Victorian Desalination Plant operator AquaSure has confirmed that work is underway to repair a switchgear that was damaged during re-energisation of the plant.

Qorvo has combined RF transceivers for communication protocols; ZigBee 3.0, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in a single chip.   The ARM Cortex-M4-based GP695 SoC supports the IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee 3.0, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless protocols for connecting sensor networks. A feature is the combination of a Bluetooth-based smartphone interface with Thread or ZigBee 3.0 …

Read full article: CES: Qorvo brings multi-protocols to smart homes

Bridgetek will demonstrate its PanL home automation solution at CES. The platform allows users to be able to control the various lighting, air conditioning, heating and security systems that are present in their house/apartment via one single point of contact. Currently the home automation market is very disjointed, with systems from different manufacturers each relying …

Read full article: CES: Bridgetek demoes home automation system

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 is the first 10nm processor and it will be shipping in commercial products in H1. It is being fabbed, in production quantities, by Samsung. The first announced products to use the chip will be the ODG R-8 and R-9 augmented reality smartglasses from Osterhout Design Group. Jewelry designer Swarovski said it plans …

Read full article: First 10nm processor in production

We are very pleased to announce that Mamta Singhal, former IET WES Young Woman Engineer of the Year winner and toy engineer, has agreed to join the EW BrightSparks selection panel. She is joining Dr Lucy Rogers, design engineer and judge on BBC’s Robot Wars, Tony Fish, co-founder of FabLab London, Paul Hide, techUK chief, …

Read full article: IET’s Mamta Singhal joins EW BrightSparks Selection Panel

Tata Elxsi, the Bangalore-based automotive design services firm, has teamed up with DiSTI, the Florida-based user interface tool firm, to develop an integrated e-cockpit for 3D dashboards, HUD and ADAS. Based on the Renesas R-Car H3 platform, the UX was developed using DiSTI’s GL Studio and will be used for 3D instrument clusters, head-up displays and infotainment. Tony K. John, …

Read full article: CES: Tata Elxsi and DISTI show 3D dashboard

Sometimes you think that nothing really innovative is going on any more. The West Coast guys bang on about all sorts of stuff that’s never likely to happen soon – driverless cars, IoT and artificial intelligence to name but three. Already Apple and Google, the apostles of autonomous driving, are sidelining their driverless car programmes, …

Read full article: Is Anybody Genuinely Innovating?

I was thinking about using a hexadecimal control switch and ended up pondering what alternatives exist. For example, how about a quadrature encoder and an up-down counter. There appear to be a couple of quadrature encoder interface chips: LS7083N (also LS7183N*) and ELM403. update: see notes below for more on LS7… One comes from LSI Computer …

Read full article: updated: musing on hexadecimal control

Osram is showing automotive lasers amongst its offering at CES this year, including in headlights. It has a surface-mountable four-channel lidar laser with four individually controllable laser diodes and an integrated control circuit. “The new laser is a bar consisting of four laser diodes that are separated in the production process but are not individual …

Read full article: CES: Laser ranging and laser headlights from Osram

Intel is focusing on self-driving cars at CES with FPGA-boosted x86 processing, calling it the ‘Intel GO in-vehicle development platform for automated driving’ in which FPGAs sit alongside either an Atom or Xeon processor. “These FPGA and CPU-based boards can serve automakers as they look for a rapid, yet reliable way to design ADAS systems,” …

Read full article: CES: Intel GOes for self-driving cars