Abstract: Performance of an imaging reader for electro-optically reading direct part markings on workpieces is enhanced by uniformly illuminating the markings. An illuminator is operative for emitting illumination light of greater and lesser intensity toward the indicia. A diffuser is operative for diffusing the illumination light en route to the indicia. The diffuser includes a plurality of diffusing elements adjacent the illuminator for diffusing the illumination light of greater intensity more than the illumination light of lesser intensity.

Abstract: An improved housing configuration for a portable electronic device is provided. The housing includes a flash card slot configured within a battery compartment of the portable electronic device to protect a flash card from outside contaminants. The housing also includes a SIM module, the SIM module having a well to provide for proper alignment with a SIM card, a freely detachable SIM card cover, and a sealing gasket to provide a seal between the well and the SIM card cover. The housing also includes a pen slot, which enables a user to easily remove the pen with a pushing action. The housing further includes a hand strap mount, which can be easily converted into a hip-clip.

Abstract: An improved housing configuration for a portable electronic device is provided. The housing includes a flash card slot configured within a battery compartment of the portable electronic device to protect a flash card from outside contaminants. The housing also includes a SIM module, the SIM module having a well to provide for proper alignment with a SIM card, a freely detachable SIM card cover, and a sealing gasket to provide a seal between the well and the SIM card cover. The housing also includes a pen slot, which enables a user to more easily remove the pen with a pushing action. The housing further includes a hand strap mount, which can be easily converted into a hip-clip.

Abstract: A wind gauge apparatus and method. An illustrative embodiment includes a microphone positioned to engage wind pressure from a first relative direction and a controller coupled to receive an audio signal from the microphone. The controller compares the audio signal with plural threshold values, representative of wind pressure levels, and determines a first wind pressure level incident upon the microphone. Filtering and gain controls are used to condition the audio signal output from the microphone. Plural microphones are employed to allow that detection of wind direction and magnitude about a compass of directions. Digital signal processing is employed to process data. In an illustrative embodiment, the wind direction and magnitude data are used to recommend a golf club size adjustment and a golf swing direction adjustment to the user, who has taken a measurement of the wind with respect to a reference golf swing direction.

Abstract: An irregular connectivity mesh representative of a surface having an arbitrary topology is processed to generate a parameterization which maps points in a coarse base domain to points in the mesh. An illustrative embodiment uses a multi-level mesh simplification process in conjunction with conformal mapping to efficiently construct a parameterization of a mesh comprising a large number of triangles over a base domain comprising a smaller number of triangles. The parameterization in this embodiment corresponds to the inverse of function mapping each point in the original mesh to one of the triangles of the base domain, such that the original mesh can be reconstructed from the base domain and the parameterization. The mapping function is generated as a combination of a number of sub-functions, each of which relates data points in a mesh of one level in a simplification hierarchy to data points in a mesh of the next coarser level of the simplification hierarchy.