Posted by Mike Fahrion on Tue, Apr 24, 2012 @ 06:15 AM
Peanut butter is magical stuff. It will get gum out of hair or carpeting. It will remove adhesive labels. You can use it to lubricate a push mower or bait a mousetrap. And, if you're a young man who keeps emptying his piggy bank in the quest to get more power out of a Yamaha RD350, I happen to know that you can eat peanut butter for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a very long time, or at least until your financial situation improves.
Those RD350s were pocket rockets. They were only 350cc, but they routinely humiliated triples and fours twice their size on racetracks all over the country. Stock models produced up to 35 HP and were already very quick machines. Being young, I figured I could do even better. So I tinkered. Sadly, my big ideas often led to shattered pistons, money down the drain and another bout with the aforementioned peanut butter diet.
I learned a lot of what I knew about motorcycles the hard way: through trial and error. But my mistakes only cost me a few hundred dollars per pop. Professional engineers and business people are playing for far higher stakes. Yet in my roles in engineering and business I continually meet people who insist upon educating themselves by trial and error, just I as used to do. As I hear their stories and watch the consequences unfold I can't help thinking that they would surely be better off if they had only owned an RD350 and learned to look before they leap.
For example, I'm astounded by the shortcuts I see in testing. People blithely assume that devices will be compatible and it later turns out that they aren't. People fail to review use cases with the actual users, and -- sure enough -- the important ones are overlooked. People make simple misses that take entire businesses offline. (And when a system has already been deployed it's one heck of a lot harder to figure out the problem and deploy a fix.)
After the problem occurs, of course, more energy is typically consumed in finger pointing and CYA tactics than in actual diagnostics. We've sent engineers all over the globe this year to help customers solve system design problems that could -- and should -- have been avoided in the first place. So here are some tips:
Choose your technology carefully. That's a challenge when you're deploying systems with an expected service life of five to ten years or more. Technology changes quickly. In electronic-years you could be talking about five generations, and that's far beyond the reach of anyone's crystal ball. So, when in doubt, follow the money. If you need to choose a wireless technology, for example, pick something that's used in hundreds of millions of devices, not hundreds of thousands. Volume-driven, standards-based technologies are where the bulk of the R&D and manufacturing technology is being applied. The chips may change, but you'll be able to count on a continuous upgrade path.
Go IP. IP-based networking is here to stay. When you're connecting devices and sensors, convert the connections to an IP protocol. Tools like our Ethernet Serial Servers will make the job easy. There are endless benefits in using IP, starting with reduced vendor dependency and common tool sets.
Get wireless-savvy. Wireless can't replace every wired connection yet, but it's already a part of many. And wireless technologies are advancing rapidly.
Remember that wireless technology isn't magic. No matter what the vendor says, every wireless device on the market has to obey the same laws of physics. If you forget that, you're going to have a bad experience. If you haven't reviewed The 10 Commandments of Wireless recently, go give it another quick read. I have numerous conversations every month with folks who are struggling with wireless and it turns out that every one of them has broken multiple commandments. Do your homework before you spend money on deployment.
Plan ahead. Think before you act. Granted, that isn't as exciting as blowing a piston on a hairpin turn -- but there will be fewer peanut butter sandwiches waiting for you on the other side.
Happy Connections,
Mike Fahrion
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Thu, Mar 22, 2012 @ 03:00 PM
Something’s awry with the calendar here in the central USA. In mid-March we’re supposed to be freezing our tails off and wondering if Spring will ever really arrive. Instead, we’ve leapfrogged straight into summer. We’ve already been blessed with two straight weeks of weather suitable for flip-flops, baggy shorts and hideous Hawaiian shirts.
I don’t know who we have to thank for it; solar flares, El Nina or Al Gore. But we Midwesterners know a good thing when we see it. We’ve stumbled eagerly out into the sunlight like troglodytes abandoning their caves, with our pasty-white legs gleaming and our barbecue tongs held at ready. Our gutters are already cleaned out, our lawns have already been mowed and bicyclists are darting everywhere you look. It was a quick change, but we’ve adapted to it with enthusiasm.
It’s easy to adapt to a welcome change in the weather. We’ve all seen nice weather before and we know exactly what to do about it. It’s the changes you haven’t seen before that can be confusing. Adapting to them can take years, decades and even generations.
Back when radio was being developed, for example, nobody really knew what to do with it. It was clearly a nice upgrade to the telegraph, and folks jumped on that idea immediately. But even though audio broadcasting became possible very early on, it was quite some time before it occurred to anyone that you could make huge piles of money by broadcasting advertiser-sponsored sports, news and entertainment. In fact, about 20 years elapsed before somebody finally aired the first radio commercial and showed the world how to (quite literally) make money out of thin air.
