Posted by Jeannie Choe | 23 Jun 2006
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Comments (10)

SawStop's blade detects the distinct electrical charge of the human body and force-stops its blade within 1/200th of a second. Check out the perilous hot dog footage.
via sci-fi & boingboing
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Comments
wow, awesome and truly disturbing.
http://boards.core77.com/viewtopic.php?t=8319&highlight=sawstop
(Note: Boing Boing has been posting some old stuff lately. Don't depend on it for the latest and greatest.)
... and now that I actually head over there, even Boing Boing knows this is an update. Sounds like the real news is the review on Cool Tools. You should update this post to call that out so people (like me) understand there's more.
I was a fine arts technician at the University of Lethbridge and we replaced our thirty year old table saw with a sawstop. For those who use them, this is the best table saw ever. It's the Darth Vader of table saws.
We've had a sawstop tablesaw in our design school shop (NCSU) for about a year now. It works pretty darn well, and we've only ruined a couple of blades (one because of wet wood!)
The video is so clearly bogus...upon slow examination the blade magically disappears - it doesn't move away or stop, it disappears. So how does this thing really work? Does the blade just stop spinning? I'm wondering why this video would ever be used, it is so obviously fake.
the momentum of the spinning blade forces it to retract, not "magically disappear." it stops, then moves away. this thing works by inducing an electric charge on the blade. the human body's capacitance causes a change in the voltage. when the sawstop detects this with its texas instruments-supplied technology, it forces a brake into the blade, which stops then retracts the blade. maybe you should go to the site (www.sawstop.com) and ask the people who saved their fingers if this is bogus.
There is nothing bogus about the Sawstop. I've seen it in action several times - luckily, not with a real finger. It is amazing and yes, the blade actually does drop below the table faster than you can see it. To see it happen on film, you'd need a camera running at around 250 frames a second, not the 15fps typical for movie clips on the web or 30fps in theaters.
Wish my father had had one of those back when he cut off his thumb.
He then had a highly successful operation to graft one of his big toes to his hand; after some months to let this "take," plastic surgery was used to make it look more like a thumb.
I kid you not.
hey i am doing a project for my enginiering class and we need to have a system that has sensors and i was thinking about useing the sawstop...does any one know of any sensors used in the sawstop??