Focus on Code Mercenaries

Code Mercenaries has been a supplier for manufacturers of industrial input devices and peripherals since 1998. In 2008 Code Mercenaries started to develop and manufacture products for LED lighting applications. Their design philosophy for LED lighting drivers is to deliver maximum efficiency and maximum life cycle to enable the potential of modern LED technology. 

The keyboard and combined keyboard/mouse controller family KeyWarrior, and the mouse controller family MouseWarrior serve as basis for a large number of industrial input devices. A small but vital customer base are the manufacturers of products for the disability market and other specialty input devices. The joystick controller family JoyWarrior serves a broad range of customers from industrial machine/vision control, professional and semiprofessional simulator control, to hobby and model building. A good option for front panel design are the joystick/mouse hybrid controllers MW24J8 and MW24H8 which are switch-selectable to work as a mouse or joystick allowing both cursor control and data input via a joystick.

JoyWarrior24F8 is a low cost three axis acceleration sensor. With its small size and simple connection via a USB interface it opens a lot of new application

options. The MouseWarrior24F8 variant of this sensor is a mouse replacement that needs no surface for operation.

Applications for the IO-Warrior universal USB I/O controllers are very diverse. Basically, the number of pins and the data rate are IO-Warrior’s only limitations. It is used in laboratory setups and test equipment, as well as in hobby projects and full-scale device production, either as the core of a device or "just" the interface to USB. IO-Warrior chips are presently controlling robots and telescopes, doing quality control on production lines, taking measurements in labs, controlling switches and displays in front panels or simulator cockpits, or working as the USB interface in many kinds of products.

SpinWarrior is a family of rotary encoder controllers with USB interface. Various models allow from 3 to 6 encoders to be connected to the USB and are suitable for motion control, measurement or human interfacing applications.

Drivers for Pico's scope and data loggers run on BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi

Pico Technology has released PicoScopeR beta drivers for its oscilloscope and data logging devices to run on the ARM-based BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi development boards.

The drivers access a range of compact, economical USB oscilloscopes and data loggers, including high-speed oscilloscopes with bandwidths up to 500MHz, high-resolution 12bit and 16bit oscilloscopes, and deep-memory oscilloscopes with buffer sizes up to 512Msample.

Most of the company’s oscilloscopes offer advanced digital triggering, fast block-mode and streaming-mode data capture, and a built-in signal generator or arbitrary waveform generator. The data logger range includes multi-channel voltage loggers, eight-channel thermocouple loggers and the DrDAQ multifunction logger.
Separate driver packages and snippets of C code are available for Raspbian and Debian systems. Code could be developed in C-compatible programming languages such as C++, Java and JavaScript, says the company.
A forum is available via the company’s website. Beta drivers for Mac OS X and Linux, drivers for Microsoft Windows and a free SDK can be downloaded free of charge.
http://www.picotech.com

electronica show in Munich

I just got back from three days in Munich at one of Europe's premier industrial electronics shows.  It was good to meet up with more than a dozen of our worldwide suppliers and catch up on their developments and share plans.  Soem excitin new products are in the pipeline!

Here's what Graham Pitcher of the UK's New Electronics (www.newelectronics.co.uk) thought of the show:

By the time electronica closed last Friday afternoon, more than 73,000 visitors had passed through its bar code controlled gates - a modest, but welcome, increase on the number of attendees in 2012.

electronica has always been viewed as a German show with a reasonable international attendance. But the figures released by the organizers showed there were as many international visitors this year as there were from Germany - and the UK was the third largest international group, behind Italy and Austria.

Two themes dominated the event: the Internet of Things (IoT); and 'solutions'. The IoT was the topic for this year's CEO Roundtable. Picking up on emerging themes, the CEOs - from NXP, Freescale, STMicroelectronics and Infineon - called for secure, scalable and energy efficient products to enable the IoT to develop further.

Many leading semiconductor companies and distributors were talking about 'solutions'. What are they? Anything from evaluation boards and reference designs to pre-configured circuit elements. Why are they appearing? Two main reasons: one is that engineers don't have enough time to start designs from scratch; the other is that a 'resource gap' is emerging - companies don't have the necessary skills in house.

Most 'solutions' were, in fact, only partial; other elements need to be brought together to create a product. But if a company, for example, didn't have the analog expertise, these ideas would certainly take the project forward.

Well, that's it for another two years. What might the focus be for the 2016 event? Electronics technology might not be moving forward quite as quickly as it once did, but the pace of product innovation hasn't slowed - it's the applications that now capture our imagination, rather than the 'bits and pieces' inside the box.

What might those new applications be? Gregg Lowe, Freescale's CEO, ended his contribution to the CEO Roundtable by saying: "When we come back in two years, we'll be talking about something we don't know about today."

Handheld 25MHz Scope on YouTube!

Our latest YouTube video features Owon's great RDS1021 Handheld 25MHz USB Oscilloscope. Great for field toolkits! Check it out! http://youtu.be/YpFgJtL1Q4o