Electronics-Lab.com Blog

In February you can win a digital multimeter in value of € 200

In autumn 2011 the SOS electronic launched to its customers and fans a unique new newsletter, which is tailor-made. You can choose what you want to read and how often you’ll get!

The newsletter contains product articles on a high professional level and the main task is primarily to inform developers about new trends and components in the industry. For these articles especially for this purpose is assigned a specialist who has worked as a developer itself, so he can feel the need to develop hardware applications.

Newsletter uniqueness lies in the fact that you can set up yourself in your profile an area of messaging and the frequency of such transfers.

Actually the newsletter is sent to more than 40 000 email addresses. If you are not among them, you can subscribe for it. In 2012, you have two more reasons to do it so.

If you do it, you can win one of the monthly prices. Of all those who subscribe for newsletter in the particular month will be choose by a lot a winner of valuable price.

In addition, those who subscribe in during the year 2012 and stay subscribed for the newsletter for the whole time will be listed for a drawing of a professional soldering station Weller WX 2!

So remember:

1. You can subscribe for SOS newsletter at http://www.soselectronic.com/newsletter

2. In February 2012 we will be drawing the winner of intelligent digital multimeter UNI-T UT71E in value of 200 €.

3. Throughout the year 2012 you can compete for professional soldering station Weller WX 2021 in value of 1100 €.

Nimbits is a service you can use to record and share data on the cloud. It is a free, social and open source platform for the Internet of Things.

Nimbits Server is a free and open source Operational Process Data Historian you can use to create and share data points on a public or private cloud and record your changing numeric, text based, GPS, json or xml values into them. Nimbits is software platform you can use to develop your own cloud, android and micro-controller applications. With our open source software development kit, we greatly simplify your requirements for logging, alerts and more.

Nimbits – share data on the cloud - [Link]

element14, Microchip and Matrix introduce the new PIC18 Flowcode Developers Kit.  Lowers the barrier to electronics design with easy to use Graphical Programming 

30 January 2012 – London, element14, the first collaborative global electronics community from Premier Farnell plc (LSE:pfl), has teamed up with Microchip and Matrix to introduce the new PIC18 Flowcode Developers Kit.  This innovative development and demonstration kit is designed to offer a hands-on, easy approach to electronics design using Flowcode, one of the world’s most advanced graphical programming languages for microcontrollers.

The development platform is based on a Microchip PIC18F26J50 low power, 8-bit PIC18F26J50 microcontroller, and is integrated with temperature sensor, capacitor touch sensor and potentiometer to help developers verify programs designed using Flowcode.

“The new PIC18 Flowcode Developers Kit is an innovative, fully featured yet low cost solution designed to help developers realize their designs in working hardware,” says Mike Powell, Technology Development Manager, Premier Farnell.  “Optimized for Flowcode development, the board has several expansion options, it can be used as a black box and is mounted with a PIC 18 device that is low power, but high performance.

The competitive advantage of Flowcode is that it allows those with little-to-no programming experience to create electronic systems in minutes. Flowcode supports code generation for the PIC® (PIC12, PIC16, and PIC18 series ), PIC24 and dsPIC® series of microcontrollers. The professional edition includes drivers for a range of sub-systems including LCDs, keypads, seven-segment displays, ADC and PWM, as well as communication protocols including I2C, SPI, RS-232RS-232, Zigbee and TCP/IP, among others.

Flowcode is compatible with Microchip’s PICkit programmer as well as third party programmers. It is also compatible with the HI-TECH C compiler. A ‘Lite’ version of Flowcode 4 is included in the kit.

For more information visit element14.

CHICAGO – Jan. 11, 2012 – Newark’s element14, the first online community and electronics store for design engineers, today announced a partnership with the leading PCB solutions provider Sunstone Circuits® to deliver bare printed circuit board (PCB) prototyping services to customers in the Americas through the Knode, an intelligent search and knowledge tool helping engineers select and purchase the right solutions for designs. Through this partnership, design engineers can access Sunstone’s prototyping products and services to create high quality test copies of unpopulated or “bare” PCBs prior to ordering the finished electronic product, allowing engineers to conserve resources through much shorter design cycles.

