Author: Ray Keefe

  • Light at Work

    Putting Light to Work Light is a really interesting thing. It has so many different aspects. And it took us a long time to work out exactly how it functioned. And in many ways that is still an ongoing process. So this post is a brief survey of some recent…

  • Printed Electronics Overview

    Printed Electronics Way back in 2011 we looked at the state of Printed Electronics and concluded this was a rapidly emerging area of Technology and had been since the previous look at The Future of Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in 2009. It has been a while so what has happened…

  • Australian Manufacturing Continues to Grow Strongly

    Australian Manufacturing Boom I’m really pleased to announce that the growth in Australian Manufacturing last year was the biggest since the GFC. Australian Manufacturing Exports now exceed 2009 levels and it was the second largest jobs growth sector in the entire Australian economy.   You can probably tell I’m pretty…

  • Antennas – The History

    Introducing Andrew Walla This is a guest blog article from Andrew Walla who is an expert in Radio Frequency Engineering (RF), particularly focusing on small form factor Antennas. So the emphasis is on compact antennas which fits in with our recent emphasis on the Internet of Things (IoT).   A…

  • I Nearly Retired

    Manufacturing Profits you can retire on I was talking with one of our past clients a little while ago. They told me they had a problem. They said, “Ray, I nearly retired“! So I asked them what that meant. And they explained.   We had developed a product for them…

  • 5G and IoT

    5G for IoT Thanks to the team at VDC Research who compile some very useful information on Embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) trends. It is free to join and the deal is that you contribute to their surveys in order to get access to some reports for free. They…

  • Cellular IoT Communications

    LPWAN = Low Power Wide Area Network LPWAN is typically thought about as cellular data networks but that involves a contradiction since cellular and low power are inherently in conflict with each other. For instance, a standard 3G or 4G cellular modem will have a peak current draw of up…

  • Connect Expo 2017

    Connect Expo The Connect Expo is on each year around late March in Melbourne at the Exhibition and Convention Centre. I had gone to previous events but this was our first time as an exhibitor.   This was by far the best Connect Expo I have been to. The mix of…

  • Software Costing

    Software Costing There is an old saying that goes something like this: “hardware is almost free and comes from China; but software is actually free and comes from India”. Actually not such on old saying, and certainly not true. But we do see signs of this myth being alive and well…

  • Power Supply Specification

    Power Supply Specification The idea for this post came from a discussion in IEEE Collabratec on how to design a Power Supply. The question of how to design a Power Supply seems innocuous enough until you really start to think back on past Power Supply designs. I was originally concerned that…