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Component Engineering Community Launches

admin — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:13:43 +0000

This week, a free, online community for components engineering (CE) professionals has been launched at www.componentsengineering.com. This new site offers a forum for engineers to resource information, as well tools to create and maintain a CE department within their respective organizations.

The site includes free, downloadable content of procedures, processes, flowcharts, and guidelines, as well as tools and resources for learning the basic disciplines of components engineering. The site also provides resources for both fundamental and advanced component-specific education.

Douglas Alexander, the founder and principle consultant, created this website to capture and increase the knowledge of experienced of CEs. In addition to the current content, contributions of original white papers and other related document contributions are welcomed.

“After working in this field of electronics for over 30 years, and finding no website or book dedicated to this core discipline, I was determined to develop a site giving proper recognition to the community of engineers working behind the scenes at almost every manufacturing and engineering company known today.”

The title of components engineer has been around for many years, Alexander said. There is a vast body of knowledge and capability resident in those who, for various reasons, have not worked in their field for some time but are not ready to retire. “Experience and knowledge should not be retired even if you are. Now, here is where you keep it alive.”

Retired, semi-retired, and full-time CE professionals are welcome to submit their credentials, work-experience, and working locations on the site by email. Fees are confidential between the consultant and the clients.

“There is a catch,” Douglas explained, “The individual requesting a posting as a consultant, must demonstrate a competency level by submitting white papers and/or other CE specific documentation that will be reviewed by members of the site for acceptability.” These documents will be credited to the authors and will be reviewed by prospective clients to determination of the consultant’s applicable knowledge and ultimately “worthiness” for hire.

Alexander said the site is a collaborative effort and will fulfill its full purpose as the community grows with the individual contributions from experienced practitioners. “It is my sincere desire to provide an opportunity for those who want to consult in this special field of engineering to contribute to these pages and form or reestablish peer-to-peer relationships with others of like mind and spirit.”

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Smart grid adoption may rest on electronic design

admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:36:18 +0000

By Lou Covey

NewTechPress Editorial Director

The establishment of the smart grid is an inevitability, according to experts speaking at the Smart Power Grid Technology Conference, but depending on power utilities, government and “field of dreams marketing” will only delay it. That’s why the latent industry needs the help of the electronic design community, according to speakers at the event put on by ISQED.

Edward Cazalet, CEO of the Cazalet Group, and Tom Tamarkin, CEO of EnergyCite, painted a picture, for 100+ design engineers at the fledgling conference, of an industry that is ready to spread nationwide save for public misunderstandings, governmental gridlock, and utility intransigence. Between the two presentations they offered a road map for the smart grid but that lacked a clear path to public acceptance.

“That’s why I’m here today,” Cazalet concluded. “We need your help to spread this word and identify how it can be done.” Both entrepreneurs were looking for attendees to start looking into the potential of the smart grid for new product development, not unlike what came out of the PC industry in the 1980s.

Cazalet opened the conference with a description of the Transactive Energy Market Information Exchange (TeMIX). The exchange protocol makes it possible for energy providers and customers to buy and sell blocks of power at any time. That includes power utilities, power resellers and even customers with alternative energy systems that create more power than they need. For example, an electric vehicle sitting in a garage after it reaches a full charge is essentially a block of power that can be utilized. Offering that block on the exchange makes it possible for the car’s owner to sell that power to the grid.

“Any party can buy and sell power blocks to any other party,” Cazalet explained. “ Customer purchase blocks of power by subscription, paying extra if they use more than what they purchase or selling back what they don’t use.”

At present, however, that infrastructure is dependent on the connection of smart meters to the supplier’s power blocks and consuming devices. While utilities have been under directive of federal and state governments to deploy these devices since as early as 2004, widespread distribution of the devices is still creeping along.

Tamarkin pointed out that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) mandated the installation of smart meters by investor-owned utilities in 2004. Southern California Edison (SCE) initiated form opposition that same year. Tamarkin drafted and personally documents to prove the benefit to SCE in 2005, causing SCE to reverse it’s position formally and move forward on the initiative.

Tamarkin explained that the current method of billing rate payers is to provide a bill for what was consumed 90 days previous. Rate payers can only adjust their usage after the fact and hope that they are doing some good. A completed smart grid, starting with smart meters, allows rate payers to see what their consumption is at any particular point and what they will have to pay for it.

