By Jon Gabay Fame, fun and (small) fortune await!  Welcome to the first in a series of articles for design engineers, students, inventors, and hobbyists with electronic, electro-mechanical, and electro-optic systems. It teaches, demonstrates, and makes available electronic modules that can be used to perform functions. We invite you to dive into the technology, implement the designs and share your

OLD WESTBURY, N.Y.–We frequently ask entrepreneurs "what's the caliber of engineering students you're getting these days?" The answer is invariably something like, "They're super smart but need a lot of training." This perhaps is an age-old refrain, but it takes on new resonance for an age in which companies increasingly run leaner and have less time to train and mentor new hires

BOSTON–We convened a panel of industry luminaries at ESC Boston this fall to take on some pointed questions from me and the audience about the nature of innovation. What are the challenges? Are we seeing the skill sets we need coming out of the college ranks into engineering jobs? How do we manage complexity? More design resources John Day, Technical

(Odometer: 6,311 miles) ROCKLEIGH, N.J.–It's a big thing when a company name becomes a verb. Xerox, for example, became a verb to copy something on an electronic copy machine. It has its downsides, but in the end to become the name associated with an action or an industry is a milestone. More design resources Welcome to Crestron, which, the story

HORSHAM, Penn.–Scroll through the government statistics and one thing will invariably jump out at you: productivity rates have soared over the past quarter century in the technology industry. But the technology that our industry produces has made a much smaller (even negligible) impact in other industries, such as education, public safety, construction, government, medical, etc. More design resources It's easy

HARRISBURG, Penn.–It’s trite but true: companies (and people) who don’t adapt are doomed to (best-case) fail or (worst-case) die. But this is particularly challenging today when the voice of the customer’s customer (or some non-customer actor) is so much louder than ever. In more consumer electronics applications, social media communications trends drove handset design for several years; today it’s apps

PHILADELPHIA–The problem with robots right now is they’re not particularly sensitive. Don’t get me wrong. I know we can’t boil the robotics ocean right away, and in motion and learning departments, robotics sits in an amazing era of innovation. But if we want to develop even more “human” robots, we need to work on the machine-man interface– the ability for

MT. HOLLY SPRINGS, Penn.–Microprocessors are sexy. Oscillators? Not so much, but they make the world go around. The first quartz resonators were developed around World War I and had an astounding and immediate impact on electronics design and our notions of time. The technology was patented by Bell Labs, and Vectron, whom we visited in the rolling hills of central

PHILADELPHIA–For decades the percentage of women in engineering has stagnated at between roughly 5% of overall engineering jobs. This despite the fact that women are growing as a percentage of workforces in mathematics and the biosciences over the same period of time. Theories abound for this situation in the engineering ranks. Some believe that while girls excel at science and