Hardware Archives - Data Respons

Controlling the power needed to de-ice drones

In its effort to bring the first drone de-icing system to market, Trondheim-based startup UBIQ Aerospace reached out to Data Respons R&D Services for hardware expertise to control the 1.800 watts needed for setting drone wings on “defrost”: A challenging assignment with a tight deadline.

Value-add from Industrial IoT requires specialist competence

This implies outfitting equipment with a combination of instrumentation and communications capabilities that facilitate the collection of operational and environmental data relevant for the given asset. For existing equipment, this requires a gateway connecting the equipment and supporting the relevant means of communication, be it cellular for mobile equipment or cabled for stationary. Data […]

Improving motion control in a bipolar printer

Simon Breum Fisker and Jacob Lindeberg launched their Sculpto printer in 2016, and September 2017 they released a new, improved model called Sculpto+. The new printer is quicker and quieter. Also, a new “print engine” makes it even easier to find models on the internet, e.g. on thingiverse.com and print them directly from your phone. […]

Fake?

In hindsight, the innocence of our shock facing such simple component deception seems almost quaint. We were stunned by the sheer audacity of the fraudsters and did not realize that hawking empty capsules as real components is actually one of the more benign forms of counterfeiting. Counterfeit electronic components, at that time an almost unknown […]

End-of-life (EOL)

Moore’s law, yet again At the heart of the problem of component obsolescence is Moore’s law and the ever-shrinking dimensions of the transistor, the essential atomic building block of an integrated circuit. Moore’s observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every second year has held true for 50 years, and […]

SoC FPGA Evaluation Guidelines

The number of commercially available SoC FPGA devices is continuously increasing, giving a large variety of configurations to choose between. If you encounter a project where a processor and an FPGA is needed or preferred, you should know what a SoC FPGA is and understand when such a solution could be useful. The purpose of […]

Processors for high temperature applications

Texas Instruments OMAPL137-HT processor in a downhole modem rated for 175°C. Old architectures Most high temperature processors are based on old architectures. Often, an old architecture is taken as a starting point and improved in regards to temperature. The documentation is then updated to some extent, but the documentation can vary quite in quality depending […]

Pros & cons of using STM32CubeMX code generation tool insead of manually writing drivers for an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller

Cube is a great tool for narrowing down the possible choices when selecting a microcontroller. It let the user choose a microcontroller based on the required peripherals, family of microcontrollers, package type, flash size, ram size, minimum number of input/output pins and so on. For getting started quick and easy with prototyping, a board support […]