The technology had been there all along. But the modern radio station couldn’t be invented until someone made the necessary mental connection. Just because a technology exists doesn’t mean that people automatically know how they’ll use it.
More than a century has passed since Maxwell, Tesla and Hertz got the ball rolling, and we’re still discovering new uses for wireless technology. The last few years alone have produced dramatic progress in the most promising of today’s wireless technologies: Wi-Fi and cellular. Do you want someone to manage your infrastructure for you, letting you leverage their massive investment in technology? You can do that. A small monthly fee will buy you space on a cellular network. Would you prefer to manage your own infrastructure? You can do that, too. Wi-Fi makes it easy.
Here at B&B Electronics we’re adapting to these changes with enthusiasm. Wireless and cellular are clearly where the action is, and we’ve plunged right in. Just a few months ago we expanded our talent pool and extended our product line by acquiring Quatech, the Wi-Fi M2M specialists. And just a couple of weeks ago we acquired Conel, top players in the cellular M2M space. We not only have the resources we’ll need to adapt to the changes; we’ve put ourselves in a position to lead the way.
It’s going to be exciting. Wi-Fi chip sets, for example, keep getting faster and smaller. And their power requirements are dropping at the same time -- energy harvesting and multi-year battery apps will soon be ubiquitous. As it becomes easier and easier to integrate Wi-Fi into our equipment we’ll soon reach a point where we’ll expect just about everything to have Wi-Fi connectivity. We’ll be surprised and disappointed when we run into something that doesn’t.
And when it comes to cellular, just follow the money. In the US, cellular is already a $160 billion industry. The total number of cellular handset subscribers is actually larger than the total population. Carriers are looking elsewhere for growth, and they’ve set their sights on the machine to machine space, or the “Internet of Things.” The continued build-out and upgrading of this managed wireless infrastructure will lead to tremendous improvements in automation, safety and productivity.
Adapting to this unexpected summer weather has been fun. Adapting to the new wireless technologies will be fun, too. We’re only beginning to discover all of the possibilities.
What’s your gut telling you about wireless? Unbridled enthusiasm or skepticism? Share your opinion. I’d love to hear what you think about where -- after more than 100 years and counting -- the Wild West of Wireless will take us next.
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Feb 22, 2012 @ 03:00 PM
With Christmas shopping, holiday parties, and the end of the world already scheduled for December, 2012, it'll be a miracle if anybody gets anything done after Thanksgiving. So I'm banging madly away on my laptop at 460 mph and 37,922 feet, with Chick Corea and Gary Burton grooving in my ears, doing my best to get ahead of the game before December 21 rolls around and it's time to start shoveling comet debris out of my driveway and fending off the zombies.
It has already been an exciting year here at B&B Electronics, even if it isn't zombie season yet. A couple of months ago Control Engineering nominated our new, third generation, rugged, ESW100 series Ethernet switches and our rugged UHR304 USB hub for the Engineer's Choice Award. I'm proud to say that B&B has just taken first place in both categories.
Ethernet switches compete in a very crowded field. So it was fun -- and satisfying -- to be recognized as the best. The engineers chose our ESW100 series switches because they pack rugged reliability into a slim metal enclosure with a compact form factor. Try one on your next project and you'll see why they were a hit.
Our UHR304 isolated USB hub won because it's the first isolated USB hub to meet the requirements for "heavy industrial" compliance. And it didn't have to outshine the competition -- there isn't any. The UHR304 is currently the only device in its class. As USB continues to expand into new off-the-desktop applications, you can count on B&B Electronics to keep engineering and building the devices that will make USB rugged and reliable, wherever it needs to go.
The year may still be young, but B&B Electronics has already sent some cool applications out the door. For example, way down under in the Land of Oz the seasons run backwards and the constellations are all wrong. But the engineering problems are the same, and some of the solutions come from right here in Illinois. When you're buying your Foster's and fueling the car for your mid-January trip to the beach, odds are that all the pump and transaction information will be flowing through a solution designed and manufactured by B&B Electronics.
We've provided the same kinds of solutions for a good percentage of the fuel stations here in the States. And we don't insist that you buy all new equipment, either. Show us what you've already got and we'll show you how to make it communicate. Here's a story about an Australian customer who needed us to integrate a tricky, obsolete pump protocol and a structured wiring solution, while also minimizing installation labor costs: Learn more.
