An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.
In the name of science and safety, I locked myself away in the workshop over the long weekend to produced a +/-4° LED bicycle headlamp to compare with the +/-5.5° version I made a while ago.
+/-5.5° has seemed a little wide, lighting up road-side shrubs and the road immediately in front of the bike too brightly.
Mk6a in all its glory. For scale, the lens is 18mm across and the hole is 26mm.
Continue reading "An Engineer in Wonderland - Hmmm, LED headlamp flop?" »
An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.
I was talking to a retired wood worker about a bench-top scroll saw I just bought.
It is the mechanical cousin of the hand-held fret saw, and within it a saw blade under tension moves rapidly up and down cutting what ever you push against it.
The good thing is, by threading the blade through a drilled starter hole, apertures can be cut in sheet material.
Continue reading "An Engineer in Wonderland - Wooden springs and infinite fretsaws" »
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd,
who has
over 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry
specialising in interconnection cable assembly.
Molex Interconnect is supporting the University of Michigan Solar Car Team as they race against time to build their latest solar car for the World Solar Challenge 1,800 mile race in Australia.
The Team (
UMsolar) is an entirely student-run organization that designs and builds solar-powered vehicles. The team races both nationally and internationally. Since its establishment in 1990, the team has built 10 vehicles, won the American Solar Challenge six times, and placed third in the World Solar Challenge four times. UMsolar is widely recognized as the most successful team in North America.
Continue reading "Only Connect: Molex and the Solar powered vehicle" »
A panel of independent judges has made its decisions as part of the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2011, and the shortlisted finalists in each of the 16 award categories are now published.
The winners will be announced at an Elektra Awards Dinner and
Christmas Party which takes place on Wednesday 14th December at the Park
Plaza, Westminster Bridge in London.
The established annual highpoint of the electronics industry, the
Elektra Awards gives the industry the opportunity to recognise the
achievements of individuals and companies across Europe. They are
designed to promote best practice in key areas including, innovation,
sales growth and employee motivation.
View the Elektra Awards shortlist >>
Continue reading "Shortlist announced for the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2011" »
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd,
who has
over 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry
specialising in interconnection cable assembly.
One thing that is good about big companies is their responsibility to society and, more specifically for the purpose of this blog, the environment.
The bigger the company the more pressure is put on them to show how much they care and want to make a positive difference. So let's look at who's been doing what in the connector industry to benefit the environment...
...Now, that's how the blog was supposed to go. However, after spending a lot of time searching for manufacturers with credible eco credentials, I was only able to find the following.
Continue reading "Only Connect: The Eco Award goes to...? (Going Green #8) " »
We are pleased to announce another new sponsor for the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2011: test and measurement specialist National Instruments is sponsoring the Environmental Award.
Yesterday we announced the shortlist, and for the NI sponsored award, these are:
Axiom Manufacturing Services - Programme to cut carbon emissions by 40%
Datec Technologies - Certification by the Carbon Trust business standard 2010
Ericsson Power Modules - Participation in low-carbon assessment by WWF
Continue reading "National Instruments sponsors the Elektra Environmental Award" »
Here are the top ten most popular articles on
ElectronicsWeekly.com
in the last week, with ICs, ARM CPUs, Intel process technology and SmartBird electronics leading the way...
See what your peers have been reading. In reverse order:
10. Cycle wheel rims + LEDs == Revolights
9. UK imprinted electronics prototypes light up
8. TSMC targets 2015 for volume production on 14nm; Intel targets 2013
Continue reading "Top 10 most popular articles on ElectronicsWeekly.com" »
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd,
who has
over 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry
specialising in interconnection cable assembly.
As reported in
Distribution World, RS has created a
website portal aimed at design engineers and students looking to select and buy connector and interfacing components and equipment.
As a connector / interconnection specialist I thought I'd take a look and give you my thoughts from my humble expert opinion.
The portal focuses primarily on USB, Ethernet & Low Power RF with the addition of some other products. This portal is useful in that it explains a brief overview of each product and applications which use the connectors.
