标签：#IoT

Memory Chips Supply chain strategy from electronics production engineering, 500–50k units/year Introduction "Order from Digi-Key" is a prototyping strategy, not a production strategy. The 2020–2023 IC shortage demonstrated that supply chain resilience must be designed in — not improvised when lead times hit 52 weeks. The Sourcing Tier Structure Tier Examples MOQ Price Premium Lead Time Risk Authorized dist. Digi-Key, Mouser, Newark 1 pc +25–40% 1–3 days (stock) Lowest Franchise dist. Arrow, Avnet, TTI 100–1k Baseline 2–8 weeks Low Manufacturer direct TI, Infineon, ST portals 1k–10k+ −10 to −30% 8–20 weeks Low Regional aggregators IC-Online, local dist. Mixed Variable Variable Medium Spot market Brokers, eBay 1 pc +50 to +500% Days High Never use spot market for ICs without incoming inspection. Counterfeit STM32, ESP32, and common analog ICs are well-documented. Volume Pricing Reality Illustrative for a $2.50 MCU: Volume Digi-Key Arrow/Avnet Manufacturer Direct 100 $3.10 $2.65 N/A 1,000 $2.75 $2.15 $1.85 10,000 $2.40 $1.70 $1.25 50,000 $2.10 $1.40 $0.90 The franchise/direct savings are material at 1k+ units. Establishing Arrow or Avnet relationships pays for the admin overhead within 2 production cycles. BOM Resilience Framework For each critical component, document: Primary source : authorized distribution or direct Secondary distributor : alternative channel for same part Alternate part : functionally equivalent, different manufacturer, validated Buffer stock : target weeks at production rate Lead time worst-case : historical peak, not current During normal periods: 4-week buffer, one secondary source, one qualified alternate. For 5+ year product lifecycles: qualify the alternate before you need it. Practical Sourcing Mix: 500–5k Units/Year Component Type Primary Secondary Notes Commodity passives Digi-Key/Mouser + Yageo/Walsin Arrow Annual pricing agreements MCUs < $3 Arrow direct IC-Online for gap fills 90-day POs, buffer stock MCUs $3–$10 Manufacturer direct + A

Listen to the session or watch below Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Will they really work? Watch a conversation exploring longevity’s new focus. Speakers: Mary Beth Griggs, science editor and Jessica…

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A device that resets in the field is not always the hardest problem. The harder problem is a device that resets, comes back online, and leaves no evidence about what happened before the reboot. That is where a firmware black box becomes useful. This is the DEV.to edition of a Silicon LogiX technical article. The canonical English source is linked at the end. What a firmware black box is A firmware black box is a small diagnostic subsystem inside the firmware. Its job is to preserve enough information to support post-mortem analysis after a reset, watchdog event, HardFault, panic or unexpected reboot. It does not need to record everything. It needs to record the data that helps answer the first diagnostic questions: why did the device reset? how long had it been running? which firmware build was installed? what state was the application in? which task was active? did the watchdog fire? did memory, stack or heap margins collapse? did the network, modem, BLE, Wi-Fi or OTA flow fail just before the reboot? Without that data, every field reset deletes most of the evidence. Why sporadic resets are expensive Rare embedded bugs are often more expensive than obvious failures. A crash that happens every time in the same function can usually be analyzed with a debugger, logs and a repeatable test. A reset that appears once every ten days on a customer device is different. The cause may depend on a combination of: temperature unstable power brown-out cable length enclosure heating network drops modem state memory fragmentation stack exhaustion long uptime race conditions a peripheral that stops responding an OTA edge case In the lab, the product may look clean. In the field, the environment changes. The customer report often becomes: "it rebooted", "it stopped communicating", or "we had to power-cycle it". That is not enough for firmware diagnosis. What to capture A good first version does not need to be large. Start with a compact structure that survives the next boot: reset r

Look at almost any piece of electronics on your desk and you will find a small light staring back at you. A router with a row of blinking status lights. A power brick with a steady green dot. A development board with a tiny red point that flickers every time it does something. We barely notice these lights anymore, but each one descends from a single laboratory breakthrough in 1962, when an engineer at General Electric coaxed a sliver of semiconductor into glowing visible red for the first time. Who invented the first visible LED The engineer was Nick Holonyak Jr., a consulting scientist at General Electric's lab in Syracuse, New York, and a former student of John Bardeen, one of the inventors of the transistor. On October 9, 1962, Holonyak demonstrated the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode. It emitted red light, and it worked at room temperature, which made it genuinely useful rather than a laboratory curiosity. What made his approach different was the material. Other researchers in the early 1960s were building diodes that emitted infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Holonyak gambled on a different alloy, gallium arsenide phosphide, and it paid off with the first light a person could actually see coming out of a semiconductor. He was so confident in the idea that he predicted LEDs would one day replace the incandescent bulb. At the time that sounded outlandish. Today it is simply how lighting works. Why a tiny red light mattered so much The incandescent bulb that Thomas Edison commercialized makes light by heating a filament until it glows. That is wildly inefficient, because most of the energy escapes as heat rather than light, and the filament eventually burns out. An LED works on a completely different principle. When current flows across a specially engineered semiconductor junction, electrons release their energy directly as photons. There is no filament to burn out, almost no wasted heat, and the device can switch on and o