The Mayan Long Count isn't the only thing approaching its end in 2012. The old PDP-11 is coming to the end of its useful life as well. Introduced in 1970, PDP-11s have been humming away in American nuclear power plants ever since. It has been their job to monitor expensive, precision radiation detectors over proprietary serial links. When a nuclear power operator decided to upgrade to a newer PC-based SCADA system with redundant fiber and IP protocols they came to B&B Electronics for answers. The new systems were built not 50 feet from my office, and pallet-loads of them are now en-route to full deployment. Learn more.
When I was a kid they promised that we'd all be driving flying cars by now, and I don't mind saying that I've been seriously disappointed. But even a flying car would have trouble competing with my fond memories of a certain old Chevy cargo van. That van served as my rolling rec room and as a mobile garage for the two-wheeled toys that used to consume so much of my time and money. On my longer excursions it was also an emergency hotel. The room service was miserable, but you couldn't beat the rates.
I've had a soft spot for vans ever since; and I'm jealous of some of the toys that are available to today's road warriors. I wish I'd had Internet, GPS and mobile satellite TV in that old Chevy.
But vans aren't just for recreation, and nowadays B&B Electronics helps companies manage fleets of thousands. By using our unique, embedded fleet management software, a central office can track a van's location, speed, fuel consumption, odometer, seat belt status and all of those other bits of data that are of interest to fleet managers, accountants and insurance agents. You'd recognize the names on the sides of the vans, but you might not know that B&B Electronics was part of the story. Check it out: www.rvdstreamer.com
We develop and implement many other field service apps, too. For example, virtually every modern field service van contains a laptop or tablet. Those laptops and tablets need to be connected to all kinds of stuff: HVAC systems, building automation controllers, elevators, meters, trucks, and military vehicles. The field service folks need simple, reliable hardware that will make those connections easy, even if the connected machines employ different protocols and different ports, some of which will be tucked away in hard to reach places. B&B helps our customers connect it all; whatever it is, and wherever it needs to go.
We're already providing our customers with solutions for problems in industries ranging from energy to transportation. And the questions will surely get even more interesting when Dec. 21 arrives and the sky falls in. In the meantime, I've written this blog, I've traveled 400 miles, I've listened to some righteous music, and the nice lady with the cocktail cart has come by twice. If I keep multi-tasking at this rate I'll be ready for anything.
Happy Connections,
Mike Fahrion
P.S. For those of you headed out to Design West Summit out in San Jose next month, drop by and say "Hi." I'll be giving a talk on communicating to sensors out at the edge of networks -- love to see you there!
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 04:00 AM
We’re three weeks into 2012 and picking up another minute of glorious daylight every day. Wonderful.
But winter isn’t over just yet, and today I’m fresh off the sledding hill. I spent the afternoon participating in every variety of sledding carnage that you could possibly imagine. Kids from five to fifty turned themselves into human bowling pins and Weeble wobbles. It was great fun. As I sit here recovering, thawing my pinky toe over the fire and letting the day’s bruises settle in, I thought I’d share a few thoughts that have been rattling around in my noggin.
First, let me ask you this: How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding up?
Back in seventh grade a well-meaning Ms. Patten insisted that we write down three New Year’s resolutions. Someone in your own life has surely insisted that you to do the same. Optimism is a beautiful thing.
I’ve never met anyone who isn’t expert at dreaming up goals; any nit can do it. The real challenge is achieving something new. To achieve something new, you have to do something new. That means change, and we humans are rarely wired for it.
Goodbye RS-232, Act IV
Friday afternoon I found myself in the midst of a futile search for an important scrap of paper on my hopelessly chaotic desk. The elusive scrap contained my notes on a recent market study of the RS-232 and RS-485 chip markets. It said that the five-year forecast was for continued growth in those chip sales.
That made me smile. I travel in some geeky circles, and many of the people I know have been predicting the death of the serial port for more than a decade. In fact, it has been nearly a decade since EE Product News editor Joe Desposito penned a soulful article lamenting the loss of serial ports on his PC, calling it the end of an era. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ve probably noticed that I have my own opinions about that.
It has turned out that serial ports are not only moving into their fourth decade – sixth, for RS-232 – but that their numbers are continuing to grow at a prodigious rate. Somewhere around one billion more of them are expected to be deployed in just the next couple of years. In the electronics world, that’s immortality. RS-232 and RS-485 may not have the same sex appeal as wireless, but they’re certainly aging well.
What does all of this say about device connectivity? Among other things, it says that the need for serial ports is no longer driven by PCs.
