The project, Protecting Environments with UAV Swarms, also includes the British Antarctic Survey and Lancashire Fire and Rescue. Its vehicle is Windracers’ 10 metre wingspan twin-engine UAV, which can carry 100kg across 1,000km. “It incorporates a high-reliability autopilot system provided by Distributed Avionics,” said Windracers, and “the entire aircraft has been developed using a zero-single-point-of-failure philosophy, being robust to flight ...

Led lighting certification body Zhaga has announced the first products that have met its ‘Book 24’ definition of luminaires that can be programmed over NFC (near-field communications). “Tridonic is the first company that has earned Zhaga-NFC certification for a number of their LED drivers [right],” according to Zhaga, and they can now carry the Zhaga-NFC certification logo. Book 24 application ...

element14 has opened submissions for a chance to win PiMassive, a larger-than-life replica Raspberry Pi, which can be displayed as wall art. Applicants are encouraged to be creative in their application and express why they would like to own this unique prize.  PiMassive was created by Wesley Gardner for the element14 PiCasso Design Challenge, and was completed in 2019 after ...

Inflation is pushing working people to strike to protect their wages and pushing housewives to skimp to stay solvent, but inflation has a mega-beneficiary – government. Governments are seeing their debts being whittled away through the currency depreciation caused by inflation. The combined debt of the USA and Europe fell by $4.5 trillion in 2021 and 2022, says the Nikkei. The ...

Toshiba has introduced a smart gate drive photo-coupler with automatic recovery from some fault conditions. Capable of driving ±2.5A into an IGBT or mosfet gate, it is called TLP5222, and is a partner to the TLP5212 announced earlier this month, which needs a signal on the primary side to initiate recovery from fault conditions. “TLP5222 continuously monitors the mosfet drain-source ...

Kyocera AVX has introduced a series of pouch-style supercapacitors for decreasing current surges in batteries. Called the SCP Series and branded PrizmaCap, they “can be used on their own as system power backup devices, replacing batteries in some cases, or they can be used in conjunction with primary or secondary batteries”, according to distributor Anglia, which is stocking the parts. ...

Renesas is buying Steradian Semiconductors, a fabless semiconductor company based in Bengaluru, India, specialising in 4D imaging radar. The acquisition of Steradian’s radar technology will enable Renesas to extend its reach in the radar market and boost its automotive and industrial sensing solution offerings. With the advancements of ADAS in the automotive market, automotive sensor fusion demand is growing to ...

Four big deals prop up the 2022 semiconductor M&A total, says IC Insights, and without any more of them this year’s value of planned acquisitions will probably fall short of the annual average. After slowing significantly in the last half of 2021, the pace of megadeals for semiconductor mergers and acquisitions regained momentum in the first six months of 2022, ...

Virgin Media O2, NEC and Rakuten Symphony have announced that multi-vendor O-RAN is being deployed in Virgin Media O2’s network and is now operational and handling  commercial traffic. The first deployments are in macro-sites in the Northamptonshire region. “The successful activation of Virgin Media O2’s first UK macro-sites demonstrates the potential of the multi-vendor Open RAN model,” says Virgin Media ...

Here is the letter Elon. Musk’s lawyer sent to Twitter saying why Musk is not legally obliged to go through with the purchase of Twitter. Dear Ms. Gadde (Twitter’s lawyer): We write on behalf of X Holdings I, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc. (the “Musk Parties”) to provide an additional notice of termination of the Agreement and Plan of ...