Industry 4.0 data collection sounds simple until you look closely at the factory floor. In theory, the flow is clean: machine → gateway → cloud → dashboard In practice, it is usually less tidy. Factories may have PLCs, CNC machines, sensors, meters, inspection systems, production lines, and older equipment all working together. Some devices use Ethernet. Some still rely on serial interfaces. Some data is useful every second. Some data only matters when a machine changes state, crosses a threshold, or triggers an alarm. This is where an industrial edge gateway becomes useful. A gateway such as Robustel EG5120 can sit between factory equipment and upper-layer systems, helping collect selected machine or PLC data, handle it locally where needed, and forward useful information toward cloud or enterprise platforms. That does not mean the gateway replaces PLCs, SCADA, MES, or the cloud. It simply means factory data often needs a practical middle layer before it becomes useful somewhere else. Factory data is not one clean data stream One thing that gets underestimated in Industry 4.0 projects is how mixed the data sources can be. A PLC may provide equipment status, alarms, and process values. A CNC machine may expose cycle information or maintenance indicators. Sensors and meters may generate temperature, vibration, energy, or environmental data. Inspection systems may produce quality-related events or selected result data. A production line may generate throughput signals, downtime events, or operating states. These are all “factory data,” but they do not behave the same way. A machine fault may need quick attention. An energy reading may only need periodic reporting. A repeated sensor value may not need to be sent upstream every time. A quality inspection output may be useful as metadata, but not every raw file is practical to upload continuously.So the first question is not only: Can we connect this machine? A better question is: What data do we actually need, where sho

Most of the web's foundational moments have vanished. The servers were unplugged, the code was lost, the pages 404'd into history. But the first website ever published is a striking exception: you can still read it today, more or less as it appeared when it went live on August 6, 1991. It is a plain, text-only page with a white background and blue hyperlinks, and it explains a brand-new idea called the World Wide Web. One page that described itself The author was Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. By the end of 1990 he had quietly assembled the three technologies that still define the web: HTML for writing pages, HTTP for moving them between machines, and the URL for addressing any document on any server. The first website, hosted at the address info.cern.ch , was the web explaining itself - what hypertext was, how to browse it, and how to make your own pages. It ran on a NeXT computer, the sleek black workstation designed by Steve Jobs's company during his years away from Apple. That single machine was the entire World Wide Web for a while. A handwritten label was stuck to its case: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" One unplugged cable would have taken the whole web offline. Why a 1991 web page still matters to IoT It is easy to file this under nostalgia, but the first website is more than a museum piece. It is the origin point of the request-and-response model that quietly powers almost everything connected today. When an ESP32 sensor node pushes a reading to a cloud dashboard, when a smart meter checks in with a server, or when you open an app to see whether your device is online, the same basic conversation is happening: a client asks a question over HTTP, a server answers, and a URL says where to look. Berners-Lee made a deliberate choice that turned out to matter enormously. He kept the standards open and unlicensed. Anyone could implement a browser or a server without pa

