Electronic Product Design Blog

So if your one of the many who doesn’t really get Twitter and can’t see yet how the iPad is such a game changer, a new iPad ap has just been launched that really is ground breaking and could well change that.  I’ve always used Twitter to get news rather than to tweet and its a brilliant tool for that.  Why listen to or read the generic news when you can hear personally tailored news that’s important to you instead? However Twitters format and the impression that you need to be someone who tweets puts a lot of people off and unless you’ve given it a bit of time and honed a list of good people to follow you don’t get to see what a powerful personal news tool it is (the first rule of twitter is to follow easily, un-follow more easily).

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Being of the parenting stage of life and a self confessed geek I’ve been asked on many an occasion what is the best way to protect home computers so that kids can’t get to bad places on the web.  Over the years I’ve tried out a few solutions and for the last couple of years have used the OpenDNS free service.  Whilst I’ve found this to be far better than the paid for solutions I’d used (it very rarely lets through bad web sites) the problem was that you needed to be a bit geeky to set up an account and install suitable software on home PC’s to update it whenever your broadband IP address changed.

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Managing the passwords for your on-line presence is becoming increasingly hard.  If you want to protect yourself you should avoid using dictionary based words and using the same password for multiple sites.  However the number of sites and services requiring passwords is ever expanding.

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I joined the UK Electronics Group at LinkedIn a little while back.  Unlike most of the LinkedIn groups I’ve come across this one is nice and small with what seems a good membership of professional types.  A discussion came up where the idea was floated about whether maybe a conference should be organised somehere and what it should contain.  I made what I thought might well be an unpopular comment, saying that I think it would be great idea to look at organising some form of online conference using webinars.  For me this concept solves all the problems of conferences – having to travel across the country to some town that is hugely inconvenient for 99% of the attendees, the day or more out of the office and that I’d be able to pick and choose what I participated in.  It would also mean that a well organised online event could potentially attract lots of visitors and make it all very worthwhile to do in the first place.  To my surprise the only other comments on the discussion seemed to agree with me – I thought I might get lambasted for suggesting that doing a conference online could in any way be better that face to face human contact!

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Lots of electronic component manufacturers have started sending out letters to their customers, distributors and design partners in the last few weeks warning of increasing lead times for parts.  When the worldwide recession first started electronic component manufacturers we’re one of the first to be hit with a large drop in orders as companies immediately cut back on manufacture and looked to use up their existing stocks.  Now that much of the world is emerging from recession electronic manufacturers are being hit with massive increases in orders and are asking their large customers to give them increased warning of their likely requirements over the coming months and quarters where possible.  As with all manufacturing processes, electronic manufacturers have a finite manufacturing capacity and they have to decide what components to commit each of their manufacturing lines to on a week by week basis.  Whilst smaller manufacturers can’t influence this they do need to be aware of the problem and start planning accordingly.

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Once upon a time the United Kingdom was a world leader in engineering and technology.  For generations there was a built in desire and drive for clever people to explore, investigate, invent and break seemingly impossible barriers in all aspects of engineering.  Then came the most recent modern revolution and the cost of labour saw much of our manufacturing industries vanish offshore and the slow eroding of our technical expertise as the governments of the up and coming countries embraced new technologies, nurturing and investing in their people to take on the new skills required.  In the UK our government chose to embrace the service and financial industries instead.

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BBC4 are running a brilliant series of technology related programs currently as part of their ‘Electric Revolution’ season.  The season encompasses everything from new tv programming looking at the rise of technology through the years, with bags of childhood nostalgia for anyone over the age of 30, to analysing how new technologies have changed our lives and how we’ve evolved as people and a society to interact with them.  There have also been some great documentaries charting the evolution of specific technologies, such as the semiconductor, and the people behind them.  Finally the drama Micro Men is a must see for anyone of the Sinclair Spectrum and Acorn BBC computer generation, with the casting of Martin Freeman (The Office) playing Acorn’s Chris Curry and Alexander Armstrong (Armstrong & Miller) playing Sinclair’s Sir Clive Sinclair simply genius. (more…)

The Geek Atlas has been released recently and its a top book for anyone into technology, be they a super geek or just a beginner geek. Its written by John Graham-Cumming, a real technology expert rather than author with desires to be a technology expert.  His expertise has produced a book that is both really interesting but also very accurate, something many technology books by less technical authors fail to achieve.

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As the technology revolution continues on at an ever increasing pace the role of the software engineer is becoming ever more important. Although the need to solve problems with clever electronic circuitry is still very much there, the big advances in product design these days are being made in the software engineering. Why? As well as the average PC becoming ever more powerful so too is the low cost embedded processor, and these tend to be designed into pretty much any electronic product these days, from an iPhone to a dishwasher. The performance and capabilities of today’s embedded processors costing just a few dollars is simply amazing and with a carefully selected device designed into a new product the task of programming it is becoming more and more of the overall development requirement.

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More battery power news has come out recently, this time about work being carried out at MIT and an apparent breakthrough in the design of Lithium batteries. This could be really important as whilst Lithium batteries are far from ideal in terms of environmental friendliness (they are toxic), they are the best mobile energy storage device we currently have in terms of energy density and cost. Importantly, they are also now a well understood and quite mature technology (let’s hope the days of exploding laptop batteries are behind us!).

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Remember when PCs had a turbo button on the front?  We’re talking the 386 and 486 days of computing, Windows 3.1 and when a 40MB hard disk cost a small fortune.  Wouldn’t it be good if our computers still had the turbo button, for those times when you really need to turn the performance up to 11!

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OnLive have hit the headlines in quite a big way recently. They’re starting the PR on their new technology which is aimed at allowing users to play games over the net with all of the intensive graphics processing being carried out in large server farms. At your end you just need a really cheap OnLive box or an old PC or Mac that’s been gathering dust. The concept works on the principal of your inputs being sent over the net to their servers, which process them and create the game video in real time, sending it back to you as a heavily compressed video stream. This means your basically watching a video stream, like watching a YouTube video, except that its high quality and being created in real time just for you.

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A suitably cold spring nights finds me, my laptop and various bits of electronics huddled in the passenger seat of a car programming the final effects for the new exterior lighting of The Wyvern Theatre in Swindon.  As the local skateboarders departed to their bed’s we we’re just getting into a long night of testing and tweaking each of the effects specified by designer Gudrun Sigriour Haraldsdottir.

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In the world of technological innovation batteries have been a poor performer for many years, with their evolution and improvement lagging wildly behind the progress of the devices they power. The best commercially viable solution we currently have, in terms of energy density, are lithium. This battery technology is toxic and therefore horrible for the environment when batteries are disposed of, takes time to charge and suffers from long term degradation even when not used (yes that rumor about keeping lithium batteries partly discharged in your fridge to prolong their life is true!)

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