Category Archives: Science & Engineering

Science and Engineering ideas, product review, technical stuff

Nearest planet takes 600,000 years to get there!

Science & Engineering, Uncategorized, , ,

I am a keen and avid reader of the SMH and today they published an article via Reuter’s feed about the closest exoplanet is around 33 light years according to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. (sources)

So i was curious and did some calculation myself to see how long will a spacecraft take to reach there.

Let’s make some assumption,
1) leap year is negligible to the calculations,
2) Speed of light travel at 300,000km/s,

Therefore each year light will travel,
300,000 x 3600 sec/hr x 24 hr/day x 365 days
= 9,460,000,000,000 km/year (round off)

hence, 33 light years = 300,000,000,000,000 km (round off)

The fastest spacecraft from wikipedia (sources) is the New Horizons which they travel around 36,000 mph = 57600 km/h (approx)
Therefore each year the spacecraft will travel = 500,000,000 km/year (round off)

Unless we have a machine that will travel at the speed of light, using the New Horizon will take approx,
= 300,000,000,000,000 / 500,000,000
= 3,000,000 / 5
= 600,000 human years (approx)

In conclusion, we’ll probably never reach that planet using current technology but if we are able to improve the existing technology by 1000 folds, human could certainly reached that planet within 60 years or so.

Setting up HP 1022n printer

Science & Engineering, ,

Brought a printer HP 1032n at bargain price (second hand about $200, got it for $60) several months ago but only to find out the fuser is damage and worn out after about 100 pages of printing.

So borrowed my friend’s HP 1022n network printer as a temporary replacement until i buy another bargain from online auction.

However, the printer setup wasn’t as trivial as the HP 1032n, where the HP 1032n software drivers installation and the network detection of the printer were automated and easily added to the windows XP system.

The 1022n XP driver seems to work only for USB connection, the system unable to detected the network port. So with the HP 1022n I have to manual added a new port for it to recognized it.

To keep blog short, i did the following to make the network printer working,

  1. Goto control panel and “Add Printer”
  2. Select “Add local printer” as setup can’t and will not found the network printer by default
  3. Select “Create new port” and selected TCP/IP as standard port, NOTE: it require the printer to be turn on
  4. Added the IP address  allocated to the printer. The IP address can be found by pressing and holding the power on button for more than 5 sec.
  5. Select the printer model
  6. Print test page. If the pages do print then you know the network setup is correct.

Some screen shots:

HP 1022n printer setup