Arduino now has a standalone voice recognition and synthesiser which does not require an internet connection or cloud-based processing. It is a hardware shield which is claimed to ‘Siri- like’ recognise full sentences and has a 2GB internal dictionary. It can be programmed to recognise almost any complete English sentence and build a dialogue system to …

Build your own Siri for Arduino

Designers of USB Type-C small form factor devices can now create always-on rails with the ultra-low quiescent current MAX77596 buck converter from Maxim. Next-generation products that use the high data rates and increased power transfer capability of USB Type-C ports will require low-voltage supply rails to power necessary Type-C port controllers. Devices using the Power Delivery (PD) …

Maxim opens low-current buck converter for always-on rails

An umbrella with a one transistor radio built inside the shaft has been developed by the Maruko Industrial Company of Nihonbashi Chuo-ku, Tokyo. So, 55 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of March 22nd 1961 The story continues: The radio operates on a three volt dry battery and uses the umbrella shaft …

Singin’ In The Rain

The headquarters of Cisco integrator Smartworld is the latest “Digital Ceiling” proof-of-concept site that incorporates PoE technology.

The US Department of Energy is pursuing regulations for general service lamps that are stronger in many ways than California Title 20, but don’t mandate the boost in color rendering performance that has drawn the ire of many in the SSL sector.

A new set of review, guidance and reporting activities have been formalized to help customers prepare, manage, and optimize their cloud operations. Included with the Enterprise support plan, Operations Support enables customers to work with their Technical Account Manager to gain:

• Operational insight: Operations assessments and analysis to identify gaps across the operations lifecycle, as well as recommendations based on best practices.
• Event Reporting: Detailed reporting on customer-impacting events, including AWS remediation steps and recommended customer actions to help mitigate future risk.

Amazon Kinesis Agent is a pre-built Java application that offers an easy way to collect and send data to Amazon Kinesis Streams and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. The agent monitors a set of files for new data and continuously sends it to Amazon Kinesis Streams or Amazon Kinesis Firehose.

AWS IoT now offers APIs to register and use security certificates signed by your Certificate Authority (CA) as an alternative to using certificates that were generated by AWS IoT. This allows your connected devices with existing or new certificates signed by your signing certificate seamless access to AWS IoT.

To learn more about the service, visit the AWS IoT documentation .

We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool now supports conversions between two popular open source engines: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Conversions can be run in either direction and using any MySQL compatible engine including Amazon’s next generation cloud database, Aurora. This release builds upon existing support for conversions from Oracle and SQL Server to PostgreSQL and MySQL. SCT now includes further improvements in conversion rules between all engines and a revised assessment report. 

You now have the ability to quickly and easily create new Amazon Redshift datasources in Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) by copying settings from an existing Amazon Redshift datasource. A new option on the Amazon ML console allows you to select an existing Redshift datasource to copy the Redshift cluster name, database name, IAM role, SQL query and staging data location, to automatically populate these fields in the Create Datasource wizard. You can modify the settings before the new datasource is created, for example, to change the SQL query, or to specify a different IAM role to access the cluster.