Tamarkin likened the potential to the relationship between a car and the gas pump. Once a consumer puts the nozzle into the tank and starts pumping, he knows exaclty what is going in the tank and how much it costs. And the gas gauge in the car tells him exactly what his consumption rate is with some cars telling the driver if his milage is optimal. With that knowledge and TeMIX in place, Cazalet said consumers would be able to purchase sufficient power for their needs on a just-in-time basis and utilities would better be able to predict where that energy should come from and how much to produce.

The problem, however, is the utilities have not shown much interest in completing the loop with the consuming, possibly because it doesn’t benefit them in the short run. As Cazalet put it, “If it isn’t about generation or distribution, they don’t much care to talk about it.”

That has allowed the discussion to be directed by unknowledgeable consumer groups the base arguments against the technology on misrepresentation and isolated instances of bad installations. For example, Joshua Hartnett , a vocal opponent of smart meter installation, based on supposed radiation issues, uses a blackberry phone that emits more radiation at Hartnett’s head than he would ever receive from a neighborhood full of smart meters. The fact that utilities and governments have been moving to correct the misrepresentations only in the past year has contributed to the lack of adoption.

Both Cazalet and Tamarkin asserted that once consumers have easy access to products that could tie into the smart grid, it would create a groundswell of demand and pressure on legislators, regulators and utilities.

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Five companies you might have missed at ESC-SV 2011

admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 01:02:06 +0000

The Embedded Systems Conference, especially the Silicon Valley edition, is an eclectic collection of cutting edge technology. This year, ESC-SV 2011 was no exception. Yes, there were the regular software, RTOS, component and design services companies, but there was also significant presence of distributors like DigiKey and element14 that were drawing a lot of attention.

On the periphery of the exhibition were the companies that lack the marketing resources of the major players and while most were satisfied by the amount of customer traffic, they were a little wistful about the lack of attention they were getting from the press. Luckily for them, New Tech Press was there, and boy did we find some cool companies.

So here are five of the companies that weren’t among the usual suspects at ESC, and that you might have missed.

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Smart Grid Conference should be on your calendar

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:42:46 +0000

The Smart Power Grid Technology Conference (May 12 at the Santa Clara Biltmore, should be on a lot of calendars this coming May. Smart grid tech is a major new industry that is receiving a lot of bad press from a lack of knowledge and the only way to overcome that is by educating ourselves.

In particular, the session on ”The Transformation of Ratepayers into Customers” will be a significant piece of information. Tom Tamarkin, president of the Uttility Services Customer Link, will set out a definition for the term “smart meters” that takes into account the concerns of the public.

Additional topics include, “Enabling the Smart Connected Home,” and “the Role of Smart Lighting in the Smart Grid.”

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Glogster planting trees in Haiti

loucovey — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:48:48 +0000

Glogster EDU, a social media microblogging company, has joined the Trees for the Future, effort to reforest Haiti,

Glogster is donating funds for planting a tree for every premium license purchased. The company has already paid for more than 7,000 trees in the past six months and is well on the way to it’s personal goal of 20,000 trees. Glogster has issued a challenge to the technology world to join them with the goal of planting 1 million trees before then end of 2011. Doochoo, another social media company based in Italy, is the first company to take up the challenge and is donating its services to raise visibility of the effort.

The 22-year-old Trees for the Future focuses on economically challenged areas not just to combat climate change. In Haiti, deforestation has had a direct effect on the spread of cholera, destruction by hurricanes and crop failures. “Almost all of the country’s problems—natural disasters, food shortages, poverty—can be traced back to rampant deforestation,” says Ethan Budiansky, the Caribbean-programs officer at Trees for the Future. Currently, the organization is concentrating on planting thousands of trees in the mountains around Gonaïves.

“Glogster EDU supports the work of Save the Trees,” said Roman Smola, president and CEO of Glogster, “because it fits so closely with our own efforts to reduce the amount of paper used in American schools.”

Glogs, online multimedia posters or graphical microblogs from Glogster EDU, can be used to replace paper posters and portfolios with on-line documents that demonstrate a student’s understanding of subjects. Classes can work collaboratively within classrooms and throughout entire schools with only electronic files. This reduction in paper use saves trees and slashes expenses while simultaneously empowering educators and students with a digital education platform for their knowledge in the form of text, photos, videos, graphics, sounds, drawings, data attachments and more.

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