I’ve always been enamored with everything involving the connectivity of specialized and remote devices. There’s hardly a device on the planet that I can’t find a way to connect and integrate into a system. The most interesting and challenging connections are made way out there at the very edge of the network; things like remote sensors, for example. And those are precisely the kinds of applications that are driving the demand for RS-232 and RS-485.
So, as my pinky toe regains its color over the fire, I’m playing mental Twister and considering how some of my recent applications and solutions have been a part of that demand.
How about gas pumps? Nearly all of the pumps in the US and most of the pumps in Europe use serial communications. If you have a car and a credit card you’ve fueled up at a station where your information not only traveled through a serial port, it traveled through a B&B Electronics serial server that connected the serial ports to the franchise’s local and wide area network.
The treadmills on the international space station use B&B Electronics equipment to connect their serial ports to the local data network. That network’s space-to-ground, point-to-point data link carries B&B Electronics’ bits and bytes all the way back to Earth. Not bad.
Have you ever seen a truck or van with the telltale dome on its cab that holds its array of cellular and GPS antennas? It’s highly probable that their mobile WAN depends upon some clever piece of engineering from B&B Electronics. We help move the bits and bytes that allow fleet owners to monitor everything from vehicle data to driver behavior.
The healthcare industry uses lots of fancy stuff too. Have you ever known anyone who benefited from the use of a mobile MRI unit? You guessed it -- B&B Electronics’s solutions helped it happen. Fetal monitor? Kidney dialysis machine? Same story.
Have you ever had bodywork done on your car? There’s a better than 50 percent chance that getting a perfect color match depended upon the flow of B&B Electronics-enabled bits and bytes.
Got a newer furnace or AC unit in your house? Were you surprised when the tech pulled out a laptop instead of a pair of vice grips? Yup – B&B Electronics was there too.
Watch for the newest B&B Electronics product solutions guide in your mailbox this week. If you’re not already on our mailing list, click here to request a product solutions guide.
Data connectivity has expanded into many new environments over the years. I wonder what New Year’s resolutions Ms. Patten would have written for the serial port, way back in 1983.
Talk back below.
Happy (Frosty) Connections,
Mike Fahrion
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 @ 04:00 AM
Dear Friend and Subscriber:
Another Christmas season has zoomed up to our doorstep. School plays, concerts and late night shopping consume the evenings -- and I’ve found a few things to keep me busy at the office as well. All the chaos will come together with a few days of family celebration.
Christmas is also a leading indicator that another Midwestern winter is settling in, with no global warming-induced relief in the forecast. I barely lasted a day into December before I escaped to the desert Southwest for some warm air and R&R. This winter I’m vowing to slip off to someplace warm and sunny every month. So, if you happen to be somewhere warm, I may very well be coming to see you. In Minnesota? When Spring’s just around the corner, call me then.
Did you feel a slight disturbance in the force last week? That was me. It may get me banned from some engineering circles, but last week I fully succumbed to the Apple eco-system. It started innocently enough, with a little iPod to accompany me on runs. Then an iPhone ousted my Blackberry. And now the conversion is complete, as I’ve traded in my aging Dell for a racy little MacBook.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, every engineer can learn something about product design from the Apple guys. They sure know how to make things simple.
On the simple theme, I had a couple of calls last week that got me noodling about Power over Ethernet. PoE is a great example of a simple idea that can simplify your life, and it’s picking up momentum in more and more applications. But, like most commercial technologies, PoE wasn’t purpose-designed for rugged environments. I've put together a quick PoE video to highlight some of the PoE challenges that you might run into and show you how to solve them when you take PoE out of the IT closet.
Got six minutes to spare? Check out the video for yourself.
Or, want to jump right to a few great PoE solutions?
Ever need to install a PoE switch in a rugged location? Vibration, heat, cold and/or lots of noise-causing equipment or power cables nearby? You need the EIRP305-T. It’ll give you 5 PoE ports and has survived the engineering test gauntlet of snarky compliance tests for rugged environments.
Got heavy-duty networking requirements? Check out the 10-port managed PoE switch that also includes two Gigabit SFP ports for a backbone or ring connection.
Coming up short on power? Straight PoE pumps out about 15 watts per port. When that just won’t do, PoE+ ups the ante and gives you 25 watts of power per port. Enough for PTZ cameras, high power radios and all kinds of other devices that you may want to install in a location that doesn’t have access to AC power. The EIRHP305-T gives you 5 PoE+ Ethernet ports, each pumping out up to 25 Watts.
And what about power supplies? It’s always tweaked me that you have to feed most “industrial grade” PoE switches 48VDC. I don’t know about you, but I hardly ever see an installation that has an existing 48V rail. The EIRP305-24V-T solves that problem by supporting a 24VDC power input -- no need for a special 48V power supply.