Continue reading "Only Connect: The RS Connector zone" »
An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.
Some nice people at Cree (*ok, not Santa) spotted my non-too-successful attempt to make a useful +/-4° LED headlight recently and took pity on me.
Apparently the guys in the lab had a hunt around, and the result was that a box of bits dropped onto the Electronics Weekly tech desk, which will soon be making its way to the workshop tucked away behind Alice Towers.
Continue reading "An Engineer in Wonderland - Look what Santa* brought me" »
Electronics Weekly in association with
Jonathan Lee Recruitment has
carried out a major survey of salary levels in the UK electronics
industry. The research was carried out by
Reed Business Insight, and thanks to everyone who took the time to take part!
Read the results >>
Over half the respondents said they had been at their current employer for more than eight years.
Over
36% were educated to degree level and 18% had Masters qualifications.
HNC level graduations represented 15% of the sample. There were a
significant number of PhD's amongst the survey sample.
Continue reading "Electronics Weekly Salary Survey 2011 - The Results" »
Welcome to the latest post in the series COMs Insider
by Bob
Pickles, Congatec UK territory
manager.
See the Embedded Masterclass in Cambridge on October 5, 2011 >>
All of us, well perhaps only some of us older types, can remember BBC Micro, Camputers Lynx and the PC AT from IBM. All had a BIOS (Basic Input Output System), which in the good old days started the PC and then ran a DOS, which was a console-based Disk Operating System.
We have moved on a long way from those times, now that fully graphical intuitive Operating Systems are the norm and most computer users hardly see BIOS at all these days. If they do, it may be a graphical splash screen, before Windows or Linux or MAC OS or some other OS loads.
Where did BIOS disappear to then? It's actually still there in every computer that's in existence, except that it's typically hidden by a blank screen or a fancy start-up logo.
Continue reading "COMs Insider: BIOS for embedded systems" »
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd, who has over 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry specialising in interconnection cable assembly.This week the government and the
UK Marine Alliance launched a new initiative to raise the awareness of the important roll that the marine industry plays in the UK economy.
Business Minister and Co-chair of the Marine Industries Leadership Council Mark Prisk said:
"Britain's marine industries are one of our best prospects for high value, high skilled economic growth. That's why we are launching the Marine Industries Growth Strategy to harness that potential and grow the industry by £8billion by 2020".
Continue reading "Only Connect: Marine manufacturing and growth" »
An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.
Doing things with bicycle dynamos is a bit of am obsession with me and several times I have pondered how to supply voltage to things that do not need the whole 3W output.
The trouble with a permanent magnet generator, as these things are, is turning them off as they don't like to stop generating.
Continue reading "An Engineer in Wonderland - Alice invents the thyristor" »
Here's a good one to flag from the Cultrue Lab blog on our sister site New Scientist. The Royal Society has announced its shortlist for the Winton Prize...
Kat Austen, CultureLab editor, writes:
The bastion of science that is the Royal Society has announced its shortlist for the Winton Prize for Science Books. The judges have whittled it down to six books that, they think, are the cream of last year's popular science crop.
All this year's shortlisted authors are new to the prize - but not new to New Scientist. In the main part, we gave the shortlist glowing reviews. Our deputy news editor, Celeste Biever, described Alex Bellos's Alex's Adventures in Numberland
as "a page-turner about humanity's strange, never easy and above all
never dull, relationship with numbers", that includes "beautiful
explanations" of a variety of mathematical complexities, and colourful
descriptions of the characters Bellos encounters in the world of
mathematics.
Continue reading "Royal Society announces shortlist for science book prize " »
We are pleased to announce the Toshiba Electronics Education Zone has launched on ElectronicsWeekly.com.
Welcome to a new series of posts featuring the excellent electronics cartoons from 
I'm pleased to flag another new photo gallery, this time anticipating the 1,800 mile World Solar Challenge, which takes place across the Australian outback in October... See 
We are pleased to announce the launch of the 
Welcome to the second in a new series of posts featuring the excellent electronics cartoons from 
Welcome to the third in the new series of posts featuring the excellent electronics cartoons from 