Casey Business Awards

We already let you know that we are finalists in 2 of the 9 categories for the City Of Casey inaugural Casey Business Awards in our post about being Casey Business Awards Finalists.The Casey Business Awards categories we are finalists in are: 

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

The news has been picked up by one of our local Newspapers, The Journal, who ran the following article about us and the other finalists.  It is good to see so many strong contenders and our economy certainly needs strong businesses to continue to give both the employment and prosperity we have come to enjoy.  

The Journal - Successful Endeavours

 

Our congratulations go out to the other finalists and we will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner. 

It is good to see the Electronics Design, Embedded Software Development and Low Cost Electronics Manufacture featuring so strongly in the local Australian economy.  We especially note that Australian Solar Manufacturing is also a finalist in the Manufacturer of the Year category and we wish Jain and Janice Lal all the best with their nomination. 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.  

Casey Business Awards

The City Of Casey are holding there inaugural Casey Business Awards and at the Casey Business Breakfast this morning Successful Endeavours were nominated as finalists in 2 categories.

Casey Business Awards

The 2 Casey Business Awards categories are:

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

We fall into the Business And Professional Services category with our Electronics and Embedded Software development services where we design products for Australian Electronics Manufacturers  so they can achieve Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia at a good profit margin.

The Manufacturer Of The Year award category recognises that for some of our clients, we also manufacture the product the product and delivered to them programmed, tested and calibrated; ready to sell.  This includes products like a DNP3 enabled power controller product for the US Smart Grid market which is made right here in Berwick as well as the Award Winning Borgtech CPL2 Corrosion Protection Data Logger with Wireless Data Logging.

It was an honour to be recognised by our city council together with other small business owners in the City Of Casey, a municipality in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  We will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

Cranbourne News 5th August 2010 Best in Business

 Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

This week I was the recipient of an Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award.  Last year we were received 2 awards for technical excellence when we won 2 of the 15 EDN Innovation awards handed out in Australia in 2009. 

So I was very pleased to be receiving an award recognising the business side of Successful Endeavours.  The award was presented by Dr Marc Dussault of Exponential Programs and recognises entrepreneurs and business people who have demonstrated excellence deploying exponential strategies in their business by profitably creating exceptional value for their clients in a manner that is both measurable and sustainable. The award received was in the category of Engineering Consultant and was one of only 6 handed out in 2010 and the only one in that category. 

Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 Ray Keefe receives his award from Dr Marc Dussault.

You can read more about the awards at Exponential Programs Entrepreneur of the Year Awards page. 

The main reason for this post is to touch on the most significant aspect of this award for me. I once said that as a Business Owner I made a pretty good Engineer.  The past 18 months has a seen a transition away from that to the point now where I can say that I am an Entrepreneur who is also an Engineer.  Engineering is a Profession and so it isn’t something that suddenly stops being relevant.  Our education and mindset is all based on practical problem solving through the use of technology while balancing performance, risk and cost.  And we apply this skillset and mindset to most aspects of our lives, even when it isn’t the only way to go about it.  So I am very pleased to be making this transition.  Not only is our business better for it but our clients are as well. 

And I also thank our clients for the trust they have placed in us to deliver Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development for their next generation of market leading products, the vast majority of which are still made in Australia at a profit. 

Here is a picture of the Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year award certificate. 

Exponential Entrepreneur of the Year Certificate

 The initial nomination was published on PRWeb at 2010 Exponential Entrepreneur Award Winners Announced. 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Design for Green Manufacture

This is not as straight forward a topic as it might at first seem to be.  And this is because there isn’t yet a unified agreement on exactly what Green Manufacture means.  And like most Design Issues, you cannot do Electronics Design without clear requirements.  So what are the requirements?

Here are some Green Manufacture requirements or targets:

• reduce product Power Consumption
• reduce manufacturing Power Consumption
• add Renewable Energy options to the product
• add Renewable Energy options to the manufacture process
• reduce pollution or waste in the manufacture process
• reduce energy involved in upstream or downstream processes
• reduce pollution or waste in the upstream or downstream processes
• increase product life
• increase product utility
• increase manufacturing plant utilisation

I guess you can see the dilemma.  It can be hard to know which target to aim for.  Am I doing the Electronics Design with the product, process, life cycle or ecosystem issues as the primary concern?  And how do I balance these concerns?