What out-of-the-ordinary PoE applications have you run across? Talk back on the blog.
And, most importantly, have a very Merry Christmas!
Mike Fahrion
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Tue, Nov 22, 2011 @ 09:00 AM
Dear Reader:
I’m settling in for winter here in the Illinois plains. The signs are all there. Leaves have lost their grip, lawn mower stowed and out back those pesky deer are munching away at left over pumpkins. Fall is a great season. Hate to see it go - ‘cuz I know what’s next.
But there is something relaxing about a frosty fall evening in front of the fireplace, ice cubes clinking in a nice glass of Scotch, listening to the cool jazz of Miles and Coltrane.
Fantasy Mike leads quite a life.
Real Mike remembers those days...
(If you’re living the life of fantasy Mike, I wouldn’t object to an invitation. I’ll bring my own glass and logs for the fire).
It’s remarkable how life gets more complex - and wonderfully flavorful - as time marches on.
I remember when Thanksgiving was a gateway to the end of the year - time to tie up loose ends. Plan Holiday travel, tidy up the lab. Pop a new hole in your belt for the Thanksgiving feast.
Time flies when you’re having fun. This time of year is now a mind-melding jambalaya of concerts, business cases, ball games, 2012 planning, school plays, customer consulting, product road-mapping and airport terminals (as you read this I’m likely clinging to a boarding pass for an overbooked flight home from California with a bunch of folks hoping to be somewhere else for Thanksgiving).
Life is a frenzy - and I wouldn’t want to miss even a single beat.
Here at B&B we’re smack in the middle of some of the most exciting growth that I’ve been a part of in my long history with the company. Good things are happening -- Great things are coming.
Here are a few fun things that have sprung up in the last few weeks.
Product awards.
For the second year in a row, Control Engineering selected a B&B product as a finalist for its 2012 Engineers Choice awards. In fact, reflecting their wisdom, this year they’ve selected two of our new products.
First - our isolated, rugged USB hub (that would be the UHR304 for those of you reaching for your credit cards). I think highly of this thing myself, in fact just last week I put together a quick two minute video tour. (And if you have any inklings of using USB away from the safe haven of your desktop, watch my video on how to make USB reliable in ruggedized applications, this one will take a few minutes longer ‘cuz I have lots to tell you, but I promise it’s worth your time.)
Our second finalist is our new line of rugged plug and play Ethernet switches. Why choose an unmanaged switch for an award finalist? Because the new ESW100 line does everything just a bit better than everyone else. The smallest rugged switch on the market with fiber options. Flexible mounting means that a single part number can fit virtually any cabinet or panel. Rugged shock and vibration specs. Hazardous location rated. It’s not any single thing that makes the new ESW100 family stand out - it’s the sum of all the little things.
Hey, if you happen to have a free moment in your frenzied life, do me a favor and click over to Control Engineering to cast your vote. If you subscribe to their print or e-letters, you’re eligible to help make some of my favorite new products famous.
This week we celebrated the one month anniversary of the acquisition of Quatech. There are so many dimensions to this that there is no shortage of impactful stuff to work on. Great new people, new products, new channel partners, and outstanding capabilities in WiFi - both standalone and embedded. My crystal ball says that WiFi is one of three wireless standards that will ultimately rule the world. You’ll hear more from me on that down the road. Whether you want to network a single industrial scale, or you want to embed WiFi into thousands of access control devices -- Quatech brings the technology and application experience that will get the job done for you -- quickly, and reliably.
Our snarky marketing folks have been frantically busy too. Last week an anonymous B&B marketing elf slipped the results of a new brand survey into my inbox. They had a project up their sleeve a couple months back to take your pulse on how B&B and our competitors are doing. (Dunno if I’m supposed to be letting the cat out of the bag but I’m writing this far too late for last minute censoring - let’s keep this between you and I just in case). Bottom line is that over 500 folks like you defined 19 company attributes and scored B&B and our competitors against them. Being humble... B&B did well. Being not so humble, we kicked serious booty. B&B scored highest in every one of the 19 categories - sometimes by a factor of 2 to 3 times. Let me know if you’d like a "B&B Electronics for President" bumper sticker to fill that void on your bumper right between your "My child is an honor student" and "World’s Greatest Engineer" stickers. I might just have some printed up...
Busy month -- and we even managed to squeak out a couple great new products.
