Bench Talk

For those who don’t know, “24 Hours at Le Mans” is the oldest active sports car race in endurance racing. Think of it as the ultimate test lab for advanced technology. And there’s no trick to that name, this year’s race starts June 14th, 15:00 CEST (9:00am EST / 8:00am CST) and ends 15:00 CEST on June 15th. Driver, Crew and vehicle need to be at the top of their game to compete in this grueling test of racing and engineering.

Elon Musk and Tesla Motors made a HUGE announcement today, stating in a blog post that they "will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology."

I never thought that I would be sitting in on an EE class, years after graduating, taught by a Professor Emeritus at Rice University. I snuck in at the tail end of the course when he was in the middle of discussing op amps. I feel so guilty; I haven’t paid the university a dime, but I am excited to be here. I settle in and listen for a while. No one asks any questions; I assume they are all busy taking notes. Then I sped up time a bit so things would go 25% faster, since I had seen most of this before. It’s handy, but you have to have a MOOC to do that.

I got to the end of my last blog and found myself so excited about the possibilities of Radio Frequency Identification that I could not help but sit down and do some thermal engineering to satiate my desire for some math and physics, the foundations of engineering.

As an editor I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of specmanship, which is why I always look to datasheets, though meaningful comparisons of seemingly similar MCUs between different vendors are hard to construct, especially since overall energy consumption is so application specific. As Markus Levy of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) remarked to me last week, “Datasheets don’t lie, they just present [information] the way they want to present it.”

Since Karel Capek first introduced the world to robots in his 1920 Czech play, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, people have been fascinated by robots (and slightly afraid that they might take over the world). Thirty years later, American author Isaac Asimov began to popularize robots through his science fiction books including I, Robot and The Bicentennial Man. While actual working robots have a long way to go before they live up to their science fiction personas, many exciting advancements in robotic technology have been made. Here are a few of our favorite moments in the brief history of robots...

Nearly 4000 power professionals and knowledge-seekers converged at the Fort Worth Convention Center in March for the twenty-ninth annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC 2014). There was something for everyone it seemed, from hot topics such as high-density power supplies, wide bandgap semiconductors for power electronics applications, wireless charging for electric vehicles, advances in nanotechnology, energy harvesting and 3D packaging to standard subjects such as dc-dc converters, power factor correction, controls, and passive components.

I was on a standards writing committee call two weeks ago discussing part traceability with customers on the committee. I wanted them to accept this requirement in the standard “c. Maintain inventory control of received parts sufficient to have positive traceability as to the supplier of the parts. Parts from different suppliers will not be comingled.” The thinking here is that by having this traceability, customers will know whose product is giving them problems. I was amazed by the response.

The Arduino revolution recently turned the big 1-0! Hard to believe it’s been ten years since that little blue board of electronics magic found it’s way out of Italy and onto lab benches around the globe. I fondly remember many nights and weekends spent with my Arduino Diecimila. It was my first Arduino, and my first prototyping platform since a BASIC Stamp-based platform I acquired back in college.

In 1984 John Gage at Sun Microsystems promoted the idea that “the network is the computer.” Gage was a bit ahead of his time; the Internet was just getting off ground—TCP/IP had only been standardized two years earlier—and the Netscape Navigator browser didn’t debut for another 10 years. Today virtually every computer in the world is part of the Internet.