Here is one excellent article that also discusses this topic Green Supply Line.

Electronics Design can be Green

One major thing we can do is reduce the product Power Consumption.  We are coming out of a phase where a mains plug pack power supply was considered an ideal way to avoid compliance costs when designing new products.  This has led to a proliferation of low efficiency always on powered devices.  A recent look under my desk reveals the problem we have as Product Developers where every device I use is either USB Powered or mains plug pack powered.

So a first step is to review this whole approach to supplying power to devices.  We have made steady gains in the area of Power Consumption reduction for the devices themselves.  Now it is time to do a similar thing on the Power Supply side.

Energy Harvesting

This is a new area that hasn’t yet reached mainstream development.  The idea is that you can utilise the ambient environment to get power for free.  Or at least you aren’t directly requiring extra Power Generation.  Hence the name, Energy Harvesting.

How you do it and the Electronics Design and Electronics Technology required to make it work are still being defined but there has been some interesting new progress.  Some key players are:

Linear Technology – new Energy Harvesting Integrated Circuit

Enocean – are front runners in bringing Self Powered Wireless devices to the market

What is Energy Harvesting?

This is where we use Electronics Design and Electronics Devices to generate power from the Ambient Environment.  The result is a product that doesn’t need to be plugged in and recharges itself automatically. Some of the Energy Sources that are used are:

• Light
• Thermal differentials
• Vibration
• Chemistry
• Pressure differentials
• Air Flow

One example of a product that does this is the Enocean Light Switch where you can just put it where you want it.  And if you change your mind, just move it. Now wiring required.

Right now the technology is still more expensive and so take up is slow.  But as it develops and the price comes down that will change.

We are in for some interesting times.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

How Does Sleep Save Energy?

For this post, we will look specifically at Embedded Software techniques to save power and energy.  This is a well known Power Saving Strategy which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.  It is also something you have to design into the Power Management Plan from the beggining.

For this example, we will use the MSP430 from TI which has some of the best Power Saving and Power Consumption figures in the industry.  We have used them to create devices that run from a pair of AAA batteries for 2 years and which have time based control algorithms so that they can’tbe used in a purely event driven mode.  Here is how it works:

Low Power Sleep Mode

This shows the power consumption versus time.  In Low Power Sleep Mode the consumption is close to zero.  Almost no power consumed.  Then depending on what is happening it wakes up to varying degrees.

Get the best Electronic Sleep

So this is how you take advantage of this:

• make the time between wake ups as long as possible
• make the time awake as short as possible
• only turn on the peripherals needs for a particular wake period

Now if you system only has to wake once every minute then you can get low power operation from a lot of different processors.  If it wakes many times a second then you need a processor that gives you lots of ways to reduce power during wake, reduce the time awake, and increase the interval between wakes.

MSP430 Sleep

So back to the MSP430. It has Power Conservation features that allow it to do all three better than most.  Here is the list:

• Digitally Controlled Oscillator DCO allows it to wake and run quickly
• Can run a Timer from a 32KHz crystal making interval timing very low power
• Can use the DCO to set the run speed and so shorten the wake time
• Lot’s of Power Down Modes so you can always find one that suits your application
• Peripherals can be Shut Down when not in use
• Can run down to 1.8V – more on that later but it can also help here

Low Power System Architecture

To take advantage of all this, you have to develop the System Architecture so that  takes advantage of this.  An example from a very long life application we did runs like this:

• 32Hz Oscillator runs a timer that generates a 1 second wake
• User input keys set up to wake on change of state from high to low
• Use DCO at 1MHz to quickly wake, execute & sleep again
• Use State Machines to allow modules to execute predictably with eratic timing
• Have early exit tests to prevent unnecessary Code Execution

The result is an application that runs a process with User Interaction, LED Indicators, and a 2 week cycle where the average Power Consumption is 20uA at 2.7V or 54uW.  Of this, less than half is the processor executing the software and the single biggest energy use is the intermittently flashed LED Indicators.