Does it tweak you off that you can only plug USB devices into your PC? Does me. What if you want to put a card reader more than a measly 5 meters from your PC? Bar code printers? QA scale? Problem solved. The new UE204 is an Ethernet-enabled USB hub. That means you can now reach your USB peripherals over your LAN. If you can reach it with Ethernet, you can pop in a UE204 and it will give you four USB ports that can be reached from any networked computer - just like a local USB connection. Great little problem solver that can save you thousands on PC’s and expensive device upgrades. Great device - I’ll make up a demo video for you soon.
We’ve also cranked out a new family of rugged four port Ethernet serial servers. If you’ve got 232, 422, or 485 devices that you’d like to reach with copper or fiber Ethernet, the VESR4x4 four port Ethernet serial server gives you all the features and flexibility you need for virtually any job - and the rugged reliability that you expect from B&B (survey says so!).
Whew - getting late now and Fantasy Mike can almost hear the crackle of the fire and those ice cubes clinking. Real Mike has to take out the trash, walk the dog, and pack a bag for the early-morning glamour of O’Hare. What to do...
Talk back - is it just me and some late-blooming version of ADD? Or are you feeling the gravitational pull of the 21st century acceleration too?
Happy Connections - and for those of us State-side, Happy Thanksgiving!
Mike Fahrion
P.S. Don’t forget to vote!
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 @ 04:00 AM
We are spirits
in the material world
-The Police
Dear Friend and Subscriber,
Halloween and its less-famous counterpart, All Saints Day, are both celebrations of the invisible and immaterial.
There is more to the world than what you can see and touch.
I wrote that in my Halloween e-letter 5 years back – I’m recycling because it ties in nicely with today’s rather phantom-like topic.
I’ll start with the philosophical, then we’ll talk tech.
Forgive my geek profiling, but we Engineers aren’t exactly thought leaders in the shadowy world of cultural and emotional change. That’s ironic because engineers are the force that starts the avalanche of change. Hunters to farmers, farms to factories, laborers to knowledge workers. All instigated by engineers without even a premonition that their designs - innovative applications of current technology - were the equivalent of kicking a rock over the edge of a mountainside – triggering landslides of change throughout society.
We’ve done it again.
Historically, decades or even generations passed before history was able to look back and identify the resulting dramatic shifts in society. That implies that you and I might not know if we’re in the grips of one of those otherworldly events right now.
Spooky.
I bet I’d scare the britches off some if I told them that we are smack in the middle of what history will call the biggest and fastest transition in our society yet. It’s a Trick or Treat paradigm. Those spooked by change will have a rough ride. For change thrill-seekers – hang on to your broomsticks.
We’re in the middle of a new world of transactions that exist only in an ethereal world. Embedded sensors everywhere. Machines connecting automatically. Real life data tagging massive databases in real time. These ghostly transactions already rule our economy. And with just a bit of imaginative conjuring (and one eye of newt), I foretell that this is just the beginning of things to come.
The ability for machines to talk to each other is no longer cutting edge – but the critical factors of size, cost, computing power and network reach are enabling a rate of change that is massive – yet most of it is happening quietly behind the misty shroud of technology.
I had the opportunity to spend last week on the far side of the former Iron Curtain. As my passport was scanned by the grim-faced customs agent I pondered which event created more automated communications – my traveling through customs or my last Redbox movie rental. (I pondered, but I did not ask).
Or, think about what happens when you drive through an automated tollway. A scanner ID’s the RFID tag in your car. A camera captures an image of you, your car and your license plates. Image processing instantly reconciles your plate against multiple databases – some of which you voluntarily signed on to. Matched data is reflected on your financial account, which pulls automatically from your credit card as needed. Exception notifications are sent via email, which you may receive on your phone within seconds. Imagine what time and man-hours that process would have consumed 5, 10 or 20 years ago?
It wouldn’t be hard to write a chapter – or even a book – playing out all of the creative, innovative and sometimes frightening extensions of that simple transaction above – all using technology that’s readily available today to gather data and assemble a tremendous amount of business intelligence.
Interesting stuff. Think of it as a parallel to the heyday of factory automation. In the tail end of the last century we automated manufacturing. Today we’re automating the business and social processes of our lives.
Thrilling? Chilling? Talk back – I’d like to hear what you think of this new wave of automation and where it will take us.
Here’s another spooky topic. More videos from yours truly.If you missed my Ghostbridge video, now is a great time to go check out how you can put in a high performance wireless Ethernet link quicker and easier than you can hang a picture. No wireless Hobgoblins required.
And today a 2nd act. This month’s video is a brain dump of my experience with what you must do to make USB reliable when you take it off the desktop. (And there will be no extra credit points earned for picking out my acronym screw-up). We’re having great success with our line of rugged USB isolators, hubs and converters. More importantly – we’re getting reports back from customers that our USB products are working in harsh environments where all others are failing.
