This section will look at the basics of data loggers and chart recorders and how they compare to oscilloscopes, and look at the products on the market similar to the B&K Precision / Sefram DAS240-BAT to understand how it is positioned in the mark...
This week has been a rather interesting one for me down in Sydney - it's not even summer and yet the whole country is burning. Several days of low air quality meant that I decided to work from home, as I'm fairly sensitive to poor quality air...
Just over half a year ago, I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a reviewer of the Rohde & Schwarz HMP4040.04 384W Four-Channel Programmable Power Supply, which I reviewed here. The unit was a stellar performer, but unfortunately, it suffered su...
As the setup of the board is perhaps not very interesting and isn’t the key focus of the RoadTest, I’ve broken all of those details out into a separate blog posting to save cluttering the review. In this part, let’s take a look at the setup process a...
Since some RoadTest review readers get bored of looking through unboxing, the unboxing process has been moved into this separate blog post. UnboxingFor this Infineon Gate Driver with Truly Differential Input RoadTest, a special package from elem...
Most embedded systems will need to interface with “reality” in some way, whether that is reading in information measured by transducers or controlling some “actor” device to achieve some action. In the case of the Harting MICA, it has eight GPIO line...
In industrial applications, equipment can often suffer harsh conditions. While some of these are more obvious (e.g. temperature extremes, vibration, liquid and dust), others are less obvious such as power issues. In this part, I run some automated te...
One of the key features of an “industrial” piece of equipment is its tolerance to environmental extremes. This includes extremes of temperature, vibration, dust and liquid ingress. In this section, I try to kill ‘n+1’ birds with ‘n’ stones by trying ...
While the Harting MICA may be the main start of this RoadTest, it’s also important to take a good look at the Bosch Connected Industrial Sensor Solution (CISS) as it is in itself a separate product which has capabilities beyond that exposed within th...
The datasheet for the Harting MICA CISS Complete IIoT Starter Kit makes a fairly bold claim – that you could be up and running with a condition monitoring system in just 10 minutes. Let’s put this to the test. In this rather long chapter, I will be e...
In this section, I will be covering the unboxing experience – in the case of the Harting MICA, it’s a delight of its own which is well worth looking at. UnboxingThe kit from Harting comes sealed in shrink-wrap for freshness.The design of the box...
In this blog post, I’ll provide a little background on the industrial internet-of-things and the various products on the market today. IoT vs IIoT – Same, but DifferentUnless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll probably have been seeing the ...
Of utmost importance to IoT designers is often the power budget, as battery powered devices may need to be manufactured to meet a given lifetime on a non-rechargeable battery. Efficient radios, power conversion circuitry, microcontrollers and softwar...
In this blog, I will look at the characteristics of the radio emissions from the IDT ZWIR4512 6LoWPAN modules. For testing, the module region has been set to US with 10 channels as this is seemed most appropriate for Australia where ISM operation in ...
In this blog post, I discuss the results of testing the sensor cube in various situations to understand what its battery life is like and how it handles extremes of temperature and humidity. I also test the gas flow sensor on the bench to see how it ...
In this blog post, I will be focusing on the documentation supplied with the SDAWIR03 and the set-up process. Note that I will not be covering the Amazon AWS Cloud side of operations as I don’t currently have an account with them (and don’t wish to),...
As with most evaluation kits, I just couldn’t wait to find out what’s inside. In this blog, I’ll take the covers off the hub and sensor cube and look closely at the parts that make up the IDT SDAWIR03 demonstration kit. The HubThe first device t...
In this blog, I’ll cover the unboxing process for the IDT SDAWIR03 evaluation kit, including a lot of photos. Unboxing the KitThanks to element14 for swiftly and safely dispatching the RoadTest item, packed inside an outer box with bubble-wrap e...
Realising practical Internet of Things (IoT) projects requires careful balance of several potentially conflicting variables, which may include cost, convenience, power consumption, bandwidth, processing power and security just to name a few. Even whe...
It seems this year must be my lucky year, as element14 have been sending more stuff my way. This time, it wasn't so much of a surprise, as out of practicality, danzima had to ask me about my T-shirt size. However, I still had no idea what sort of T-s...
Included in this blog post are some of the juicier details which wasn’t included in the main RoadTest review so as not to “clog” up the review. Unboxing ExtrasWhat follows are some additional images including close-ups that I didn’t feel needed ...
