are faulty by decoding the signals received.

“It’s like putting a yellow, a green and a red pellet into pipelines one, two and three,” said Wei Chao-huang, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

“If only the yellow and red pellets comes out through the other end, then it can be determined that pipeline two is broken,” he said.

The new device can be operated by a single person, a huge advantage in today’s market.

Wei said the most commonly used methods of wiring inspection require multiple workers at a site to check each wire individually, usually by using an additional common wire — a reference wire designated by inspectors — to short-circuit the wire being inspected.

“When the workload is only a cable or two, it’s not a problem using the conventional ways, “ Wei said, “but at a construction site, for example, where there might be tens of rooms with hundreds of electrical cables, one-by-one inspection would be extremely time-consuming.”

Researchers said the prototype device, awarded a gold medal at the 2008 Thailand International Invention Exhibition, cost less than NT$200 and estimated that the price of the commercial version would be no more than NT$99.
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