To learn more, check out this more comprehensive article on “Low power MCU selection criteria and sleep mode implementation” from embedded.com which provides more examples.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

What is so good about Low Power Electronics?

If you read my last post, you would have noticed that this has the potential to reduce overall Power Requirements.  Up until now,  only Battery Operated Devices have really cared about Power Consumption.  If you could plug it into a wall outlet then all was OK unless you were consuming more power than a standard circuit allowed.

Today, things are different.  Climate Change is a global concern and reducing the Carbon Footprint for a product is important, regardless of what sort of power it consumes.

If we can reduce the Power Consumption of an appliance by 50%, then provided it’s Electronics Manufacture does not add that back again, we have a net Carbon Footprint gain.  In fact, if we can do this across all products then we will meet our Global Carbon Reduction target of 50% by 2050 with this strategy alone.

How to reduce Electronics Power Consumption

This is not a new topic, and much of what I present here represents the combined experience of the Electronics and Embedded Software industry.  Here is the short list:

• reduce the Supply Voltage for Microcontrollers, Microprocessors and CMOS Circuits in general
• use Sleep Modes and keep the Wake Periods as short as possible
• replace High Power Consumption Devices with Low Power Consumption Devices
• replace high utilisation Digital Filters with Analogue Electronics equivalents
• replace Polled Operating Modes with Event Driven Operating Modes
• use Low Power Smart Peripherals that Wake the rest of the System only when required
• reduce the Time To Wake and the Time To Sleep
• optimise the Software Execution Flow
• use Energy Harvesting
• Remove power from sections of Electronics Circuitry when not in use

There is overlap and interdependency between these but that is a good starting point.

Next I will start look at specific examples.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Low Power Electronics is a Green Strategy

There are 2 ways to reduce your Carbon Footprint.  The first is to get the same power from a Green Power Source that reduces the Carbon Footprint at the power generation phase.  This is where Wind Power, PV PhotoVoltaics, Wave Power, Geothermal Power and other such technologies come in.

Wind Power Generator

The second way is to use less power from the same source, which is a Power Reduction Strategy.  This is a bit different to the concept outlined in Unlimited Wealth by Paul Zane Pilzer where he shows that we keep finding ways to meet the expansion needs of the future. That is also happening.  The ‘use less power’ approach is about getting more from the existing. The great thing about this is that you can effect a reduction in you Carbon Footprint independent of the Power Generators and so this strategy can run ahead of large scale system changes.

First you have to have a baseline to measure from.  This will become critical for businesses that must show Carbon Footprint reductions once legislation in this area is brought in around the world.  The issue isn’t if, but when this happens, and what the specific details are.  Carbon Trading is an interim measure that allows money to be made off the problem while not actually ensuring there is real progress.  Eventually significant net reductions must happen.

Carbon Footprint Calculation

There is a Carbon Footprint Calculator available at IEEE.  You can see what your Carbon Footprint looks like by clicking on the IEEE picture below

IEEE Carbon Footprint Calculator

How did you go?  Some of the questions are not that easy are they?  We often don’t know the source of some of our power or the real Carbon Cost of our lifestyle.

Carbon Footprint Reduction

So reducing the Electronic Power Requirements for Electronic Devices is a primary Green Strategy for reducing your Carbon Footprint. For a complete system the calculation is of course much more complicated.  The survey above is aimed at households but the principle is the same.  A true Carbon Reduction Strategy requires you to consider not only your own operation but upstream and downstream operations as well.

This is of course only one strategy and we will look at others in the near future.  But for my next post I’ll concentrate on design techniques for Reducing Power Consumption in Electronic Appliances so that they become Low Power Electronics Appliances and help to reduce the overall Carbon Footprint.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

In this post we will look at the Product Development Process and how to get improved outcomes.  But first here is a fun graphic made from our logo.

