RS Components has signed a distribution agreement with Adafruit, which supplies hardware, tools, equipment and electronics to makers and hobbyists. RS already stocks a number of Adafruit products, and the new deal extends this to the entire line up of current Adafruit products, including its boards and accessories for Raspberry Pi and Arduino. These will …

Read full article: RS goes for maker market with Adafruit deal

A few of the BBC’s rather neat micro:bit computers have ended up with very hot chips – clearly there is a design flaw. Malcolm commented on an early post on this subject and may have put his finger on the issue: The issue is likely latch-up due to a deviation in design from the the …

Read full article: Is this the source of micro:bit’s over-heating issues?

Rohm Semiconductor presented its silicon carbide (SiC) technology at the Hong Kong round of the 2016/17 Formula E electric car racing season – the firm is a sponsor of the Venturi team. “The inverter for season three (pictured) features embedded SiC Schottky diodes, making it 2kg lighter than the inverter for season two. Electric efficiency has …

Read full article: Rohm reveals Formula E technology is SiC

In the early 60s there was a graduate music student at Stanford who became interested in electronic music. In 1972, he invented FM synthesis. Although the technology was first offered to the US organ manufacturer Hammond, it was Yamaha who took an exclusive licence on the technology and became the only supplier of FM synthesiser …

Read full article: Fable: The Company Which Looked A Gift Horse In The Mouth

European supercomputer finding will be aimed at low energy processors, said Dr Sandro D’Elia of the European Commission speaking at the HiPEAC Autumn Computing Systems Week in Dublin. “We’re looking for innovative processor designs orientated to high performance computing, which is very important to European industry’, said D’Elia, who is from the EC’s Directorate General …

Read full article: Europe offers cash for faster cooler server chips

It was good to see Linear Tech founders Bob Swanson and Bob Dobkin on LTC’s Electronica stand. Now that ADI owns the company you’d think they’d be inhabiting a beach. “We’re staying on for the transition,” Swanson told me, “there are people at Linear who helped build the company who expected to stay for another …

Read full article: The ADI – LTC Integration

The Farnell- Avnet merger, which closed three weeks ago, solves the service vs volume equation which all distributors have to address. “We’re not geared to high volume and they’re not geared to high service,” Steve Carr, head of global marketing, told me at Electronica. Carr summed up Farnell’s focus on the educational and maker market …

Read full article: Electronica: Farnell adds high volume to high service

You can now monitor the burst-bucket performance and ensure you have the right volume size for Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes using Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon EBS gp2 volumes have the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time for workloads that need to burst beyond the baseline performance. Amazon EBS now publishes the Burst Balance metric into Amazon CloudWatch for all gp2 volumes. The vast majority of customers have sufficient burst for their workloads. However, if visibility into the Burst Balance is desired, you now have the ability to monitor and take appropriate action. You can automate Burst Balance monitoring by creating a CloudWatch alarm that notifies you when the Burst Balance falls below a user-specified threshold.

An operating agreement for a proposed desalination plant at Tianjin, the largest port city in northern China, was signed on November 8, 2016, by Xianda Seawater Resources Company of Malaysia, and Tianjin Administrative Commission.

Portage, Ind., steel mill saves $210,000 annually