Following the RoadTest of the CapSense MBR3 Evaluation kit, I thought about creating a simple cursor board with 4 direction buttons and a select button with an I2C interface to a microcontroller host.Before embarking on any venture, I like to do a bi...
Garrett Mace is an electrical engineer and electronics enthusiast located in Pullman, Washington. His startup company, macetech LLC, began as a part-time hobby in 2008 and recently with his co-founder Jason Moungey made the leap to a full-time busine...
Google’s Drive for Education will give students unlimited storage for free (via Google)What’s better than having unlimited storage in Google’s Drive cloud service? How about making it free! Yep, that’s the idea behind Google’s new Drive for Educatio...
Everyone loves to talk about the painter who did some work for Facebook and took payment in the form of company stock, which was worth hundreds of millions 7 years later at the company’s IPO. Especially potential clients that are trying to negotiate ...
Early in my consultancy, I was eager to please. First clients aren't easy to find! But this particular client was working on a new microcontroller implementation of an existing product. It started as a simple way to control the system, but as opportu...
This is James (Laen) Neal, owner and operator of OSH Park, home of the purple boards. OSH Park makes prototype quantity printed circuit boards, targeted for inventors and makers and at-home engineers who don't want to etch themselves but want to ...
I was recently working on a project where the goal was to control a rocket's altitude and recovery system. The basic goal was to have an altimeter to know at what altitude the rocket was at in order to deploy the drag chute and then at an acceptable ...
When I was a co-op student a number of years ago I was tasked with automating device testing for a specific company. The testing that was in need of automation was taking up valuable hours each day. One unit could easily take 2 hours a day for its fi...
www.youtube.com/watchI design electronics for the money. Yes, I love the work, have gotten quite good at it, and believe it is my God-given purpose on this Earth. But I don't kid myself; if cash from electronics stops flowing I'm going to find anothe...
Buy this thing, man.. (via getty)Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about business, but I am pretty sure you don't go about it like this. I leave you, the reader to judge. This story illustrates, in fluorescent Day-Glo, why you do not sell produ...
Supercaps... 100F is always startling to me. I cannot go into too much detail as there are IP concerns at stake. This design failure concerns a device for the purpose of....hmm...controlling a sight where customers might come to fill there "something...
Elemental is a 3D printer like no other - it's the world’s first pressure controlled 3D printer In the final stages of development, Elemental is a stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer with a difference. Elemental is the world’s first pressure...
One of the best things about being a consultant is being able to manage projects without having to manage people. Hiring employees to help complete a project can entail adding burdensome tasks as well as much more risk. At the same time, passing on p...
Money used to be such a simple thing. A $1 weekly allowance from parents for all of your childhood chores was a pretty easy account to keep track of. Want to know how much you have? Open the piggy bank and count it up. Once the money was inhand it wa...
Wait, that isn’t electronics... As a fan of Terry Pratchett’s works I’m always on the lookout for new books by the author which are coming out. Although Terry has a progressive illness he has still managed to produce at least one book year on ye...
Right now everyone who reads this article in the United States owns a business. It may only exist in potential form, but it exists. Say someone walks up to you on the street with a 555 timer and a wad of cash. He pays you to make an astable oscillato...
Today is Nikola Tesla's birthday and many rightly recognize him as one of the greatest, most influential engineers of all time. However, we want to know who do you personally recognize as the greatest? Were you inspired by a well known figure in ...
Tesla’s Wardenclyffe plant being constructed in 1904 to transmit energy across the Atlantic (Archive photo)On July 10 of this year, famed inventor Nikola Tesla would have been 158 years-old and while he’s been gone for some time now, his technology s...
A Shameful Introduction First, a shocking truth about myself. Until a number of months ago, I did not know specifically who Nikola Tesla was, my first experience of the word Tesla was in the computer game Command & Conquer: Red Alert where b...
It was my first engineering job and I was tasked with creating the new reliability system for our chip laser components. I had big dreams, I wanted to be able to test 256 individually addressable laser chips on a single board! Having this many high-c...
A few months ago we were luck enough to have engineer Seggy Segaran present this webinar. Seggy has over 35 years experience in engineering and takes this opportunity to pass on the knowledge he has gained in designing and launching over 30 products....
We posted on Monday about how our upcoming birthday has made us all philosophical about the role of the engineer, and asked you a few questions about what being an engineer means to you personally. We would also like your perspective on the bigg...
There are a lot of consultants out there who like to think of themselves as great businessmen and women. They focus in on the contract and make sure their contingencies are covered so they will get paid even if lawyers are needed. Sadly, most off tho...
We’ve got a birthday coming up. The element14 Community will turn five years old soon and this milestone has got us thinking about the big questions. Who we are, why we’re here and what we mean to people, that sort of thing. The element14 Commun...