Successful Endeavours - Making Electronics and Embedded Software Work

Product Development Process

The Product Development Process is intended to reliably deliver new products for manufacture or distribution.  This is a critical component of a Product Strategy where you are creating the product rather than sourcing it from a supplier.   So you would think that it should be a highly optimised, well oiled machine that reliably delivers successful products. Alas that is not always the case. With 30 years of experience in Developing Products for a wide range of industries I have seen my share of projects handled well and not so well. Here are some general principles I have gleaned from my experience in Successful Product Development Projects:

• Risks must be identified and managed.  Track them and eliminate them as soon as possible.
• Anything clever or tricky needs to be checked by someone else.
• Everything else also gets checked.  Design reviews, code walk-throughs and prototypes save time, money and heart ache later on.
• Hold the timeline.  Foster an attitude that slippage is not acceptable.
• Test and check everything.
• It’s not finished until no-one has to do another thing to it.

So six core principles.  They are inter related of cousre.  Let’s look at how these work out in practice.

Successful Product Development Principles

Lets look at how each of these priciples can be used to improve the likelihood of a Successful Product Development Project.

Risk Management

Risk Management is an old idea.  Not surprising since risks have always existed. Did you know that during the Manhattan Project it was determined that there was a chance that a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere ?  Having got contradictory reports the argument was eventually settled by a report showing that although it was possible, it was unlikely.  How comfortable would you feel running that risk ? Fortunately the average Development Project is dealing with much more mundane risks such as achieving Technical Requirements such as:

• Power Consumption
• Unit Manufacturing Cost
• Performance Criteria

But the approach is still the same:

• Identify the risk
• Work out how to ameliorate the risk – reduce it – or eliminate it
• Do tests to confirm the risk has been dealt with
• Iterate until it is no longer a risk

Review the clever bits

Test Everything - Clever Design Needs Test

Where possible, any particularly clever or tricky areas of the project need to be reviewed by someone not involved in the everyday work of the project.  This is primarily to ensure that assumptions are challenged.  If you can’t get an outsider to do the review, use a process like Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono which can allow team members to step outside their emotional and assumptive predispositions.  Unchallenged assumptions are unmanaged risks.

Review the rest of the project

Review Everything

The astute amongst would have noticed that I am proposing everything gets reviewed.  But the tricky bits get extra review.  This section is for the regular bits. Reviews are an essential tool to find mistakes early and eliminate problems down the track.  You don’t have to solve a problem you don’t have.   Or as Jack Ganssle famously quipped “Skip Bugging To Speed Delivery“. The whole article refers to using Code Review and Design Review to find problems early and fix them so they don’t become much bigger problems later on. Imagine a scenario where a Software Bug causes an electric motor to try and spin backward every now and again and then corrected itself almost immediately.  You would get a momentary shudder or jerk followed by correct motion and it would only happen every now and again.  How would you determine that this was a software fault and where the fault lay?  It could be symptomatic of any number of issues including Mechanical Design and Electrical Design. How about this similar real world case.  I won’t mention the company, but their elevators had an Integer Overflow problem in the motor controller that caused the elevator to go in the wrong direction, about once a month, for half a floor.  Very disconcerting to the passengers if they pressed up, and promptly dropped half a floor before then going up.  Fortunately they found it and fixed it before it happened to someone at the top or bottom floor. All the Software Industry Metrics show for that for Software Development; Design Review, Code Review, Unit Tests and System Simulation save money and time.  And yet in many projects they don’t happen enough or are done after the event as a Quality Assurance box ticking activity where they add mostly cost and little in the way of value.  Lean Coding argues that you can reduce your Software Development Budget in particular by doing Code Inspections during the project as part of the Risk Management and Quality Management process. By reducing the bugging, you can reduce the debugging.

Stick to the Timeline

Project Development Timeline

An attitude that the schedule slipping is normal can be very costly.  Some examples of how to avoid this are:

• Develop and Simulate the Software before the Hardware is ready
• Prototype early and thoroughly
• buy in IP where it makes financial sense – this can also reduce risk
• get expert assistance with areas outside your competence
• review regularly and honestly