And finally, a treat. Just a couple weeks back B&B Electronics acquired Quatech. This is thrilling stuff. Quatech brings great talent to the B&B family along with a deep range of rugged WiFi products and capabilities, along with a set of solutions and distribution partners around the world there to make it easier than ever to get your hands into the B&B cauldron of goodies.
Happy Halloween!
Mike Fahrion
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Fri, Oct 14, 2011 @ 03:15 PM
B&B Electronics CEO, Sean Harrigan, announces B&B Electronics' acquisition of Quatech and explains how the two companies, with their combined product offerings, will offer expanded product solutions and distribution channels, as well as continued excellent customer service and support.
Read more about the acquisition.
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Sep 21, 2011 @ 04:00 AM
Dear Reader,
While paddling in and about Northern Minnesota last week (in an area that’s currently on fire). I was thinking about interesting people and good stories. Interesting people are full of experiences –but not just any old experience – it’s the ones where things go wrong that make for good stories.
A good trip is much the same. Take a trip with perfect weather, no lost luggage, no epic storms or forest fires. You’ll take away some epic memories but frankly your stories will be a big yawn.
Trips where everything goes wrong (yet you manage to make the best of the situation) leads to good story telling.
Same goes for people. People that are the most interesting are often people that screw up. The more mistakes they make the more interesting they are (but people that screw up and never recover aren’t so interesting). People that run into adversity and - eventually - overcome it have captivating and meaningful stories to share.
Technical people often get the opportunity to screw up in very impactful ways. I bet the tech out in the deserts of Arizona that pulled the plug on 6 million people will have a good story to tell some day. I hope so anyway.
Being in the product development business, I find that products have a story to tell too. I don’t care how big or small a company is, you can find drama behind product development that never makes it as far as the marketing literature.
Here in the engineering labs and hallowed Dilbert cube halls of B&B things are no different. Sure we have some products that cruise through development with little drama, but that doesn’t typically create the bonding experience that only stress, late nights and passionate debates can build.
Take our Zlinx Xtreme outdoor wireless modems and I/O. You would never know it, but in our quest to have an outdoor radio product that was small, powerful, easy to use and didn’t require teeny tiny little tools to wire, we really got ourselves twisted up. Right up to a last minute kill decision that put the product back to the drawing board just before its initial release. Cost us some real time and money, but the end result was an award winning product line that will sling your sensor data between nodes with such ease that you’d never know that you’ve gone wireless.
Rugged USB products have an interesting story to tell here at B&B as well. The trouble there all started over a decade ago when, as part of our own test configurations, we were unable to find any commercial USB products that would survive the rigors of our various surge testing that we subject each and every B&B product to. We had to learn all kinds of tricks to help USB ports and host PC’s that were running our test software survive without damage or lockups. Then customers started having the same problems as they started using USB peripherals in the field in less than friendly environments. Over time, our own boneyard of smoldering PC’s led us to the development of what our own and customer testing tells us is the most rugged and reliable line of USB converters, hubs and isolators on the planet. If you’re using USB in an environment that’s more demanding than printing out today’s lunch menu you’ll want to talk to us about USB isolation. Or, if you need to connect a serial device to a USB port, save yourself time, frustration and damage and go directly to one of our isolated USB to serial converters. A can’t-fail installation procedure, rock solid drivers and 2000 volts of isolation protection ensure that you won’t waste your day, or your PC, chasing problems that you never even knew you had.
Even our newest line of rugged and compact Ethernet switches went through their own Soap Opera drama. When we built our ESW100 line, a 3rd generation switch here at B&B, we knew we wanted it to be compact, but didn’t want to give up fiber options. (Other manufacturers give up on compact when they add fiber to their edge switches because they’re still using bulky, old school SC and ST fiber connectors). Well the rest of the world moved on. LC connectors are smaller and easier to use. Yet change isn’t easy and the discomfort of doing something different than all the competition out there wasn’t easy for everyone to swallow. It was the right move – if you haven’t used one of our ESW105 or ESW108 switches yet (especially the ones with fiber), try it – you’ll be glad you did.
Hope you’ve made some good memories and stories this summer. Share them here.
Happy Connections,
Mike Fahrion
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Wed, Aug 17, 2011 @ 11:26 AM
What makes you successful?
I was doing some bike-seat philosophizing about what makes people successful (what is it that happens to your brain when exercising? More thoughts on that later).
