The Lighting Industry Association’s new testing laboratory has been opened in Telford, the LIA Laboratory. The 12,500 sq ft purpose built facility is one of the largest of its type in Europe and will create a national testing asset for the UK’s lighting industry. This is an ISO 17025 test laboratory dedicated to lighting and …
UK firm develops wireless system to monitor tyres
A London-based firm called Silent Sensors has developed a new approach to tyre pressure and temperature measurement which it says will allow transport firms to track, manage and monitor tyres on vehicles. The system uses passive RFID sensor technology and can monitor tyres using drive-over mats, hand held readers or whilst on the road. It …
Arduino writes IoT manifesto
Arduino Day took place in California at the weekend and founder Massimo Banzi unveiled the embedded development board community’s most powerful IoT platform to date. The launch of the MKR1000 joined a new Project Hub and Iot website as the Arduino community looks to embrace IoT in a big way. According to Banzi, the release …
Practical Use For Lasers Found
The first-known practical application of lasers has now been announced by Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, US. So, 55 years ago, starts a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of March 22nd 1961. The story continues: An experimental radar system weighing about 25 to 30lbs and named Colidar (coherent light detection and ranging) has been built. …
Chip sales fell 2% in 2015
Chip sales fell 2% in 2015 to $347.5 billion, says IHS. Q1 saw an 8.9% sequential fall – the biggest since Q1 2009. The 2% y-o-y fall follows growth of 8.3% in 2014 and 6.4% in 2013. “Weak results last year signal the beginning of what is expected to be a three-year period of declining …
UK researchers make high temperature op amp in SiC
Raytheon UK has collaborated with Newcastle University to produce silicon carbide (SiC) based amplifier circuitry with operational amplifier like characteristics. The research has used the thermal characteristics of SiC not in a high power device, but in small-signal circuitry that can operate in high temperatures. “To date, the focus on Silicon Carbide semiconductors has been …
Horse To Water
Rather taken by this idea that being a coder leads to fame and fortune I ask my grandchildren if they think they should learn how to code. I suggest that a MicroBit or a Raspberry Pi would be a useful start. Zero response. Horse to water sort of thing. In the USA, apparently increasing numbers …
MPLAB-X success
Having had a bad experience with trying to run an earlier version of Microchip’s MPLAB X integrated development environment on Linux, and following a conversation with Lucio Di Jasio of Microchip, I decided to have another go. He told me that there were issues with early versions of MPLAB-X-for-Linux if the wrong version of Java was …
Packaged LEDs: LED Engin integrates seven colors, Lumileds and Osram Opto
Stage and architectural lighting developers get wider color range from newest LED Engin product while Lumileds roles rugged mid-power LED and Osram Opto targets outdoor applications.
Apache Spark 1.6.1, new versions of Apache Hadoop and Presto, and support for Amazon S3 SSE-KMS now available on Amazon EMR
You can now use upgraded versions of Apache Spark (1.6.1) , Apache Hadoop (2.7.2) , and an upgraded sandbox release of Presto (0.140) on Amazon EMR release 4.5.0 . Spark 1.6.1 was released in the community on March 9th, and it contains several bug fixes and updates to the Dataset API. Additionally, the EMR Filesystem (EMRFS) can now read objects from and write objects to Amazon S3 with S3 server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service keys (SSE-KMS) . Previously, EMRFS supported S3 server-side encryption with S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) and S3 client-side encryption with AWS KMS keys or custom keys .