As someone who has done a lot of team leading and project management, I have learned to ask about progress in more than one way.  I find the following to be very common: Manager: “This module is estimated as 10 days of work to complete.  How complete is it”? Developer: “About 80%”. Manager: “How many more days of work are required to fully finish everything”? Developer: “To fully finish everything, I would think 6 more days would cover it all”. The discrepancy is easy to spot.  People estimate high on progress because they want to please.  They also like to finish well so they tend to estimate conservatively on required effort.  In practice the real answer lies somewhere between the 2 extremes.  If the task had already consumed 6 days of effort then it is likely to run late. If you have ever built a house you might have experienced the knock on effect it has when one trades person doesn’t turn up and everyone else misses their scheduled action time because they are now waiting on a predecessor task, the trades person who has to come back again, before they can start their task.  The same thing happens on projects. So fight hard to hold to the schedule.  It is better to over resource a task (according to the plan) and get it done than to let everything and everyone slip which usually costs a lot more. Additionally, it is quite common that the later you are in the market, the lower the overall profit.  So it is worth holding the schedule for this reason as well.

Test and Check Everything

 

Test Everything

This is another Risk Management related principle. Don’t assume it will be OK.  Even if you have done it 100 times before, test it again this time.   Make sure it really is OK.  This ensures it really is 100% complete. This also implies that you are going to design things so they can be tested.  Another principle.  Design For Testability or somestimes called Design For Test. Do it.  It will save you time, effort, money and sleep. Test Driven Development is another example of a Modern Development Methodology where you set up the test first then develop the product so it passes the test.  If the Product Requirements change, you change the tests first, show that the old Product Design fails the test, then update the Product Design until it now passes the test.

It is not finished until no-one has to do anything else to it

Many tasks are called complete but they aren’t.  The documents might be checked into the Revision Control System, also known as a Version Control System or Version Management System,  but it isn’t complete until it is 100% tested, 100% integrated, 100% reviewed and 100% signed off and no-one has to do another thing. This also means that when tasks are identified that weren’t thought of in the original Project Plan, you then add them and don’t try and fiddle them into existing tasks.  This is different to working out the fine detail of a task and realising it is under resourced or over resourced on the Project Plan. You also want the extra tasks visible on the Project Management Plan so when you do the next project you have evidence that they were required last time and can make allowances for them.

Trip Assurance for Developers

Satisfaction Guaranteed

In marketing, the term Trip Assurance refers to the client having a clear expectation of this transaction or experience being a good one, just like every other one has been.  I think we can begin to develop some of the same as developers whereby projects can be routinely good experiences and likely to be so each time.

 This post is also available as an eZine article with Expert Author classification.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Manufacturers are the people we serve

A common question we are asked is what sort of Electronics Manufacturers do we Develop Products for?

So I thought I would compile 3 lists:

• The first is a list of the Electronics and Embedded Software product types we have worked on
• The second list is a list of the industries we have Developed Products for
• And the third list is the Technologies we have worked with so far

I might have to regularly update this third list since knowledge and technology are constantly expanding.  Before I do the lists I’d like to present a video that specifically addresses this last point.  This is very much worth thinking about.  Enjoy.

Electronics and Embedded Software Products

Did you notice the section from 1:45 to 2:15?  We are being prepared for jobs that don’t yet exist, technologies that haven’t been invented, and problems we don’t even know we will have!

Here is the list of some of the Electronics and Embedded Software Products that do already exist and which we have helped to create:

(more…)

Analogue Design Awards

You might recall we were finalists in the EDN Innovation Awards 2009 .  Yesterday, we were in Sydney for the EDN Innovation Awards dinner held at Dockside, Cockle Bay Wharf.

We came away with 2 trophies.  The awards were:

• Best Application of Analogue Design – Highly Commended
• Best Application of Design Software – Highly Commended

Successful Endeavours - EDN Innovation Awards 2009

Ray Keefe receives the EDN Innovation Award for Best Application of Analogue Design

We are very pleased to have had Australian Electronics Industry leaders recognise our work as being of the highest standard.

And thanks again to Pablo Varjabedian of Borgtech Pty Ltd for his support and encouragement and for having a vision as we do that products like the Borgtech CPL2 can and should be Made in Australia.

There have also been several newspaper articles focusing on the role of local businesses in the Australian Electronics Manufacturing Industry.

Berwick Journal 31 August 2009 Electronics Whiz Wired For Success

Werribee Banner 30 September 2009 It’s A Pipe Dream

Berwick Journal 5 October 2009  Electronics Firm Delivers The Goods

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.