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Monthly Archives: March 2017

Vertical vs Horizontal

Today the vertical vs horizontal debate about the right approach to the technology industry has been decided in favour of horizontal, but ten years ago it was still very much a current issue. In 2007, NXP, the re-named Philips Semiconductors which had recently been spun out of Philips, was run by Frans van Houten, now CEO of Philips. Most consumer electronics ...

Where to find your Raspberry Pi Zero W

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If you are looking to buy your next Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero W and you don’t know which websites have modules in stock? Well an enterprising guy in Italy has created a website showing which online stores have Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W’s in stock. It is called The PIlocator. As yet there is no pricing information on the ...

Jet man flies with the help of RS Components

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UK human propulsion start-up, Gravity, has built and flown a jet engine flying suit. Founded by Richard Browning, the firm’s Daedalus suit has six jet engines, four hand held and two in a backpack. RS Components has provided tools, components and expertise to support the development. RS has a page on the suit here. Just in case you are thinking ...

Quick-starting your IoT node design just got easier

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Electric Imp, the developer of hardware and software platforms for secure IoT designs, is offering quick-start reference designs for what it believes are the most frequently demanded connectivity and device prototypes. According to Hugo Fiennes, CEO and co-founder of Electric Imp: “We have seen customers cut nine to 12 weeks from prototype and trial schedules, and up to six months of ...

IoT design board makes most of its FPGA 

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Arrow Electronics is targeting the maker market with an IoT design board based on an FPGA. The Arrow MAX1000 board can be installed directly into a custom application or integrated on to a completely separate board. The Intel MAX10 FPGA has 8,000 logic elements. The chip also includes integrated flash memory, a 1Msample/s 12-bit ADC for analogue signals and a ...

From the archive: Henry Joseph Round, unrecognised electronics pioneer Part 2

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David Jervis recently contacted Electronics Weekly, trying to get a clean copy of an article written about his grandfather 50 years ago. Sadly, we couldn’t help because most of EW’s paper archive was destroyed in a storage accident. The grandfather turned out to be HJ Round, the British engineer who a century ago helped invent what was to become electronics. He ...

Free design tool used by 100,000 students, says RS

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RS Components now has 100,000 users in schools and colleges of its free-for-download DesignSpark PCB design tool via its educational network licence. In the last five years 100,000 users from more than 200 places of education across the globe, including schools, academies, colleges and universities, have been using the PCB tool. Before the launch of the licence, the DesignSpark PCB tool needed to be ...

Thermal printer works off one Li-ion cell

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Rohm has a thermal printhead for incorporating in payment terminals capable of being driven by a single-cell Li-ion battery. Thermal printheads are electronic devices that print on special media (i.e. thermal paper) by generating and dissipating heat. Conventional thermal printheads for payment terminals are driven by 2-cell Li-ion batteries. As thermal printers do not use ink or require large toner ...

ARM owner SoftBank sells Electric Imp secure IoT platform

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ARM owner SoftBank is working with secure IoT hardware specialist Electric Imp and will sell Electric Imp’s IoT QuickStart product through its own IoT design and prototyping platform. This will incorporate Electric Imp’s imp004m breakout board, which has a TELEC-certified 2.4GHz Wi-Fi module. The platform includes hardware, OS, cloud services software and IoT security software and firmware with over-the-air updates, ...