Bench Talk

Makers and engineers now have a ridiculously easy way to add a high quality touchscreen display to the Arduino UNO without a lot of fuss. It’s called the CleO35 and seems ideal for projects that need a simple yet elegant Human-Machine Interface (HMI). That’s nerd speak for the barrier between the human user and the digital device. The CleO35 was first introduced on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding site, by FTDI Chip.

In the previous blog about essential tools for electronics, I mentioned some of the more basic items. As you do more advanced electronics, and sometimes to better understand the basics, you would do well to have the following tools. They are not really needed for building basic circuits and playing around with Arduino projects and the like, but as you start to expand into more complex technologies, you will find these tools extremely helpful...

A few weeks ago I was able to talk with a guy in Mansfield, Texas, using Morse code. I nearly broke out in tears to be able to talk with another human being. He’s holed up in the Mouser warehouse, an ex-IT employee who has a little electronics experience but managed to hack together a Morse code set up. Turns out Boy Scouts really are prepared for everything. It took a while but over the course of a few days Tony was able to help me locate a shipment of electronics that had been shipped from Mouser to a home nearby, so I thought I would check it out.

The rise of Open Source Hardware (OSHW) has made it easier than ever to tinker with electronics. But even in a world where open source development (dev) platforms are making it appreciably easier to get started, tools are still a must for doing any serious circuit building and testing. Investing in good tools early in your maker career can make all the difference as to whether or not you stick with electronics as a hobby (or even profession), or give up in frustration when a circuit doesn’t quite work the way you intended.

In the space it takes us to blink an eye (300 to 400 milliseconds is the average) a modern embedded core can perform millions of operations. It’s almost unfathomable for us to perceive such tiny fractions of time, especially since the evolution of timekeeping began with sundials and water clocks, with the first (fairly) accurate clock arriving in 1656. Modern digital technology operates very comfortably at these breakneck speeds because of decades of advancements in timing technologies such as crystal oscillators and clock generators.

A long time ago (January 2014) at a Consumer Electronics Show far, far away (unless you live in Las Vegas), Intel unveiled their Edison “computer-on-module” development board aimed at wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A mashup of an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with a dash of WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 4GB of flash memory compressed into a package just a little larger than an SD card, the Edison has proven to be a formidable embedded platform. In the months since the world got their hands on the Edison boards, a lot of amazing projects have emerged. We’ll take a look at four Edison-based creations that have captured our imaginations.

“CQ CQ CQ. This is November One Hotel November Papa. Anyone got their ears on?” I ask the ether. Still, nothing but static. It’s been like this for months now. My stomach is grumbling but my desire to find someone, anyone, is too strong to breakaway from my radio. Not to mention the fact that those roaming monsters scare the heck out of me. Leaving the relatively safe confines of my ham shack is decidedly unappealing except for the annoying little fact that my food supplies are running low. Very low.

The story of medical wearables is no different than the story of technology in general. Exponential growth in capability commensurate with the shrinking of size and cost of products is simply converging to a point that the costs of fielding preventative measures like wearables is a solid alternative to just waiting until something inside of us breaks and we are rushed to the emergency room. While medical wearables do offer great promise in helping us become more proactive in our healthcare, they are primarily data collection devices that may perform some rather simple data analysis. They will have to tie into a larger medical ecosystem that has yet to fully materialize.

Determining the overall health of the human body is a complicated matter that must account for dozens of indicators, including vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen levels), fitness behavior (distance walked and amount of time sedentary), and more complex analysis of internal organs and systems to include blood cell counts, blood glucose, etc. Fortunately there is a lot of work occurring to shrink and converge medical-related sensors into inexpensive tools.

At a recent energy conference there was a great deal of discussion on how the commercial real estate market might leverage the current infatuation with smart devices, and buzz around the Internet of Things to help propel building automation technology into widespread adoption. It would seem that the technology maturity, price points, and market desire are finally beginning to intersect. In the final analysis many experts, including technologists, energy managers, engineers, and real estate professionals seemed to converge on the notion that lighting will be the key technology that will help other control technologies, such as HVAC, to finally gain greater adoption rates.