Who? What? Why? Where? When? and How?
IPig downs IPint in IPub
Steve Rogerson’s round-up of last month’s news and events, including some that may have slipped under the radar
A
pple gets everywhere these days, including it seems into my beer, or would be if I was tempted to pay
nearly £25 for a Viking style drinking horn, complete with its own stand. The publicity blurb from The Fowndry described it as “the beautifully designed drinking horn for the IPod generation”. Sorry, how on earth does the IPod and the drinking horn go together? I think we should be told. On the subject, I still haven’t got my IPhone 5s that I was hoping to have by now due mainly to a distinct worsening of Vodafone’s customer service department in the year since I last had to deal with them. Talking of beer, EBV Elektronik sent me a
press release bragging about how they had helped this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich
reduce its carbon footprint by using low energy LEDs in the roofs of the beer tents. I am sure they were appreciated by those lying flat on their backs after a few too many pilsners. Press releases that land in my inbox are sometimes about very odd events that are not related at all to the normal subjects I write about. For example, I received one this month from Mycargossip about the number of women each year who give birth in their cars. It contained the line: “Baby Freya was born in the front seat of father’s Ford Focus weighing just 4lb 11oz.” I haven’t driven a car for a while, but that seems very light for a Ford Focus. It must be something to do with these new nanomaterials we keep hearing
about. I’d have also thought there would have been more room in the back, but then I’m not an expert on giving birth. I always like a good robot movie, so I was naturally excited to receive a press release from RS Components announcing that it had produced five videos featuring the Arduino robot. So I got out the popcorn and settled down to watch. I was quickly bored with the instructions about calibrating the wheels, so I stopped the video and watched Terminator instead. Maybe RS should have hired Arnie to star in the videos. The onward march of 3D printing seems to be showing no signs of slowing down, but the weirdest gadget to come from this technology has to be the toothbrush that cleans your teeth in six seconds. You take a scan of your mouth and Blizzident produces a toothbrush to order. It is not really a brush, more a gum plate with bristles. Having recently moved on to an ultrasound brush, I think I’ll give this one a miss.
Engineers at connector maker Multi- Contact are as a happy as a pig in… Almost literally. They put their connectors through a voluntary pig farm test to see if they could survive the high levels of ammonia, which can have a serious corrosive effect on connectors. The three connectors passed and the company reckons they could survive 20 years in that kind of environment. I am now trying to get the image out of my mind of pigs queuing up to replace the connectors on their gadgets. Hmm, should I quickly register IPig as a trade name? Finally, tablets and smartphones make you go blind. Official. Well, at least that seems the obvious conclusion from research by Juniper that reckons 250 million people will be using their devices to access porn by 2017. Maybe Vodafone is doing me a favour by putting hurdles in the way of my attempts to upgrade to the IPhone 5s
Last month saw Fortronic and its UK partner Motiv8 host another of their increasingly successful forums which bring together engineers to discuss and get to know more about the latest available technology. The event, whose subject area was Power and Power Management, was hosted at the Williams F1 Conference Centre near Oxford which meant that delegates got the chance to test their driving skills on the Jenson Button F1 simulator. Motiv8's very own Harvey Osborn held the best on the day record, that was until the final hour of the day and on a "one last try" set of laps, Anthony Middleton who was attending from Convertor Technology smashed the 1.08.409 lap record with a final lap of the day at 1.05.628 setting a new Motiv8 Forum record in the process. The Power Forum addressed many aspects of the design cycle and
covered a variety of areas such as: pcb layout, thermal management, digital power system management, system architectures and design techniques, software control and power measurement. Linear Technology’s Alistair Boyd kicked the day off using his
presentation to talk through the principal benefits of digital power system management - that is reduced design cost and faster time to market; while Ian Loader, the MD of Universal Science, highlighted some of the key practical design considerations that should be employed in a good thermal design in SMD and Hybrid Power circuits. In the afternoon the programme offered delegates the choice of a number of workshops from a range of manufacturers including: Linear Technology, Arrow Electronics and Murata Power Solutions. Heavily oversubscribed these events are gaining real traction and both the organisers and delegates, at least those CIE spoke to, were impressed with the quality of the event. The engineers in attendance came from some of the UK’s leading companies including Dyson, Rolls Royce and Balfour Beatty. According to Motiv8 five events covering LED & Lighting, RF &
Wireless Design, and Power will be run in 2014 and bigger events as well as regional events are being planned. Each one is free to attend to all engineers that meet the organiser’s criteria. Suppliers are always keen to talk to engineers who are looking to use their latest technologies and this attendee thought this focused one day event provided the perfect platform for both.
46 November 2013 Components in Electronics
This is a scene from last month’s Comic Con in New York, and one that had Intel quite excited as the people were watching professional Starcraft II gamers going head to head using notebooks with the latest quad-core fourth generation Intel Core i7 processors with Iris Pro graphics. The competition was streamed live and is available to watch on the ESL TV site for those who want to see the action. The two gamers were called DeMusliM and TLO and are apparently famous in the gaming world.
www.cieonline.co.uk
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