| Lately: monitoring and sensing across a vast spectrum of industries. Lots of people want data about business processes and throwing some coin cell sized boards with BLE and sensors into a product as it goes from start to end customer can be enlightening ... sometimes too much so for some businesses :). The real trick is having the infrastructure and team to receive and analyze the data (which we do now that we've done it enough). Industrial automation is in the mix. A lot of that has been moving from combinations of IEEE-488, RS-232, USB or other non-differential links to CAN and Ethernet. Customers are often amazed how many fewer problems they have when they use a connection that is actually electrically differential. It's gotten to the point that when I hear "reliability issues" I look for USB and just wipe it out. Generally there will be a network of PC's connected via USB to "random industrial machine X" or, worse, PC->USB Adapter->RS-232/IEE-488/etc. (to be fair--the old systems with actual RS-232 ports or IEEE-488 cards generally worked fine as they had more than enough signal overhead and shielding to deal with industrial electrical spikes--it's the USB interface that disconnects and causes Windows to crap its pants). A replace of a bunch of those with something with a CAN interface generally fixes industrial problems. I finally sat down and wrote my own CANOpen stack because I was using it so frequently. Medical and bio is an occasional, but that hasn't been such a big mover for me lately. The people who cut checks and the people who actually know what their problems are are too far apart in the hierarchy right now. My big problem in bio is that I could do quite a bit using full-custom VLSI to go to ultra low power functionality, but nobody wants to pay for that. So, I'll continue to use off-the-shelf microcontrollers and FPGA's and use way too much power. Most of my grief these days isn't electrical. It's mechanical. I used 3D printers and silcone molds a lot. Very messy and annoying to work with, but it saves us having to cut molds for injection molding. I can 3D print a lot of parts for the cost of even a single injection mold. And my margins aren't so tight that I need the cost savings. And I can change the part if something is wrong. And I don't have to scream at the mold maker when (not if) he screws my mold up. |