News Briefs

Read more about FIRST: Robotic Gladiators FIRST partners with NI to provide students with CompactRIO The engineers of K-12

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) organization has selected National Instruments’ CompactRIO embedded control platform as the robot controller for its FIRST Robotics Competition. By engaging students in programs that will help them develop engineering skills, FIRST works to encourage young people to become leaders in science and technology. Founded by Dean Kamen, president of DEKA Research & Development, FIRST conducts several robotics competitions: Junior FIRST Lego League, FIRST Lego League, FIRST Technical Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition. “Our goal is to have a FIRST team in every high school and to change the culture in our communities to celebrate excellence in science and engineering the same way we celebrate sports,” said Kamen.

High school students will begin to use the CompactRIO platform during the 2009 FIRST season. They will have access to a 400-MHz PowerPC and FPGA-based I/O for creating advanced robots that they can program in either NI LabView or ANSI C.

NI is making a multimillion dollar donation of materials over the next five years to FIRST to provide the CompactRIO system to participating teams. Several organizations have collaborated with NI to provide the components required to build the CompactRIO control system, including Analog Devices, Boston Engineering, ChipX, Dove Electronics, Freescale, MSI, Texas Instruments, TTI, Westak, Wind River, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Xilinx.

Handheld infrared thermometers can give you a noncontact temperature, but for a single temperature only. Extech’s i5 handheld infrared camera goes beyond this capability to let you produce, store, and play back high-resolution thermal images so you can easily pinpoint problem areas. The i5, which weighs 12 oz and has a 3.5-in., 80x80 block LCD screen (6400 individual measurement points), produces thermal images with 2% measurement accuracy and 0.1°C thermal resolution. Temperature range is –10°C to 350°C. You can use the i5 to locate hot spots in electronic or mechanical devices for maintenance and troubleshooting.

The unit comes with a 512-Mbyte mini-SD memory card that lets you store images in .jpg format, and it comes with an adapter for connecting the card to a PC. You can also connect a USB cable to the camera’s handle and download images to a PC. Using the QuickReport software (included), you can analyze images and read a temperature at any point on an image. The handle also holds a Li-Ion rechargeable battery. The i5 will run for 7 hr on a battery charge.

Price: $2995. Extech Instruments, www.extech.com.

The editors of EDN recognized the technical accomplishments of test-equipment makers Agilent Technologies and LeCroy during their 18th Annual Innovation Awards ceremony held April 14 in San Jose, CA. Agilent received an award in the category “Test & Measurement (Power Technology)” for its N6705A DC power analyzer—an instrument that also captured Test & Measurement World’s 2008 Test Product of the Year award. In the category “Test & Measurement (General Purpose),” LeCroy was honored for the Wave-Expert 100H sampling oscilloscope. The Innovator of the Year award was presented to Intel’s 45-nm innovation team.

EDN, a sister publication to T&MW, hosts its Innovation Awards ceremony each year during the week of the Embedded Systems Conference. Other awards categories include analog ICs, sensors, and EDA. www.edn.com.

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering has increased its share of the Internet Protocol (IP) test market through two recent acquisitions. In late March, EXFO announced that it had acquired Navtel Communications, a Toronto-based manufacturer of IP Multimedia Subsystem and Voice-over-Internet Protocol test products. Navtel will be integrated into EXFO.

In April, EXFO reported it had acquired Boston-based Brix Networks, a provider of hardware and software products used to monitor converged IP networks. The company will be renamed EXFO Service Assurance. www.exfo.com.

The Ethernet Alliance reports that several of its members, including AMCC, Avago Technologies, Broadcom, Finisar, Intel, JDSU, and Vitesse, successfully conducted interoperability testing of Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP+) short-reach (SR) and long-reach (LR) optical interfaces. The tests, which were conducted at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab, demonstrated multiple SFP+ SR and LR optical transceivers and physical layer (PHY) ICs interoperating over 270 m of OM3 multimode fiber and 10 km of single-mode fiber.

The group also demonstrated multiple SFP+ SR and LR optical transceivers and PHY ICs interoperating with XENPAK, X2, and XFP optical transceivers over the same distances. SFP+ modules are optical transceivers intended for datacom applications, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet. SFP+ modules and PHY ICs are being developed in accordance with IEEE 802.3ae-2002 and IEEE 802.3aq-2006. www.ethernetalliance.org.

The Tektronix DPO3000 lunchbox-sized, two- and four-channel 100-, 300-, and 500-MHz-bandwidth oscilloscopes provide more than three times the screen area and 500 times the waveform-memory depth of the company’s TDS3000 series. The DPO3000s incorporate Tek’s Wave Inspector technology, which facilitates searching through long waveform records for anomalous events. In addition, the new units trigger from, and decode the activity on, five embedded-system buses: serial peripheral interface (SPI), inter-IC (I2C), RS-232, controller area network (CAN), and local interconnect network (LIN).

The DPO3000s incorporate 800x480-pixel wide-screen video-graphics adapter displays, which measure 9-in. diagonally. All models can capture 2.5 Gsamples/s/channel, and all provide a memory depth of 5 Msamples/channel. The screen-update rate is 50,000 waveforms/s. The units feature an Ethernet port and two USB ports—one for memory devices and one for connection to a PC. For bus debugging, the display switches to a text-only mode.

Price range: two-channel 100-MHz unit—$4450; four-channel 500-MHz unit—$10,900. (Prices include National Instruments’ LabView SignalExpress, base version, which you can upgrade to the complete Tek Edition for $699.) Tektronix, www.tektronix.com.

The Vision Show, June 10–12, Boston, MA. Sponsored by the Automated Imaging Association, www.machinevisiononline.org.

International Microwave Symposium, June 15–20, Atlanta, GA. Sponsored by IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), www.ims2008.org.

Semicon West, July 14–18, San Francisco, CA. Sponsored by SEMI. www.semiconwest.org.

To learn about other conferences, courses, and calls for papers, visit www.tmworld.com/events.