No, I’m not writing a self-help book (it would be short). But a couple events caused me to stop and think about what makes people I know successful or not, and what traits or quirks do they have in common.
It’s not intelligence. An uber-IQ may qualify you for more advanced work, but it doesn’t correlate to success. In fact extreme intelligence without the right stuff might even be counterproductive and lead to a dark world of cynicism and sarcasm. That’s a purgatory I’ve seen some engineers create for themselves.
What about motivation? Highly motivated people are enviable (and occasionally annoying). They throw themselves with unfettered enthusiasm at whatever they set out to do. But just being highly motivated isn’t it at all. Not by a long shot.
Why not? Because success really isn’t about you. It’s about those that you know and influence. Understanding what motivates them is where the real magic happens. Face it - on your own you’re a labor force of one in a world of 7 billion. You and I are a wee spec in space and time. But what about those that understand the motivation of others? They have a lever - maybe it’s 100x, maybe 1000x or more. I don’t care how motivated you are on your own, if you don’t understand the motivation of others (and do something about it), you’ll struggle. Agree? Disagree?
So I’ve been doing a bit of bicycling lately. Not a lot by enthusiasts’ standards, but between the commute to work and some weekend rides, easily over 100 miles per week. It’s one of a handful of physical activities that combines exercise, outdoors, an elegant mechanical advantage and rhythm. That combo does something for my brain which is constantly chewing on something or another when I’m riding. I find it’s impossible to dwell on petty stuff and I’m able to digest bigger issues faster and with more clarity than when my butt is planted in a desk chair. Is there something you do that gives this same mental nudge?
Enough philosophizing and on to business. Here are a few intriguing problems we’ve been involved with here lately. Maybe they’ll get you thinking about interesting problems that you can solve on or off your bike seat.
Nothing drives spending (or shirking in fear) like regulatory requirements. Widespread in Europe, and led in the US by California, fuel stations have to do leak monitoring and vapor recovery for their fuel tanks. That leads to a small embedded system being installed with, of all things, an RS-232 serial port that allows remote data collection. Instead of sending an employee out every day with a clipboard major fuel stations want to get that data into their network and business system. We’ve solved this one in a couple ways for different customers depending on what the sites look like. If they don't have wiring in place they’ve taken a pair of our Zlinx wireless modems to create a wireless link back into the computer systems inside the station. If they’re lucky enough to have some Ethernet cable (or an available conduit), they’ve adopted our single port Ethernet serial server to allow access over their existing network.
Energy management is a hot topic that isn’t going away soon. There is a quite a push to get more comprehensive data down at a more discrete level; for example, how much energy a particular location, device, or process is consuming. It turns out that, in the US, our government has been at play here as well, requiring all government buildings of significant size to monitor electric meters. Those meters aren’t always installed in a convenient location, so an enterprising solutions provider put together a combo of our Ethernet Extenders and our compact Industrial Ethernet switch to provide Ethernet connectivity at the electric meters which could then be located great distances from the host system. This could easily be retrofitted using existing telephone cable, avoiding the expensive proposition of pulling fiber connections through an existing building.
You’ll be happy to know that there are pretty demanding standards in the medical field when it comes to isolating devices that might be connected to your important bits from the power lines. Nice to know that someone is looking out on your behalf, especially when you’re wired up on a hospital bed during a lightning storm. B&B has provided serial isolation products for years (decades even), but now some of those medical devices are USB. That created a demand for USB isolation, and once some of our medical customers started inquiring we went out and got our USB isolator -- UL approved to UL 60601-1 medical standards. It’s now used to isolate the connection between a piece of USB-connected instrumentation and the IT-class PC that is prevalent throughout medical facilities.
I’m giddy about the success stories rolling in about GhostBridge - our new high performance outdoor wireless Ethernet bridge. I talked with a customer last week that yanked out a 3 year old wireless link that cost him an arm and half a leg, and replaced it with GhostBridge. On the far end was a network of high end digital signs. The wireless link provided programming access to update the content of those signs. His old link and its troublesome external antennas were getting him a throughput of about 700 kbps, which was leading to a lot of downtime for the signs. With GhostBridge his throughput went instantly to over 40Mbps and installation took just minutes. Another customer quipped that installation was “as easy as hanging a picture.” Great performance, great value, outstanding ease of use. Makes me circle back to my motivation philosophizing – there’s a nice little success story that makes me think we did a nice job in understanding what motivates many of you.
What are your motivation success stories? Do you buy in to my thoughts or am I missing some other key ingredients - or do you think I’m altogether wacked?
Talk back...I’d love to hear from you
Happy Connections, Mike Fahrion