Weller’s WTQB 1000 surface-mount re-work station is intended to cover infra-red pre-heating, de-soldering, pad cleaning, positioning and soldering components from 1 x 1 to 42 x 42mm. And BGAs can be re-balled – fitted with new solder balls. It includes an adjustable positioning arm with a vacuum pipette for lifting components and a camera, plus a …

Read full article: SMD re-work station has camera

Rittal has introduced a fastener that replaces captive nuts when installing equipment in 19inch racks. Attachment is by hand without tools, and it can be used with every enclosure in the Rittal product range straight away. It is available as a pre-assembled 1U support with three captive nuts, including centre attachment, to standard EIA 310. …

Read full article: Tool-free 19in rack fastener replaces captive nuts

LP-176 from BMV is a Pico-ITX (100 x 72mm) single-board computer is based around a choice of Intel 14nm Braswell quad-core processors: 1.6GHz N3710 Pentium or 1.04GHz Atom X5-E8000. Applications are expected in information appliances where graphics rich operation and high end audio are key. Both versions have Generation 8 graphics support with a standard …

Read full article: Pico-ITX board provides good graphics and audio at low-power

CB Insights and KPMG report that VC Funding went negative in Q4 and stayed low in Q1: The number of $100 million plus VC financings fell off a cliff in Q4 and have stayed low: Q1 was a five quarter low for new companies entering the unicorn club: The median size of European late-stage deals …

Read full article: VC Funding Trend Continues Negative

NEC  has adopted Raspberry Pi as a standard internal display peripheral “enabling a seamless integration of Raspberry Pi’s devices with NEC’s displays”, said NEC. In this case, it is the third-generation Raspberry Pi Compute Module – an industrial computer with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. “The latest Raspberry Pi 3 compute module boasts significant performance …

Read full article: NEC adds Raspberry Pi socket to displays

Where I failed to get much further that playing the odd music file on Allo’s Vana hi-fi stack – which is compatible with Raspberry Pi, website CNXsoft has managed to go the extra mile. The issues that stopped me (see links below) were around the version of Max2Play software supplied with the Sparky Raspberry Pi …

Read full article: CNXsoft reviews Allo Vana hi-fi player

New software for the Allo Vana hi-fi player for Raspberry Pi or its clones appeared on GitHub a few hours ago. The music player sounds great, but has had some software issues. Fingers crossed this code will sort it. Allo Vana GitHub has Max2Play images. They are pointed to from this Sparky/Allo forum page, then …

Read full article: A fix for Allo Vana hi-fi player for Raspberry Pi?

Once again Mentor comes under threat and it makes you realise what a great force for good Mentor has been in the semiconductor industry. It has been notably involved in the engineering community offering its ordinarily rather expensive tools to academia and start-ups on affordable terms, engaging in educational and training projects, stimulating the IC …

Read full article: Good Luck Mentor

LED-based fixtures are proving able replacements in outdoor lighting applications ranging to 100,000 lm while delivering benefits in energy efficiency and better beam control relative to HID lamps.

AWS Educate, a program that helps educators and students use real-world cloud technology in the classroom, now offers students cloud learning pathways. These learning tracks are made up of 30+ hours of curriculum across job families like Cloud Architect and Software Developer. The program also offers specialty AWS Educate Badges as add-ons to the pathways, for which students can achieve competency in specializations like IoT, start-up, and gaming.