“For 40 years, Sunstone Circuits has been committed to meeting the needs of our  customers by providing  the best and most efficient PCB design experience from quote to delivery,” said Sunstone’s President and CEO, Terry Heilman. “In addition to www.sunstone.com, this new partnership withelement14 is just one more way Sunstone can help the design engineer streamline the overall design cycle and drastically improve productivity by offering solutions through one consolidated online resource, the Knode onelement14.” Read the rest of this entry »

The State of OpenCourseWare - [Link]

Anthony Clay writes:

Electronics is a skill where you have to drill the basics constantly! I don’t always have time to re-read an entire book just to fill-in the gaps for a quick project. So I came up with a stylish set of reference posters covering the items I care about the most. They will help me quickly find (and eventually memorize) what I need the most while sitting at my workbench. Plus, they will look GREAT in my prototyping lab!

Kickstarter: EE Reference Posters Hobbyists - [Link]

Top Ten Things To Do In 2012 @ ECN: Electronic Component News – [via]

0b0000.0000: Build something open source. It’s amazing what is available. Back in the heyday of hobby electronics, it was easy to find projects in magazines such as “Popular Electronics.” You could get kits from Heathkit of RadioShack. But, for the most part, all of those things went away. With Open Source, you can build an almost unlimited variety of gadgets. What’s more, you can taylor your build to your experience level. If you want to do it all, just get the files, fab your boards, buy your parts and solder it up. If you’re less ambitious, buy a complete kit. If you’re even more ambitious, mod the design and post it up for the community.

Top Ten Things To Do In 2012 - [Link]

Global online community element14 is dedicated to providing engineers with end-to-end resources and the latest technology to help get their jobs done faster and easier than ever before. Following are a few noteworthy additions to the community:

• CadSoft launches EAGLE version 6: The newest version of the award-winning PCB software, available via the element14 knode, not only helps in board design, but also saves engineers time by providing direct connections to experienced, high-quality PCB manufacturers for fast quotes on PCB fabrication. Plus, with Accelerated Design’s Ultra Librarian users can quickly create parts, symbols and footprints that can be exported to various PCB design flows. An introductory video is available for download here.

• element14 partners with PCB prototype manufacturer Screaming Circuits: Effective Dec. 13, 2011, design engineers using the Knode on element14 can access Screaming Circuits’ services, including instant quotes and efficiently produced high-quality prototypes that adhere to shorter design cycles, saving engineers countless resources and helping shave weeks off the design process

element14: CadSoft’s EAGLE version 6 now available & new supplier partnership in effect - [Link]

via Google: – [via]

I still recall the day when my friend Yossi came to school and showed off his brand new graphing calculator. I was stunned by how easy it was to plot complicated functions — meanwhile, the rest of us were still drawing them by hand on graph paper.

Today, I’m hoping to share that magical feeling with students around the world, with the introduction of graphing functionality on Google. Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page. Just type in a function and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.

You can zoom in and out and pan across the plane to explore the function in more detail. You can also draw multiple functions by separating them with commas. This feature covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions, and is available in modern browsers.

I hope students and math lovers around the world find this experience as magical as I found the graphing calculator so long ago.

Google Enables Function Plotting from Search - [Link]

XMOS, developers of the industry’s first even-driven embedded processor, are running a special holiday promotion for a select few hacker and electronics communites.

They are giving away free developer kits to anyone who can come up with an awesome project idea that uses one.

The XC-1A developer board features XMOS’s most powerful processor; a quad-core XS1-G4 and is a great platform to start any project, big or small.

The development tools and documentation is all free to access at www.xmos.com and our community site www.xcore.com is full of past projects for inspiration.

Head over the www.xcore.com/promotion now to submit your idea and win a kit!

XMOS is giving away XC-1A developer kits - [Link]