TeamLab 那片會跟著你走的花海，原理拆解＋DIY 先看這張圖 這是 TeamLab 在東京台場的《呼應燈之森林》。當你走過去，附近的燈會慢慢亮起；你離開後，燈又慢慢暗下去，像是真的森林一樣。 還有另一個作品《花與人的共存》，花叢會跟著你移動——你站的地方，花就開在你腳邊；你離開，花就凋謝。 這兩件作品的核心邏輯是一樣的。這篇文章就來拆解它。 原理一：偵測位置 TeamLab 的互動裝置需要知道「你在哪裡」。 最常見的方法有兩種： 紅外線感應 ：在地面下方埋紅外線接收器，你走過時阻擋光線，系統就知道有人在這個位置。缺點是只能測「有沒有人」，不能測「人在哪一個方向」。 深度相機（RealSense / Kinect） ：像 Xbox 的體感相機，透過紅外線測量每一個點到你相機的距離，生成一張「深度地圖」。軟體在深度地圖裡找出人體的位置，然後算出座標。 DIY 版本 ：一塊 Arduino + 超音波感測器（HC-SR04，大約 60 元）就能做到基本的「有人靠近」偵測。 原理二：控制回應 知道你在哪裡之後，系統要決定「要做什麼回應」。 TeamLab 的做法是 ：不是「觸發」，而是「強度變化」 。 傳統的感應燈：感應到人 → 燈全亮 → 人離開 → 燈全滅。 TeamLab 的邏輯：感應到人 → 燈慢慢變亮（0.5 秒）→ 人持續在 → 維持亮度 → 人離開 → 慢慢變暗（2 秒）。 「慢慢」是關鍵。瞬間變化讓人注意到「科技」；緩慢變化讓人以為「這個空間有生命」。 這就是「驚奇設計」的核心： 時機對了，物理反應看起來像生物反應。 原理三：集體行為 最後一個秘密：TeamLab 的裝置很少只有一個「回應」。 通常會有 100-500 個元素（燈、花、光點）。每個元素各自計算自己與你的距離，決定自己的亮度或顏色。 當 500 個燈各自以稍微不同的速度亮起和暗下，你看到的不是「一個燈亮了」，而是「一片森林在你腳下呼吸」。 心理錯覺 ：你把「一群各自輕微不同步的簡單反應」，詮釋成「一個整體有意志的生物」。 用 Arduino 自己做一個迷你版 材料： Arduino Uno（大約 200 元） 超音波感測器 HC-SR04（大約 60 元） LED 燈 x 3（大約 15 元） 麵包板和杜邦線 原理很簡單： 超音波感測器偵測距離 距離越近，LED 越亮（用 PWM 訊號控制） 距離越遠，LED 越暗 int trig = 7 ; int echo = 6 ; int led = 9 ; void setup () { Serial . begin ( 9600 ); pinMode ( trig , OUTPUT ); pinMode ( echo , INPUT ); pinMode ( led , OUTPUT ); } void loop () { digitalWrite ( trig , LOW ); delayMicroseconds ( 2 ); digitalWrite ( trig , HIGH ); delayMicroseconds ( 10 ); digitalWrite ( trig , LOW ); long duration = pulseIn ( echo , HIGH ); long distance = duration * 0.034 / 2 ; // 距離越近，LED 越亮 int brightness = map ( distance , 0 , 100 , 255 , 0 ); brightness = constrain ( brightness , 0 , 255 ); analogWrite ( led , brightness ); delay ( 50 ); } 這不是 TeamLab，但這是你自己做的「會呼吸的燈」。每個 maker 都是從這裡開始的。 庭庭：這個看起來很難 真的沒有你想的那麼難。 需要的東西全部可以在蝦皮買到，全部加起來大約 300 元。網路上有超多 Arduino 教學，關鍵字搜「Arduino 超音波 LED」就有幾十篇中文教學。 你不需要懂電子，只需要跟著步驟做，做完會有「哇，我自己做出了一個會亮的東西」的感動。 如果你想更進一步 TeamLab 的進入門檻其實不是技術，是「你要把技術藏在美學後面」。 推薦兩個方向可以繼續研究： p5.js + webcam ：用 p5.js 讀取你的 webcam 影像，偵測顏色或移動。相當於用軟體做到 Kinect 的效果，零硬體成本。 Processing + 投影機 ：把電腦畫面投射到牆上或地面上，加上感測器，就是一個簡單版互動投影。投影機在蝦皮一兩千元就有。 今日概念 ：TeamLab 的魔法不是魔法，是三個原

Why 40V Input and 500mA Output Matter in Noise-Sensitive Designs You’ve probably fought a power rail that looked clean on a multimeter but still trashed your 24‑bit ADC readings. The culprit is rarely the DC level—it’s the broadband noise, switching artifacts, and line‑frequency ripple that ride on top. In precision analog, RF, and sensor signal chains, even 50 µV of supply noise can bury a 1 mV sensor signal or degrade an RF PLL’s phase noise by 10 dB. The MAX20151R addresses this head‑on with a combination that’s hard to find in a single LDO: a 40 V input range, 500 mA output drive, and just 6.5 µV RMS output noise (10 Hz–100 kHz). That wide input headroom lets you power sensitive circuitry directly from a 12 V or 24 V industrial rail, an automotive battery, or a noisy intermediate bus without a pre‑regulator. You eliminate an entire buck converter stage, saving board space and avoiding the switching noise that would otherwise require heavy filtering. The 500 mA output current is equally important. Many ultra‑low‑noise LDOs top out at 200 mA or 300 mA, forcing you to split rails or add a discrete pass transistor. With 500 mA, the MAX20151R can comfortably supply a mixed‑signal chain—an MCU, a precision ADC, a low‑jitter clock, and a handful of op‑amps—from a single quiet rail. And because the device maintains its noise performance across the full load range, you don’t have to derate your noise budget as current increases. Field experience shows that transient events on 24 V vehicle buses can easily exceed 40 V during load dump. The MAX20151R’s 40 V absolute maximum input rating, combined with integrated reverse‑voltage protection down to –40 V, gives you a robust front end that survives those spikes without external clamping. This is a practical necessity for any design that must pass ISO 7637‑2 or similar automotive transients, and it’s a key reason engineers are migrating from lower‑voltage LDOs to the MAX20151R in harsh electrical environments. Key Takeaway: If

Ask someone to name the most manufactured object in human history and you will hear guesses like the nail, the brick, or maybe the smartphone. The real answer is something almost nobody can name out loud: the MOSFET. This tiny transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1959, is the on/off switch inside every microprocessor, memory chip, and connected sensor. An estimated 13 sextillion of them have been built since 1960, making the MOSFET not just the foundation of modern electronics but the most-produced artifact our species has ever made. What a MOSFET actually is MOSFET stands for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. Strip away the jargon and it is an electrically controlled switch with no moving parts. A small voltage on one terminal, the gate, controls whether current can flow between the other two. Billions of these switches flipping on and off billions of times per second is, quite literally, what computation is. The genius of the design is that it scales: shrink the transistor and you can pack more of them onto a chip while using less power per switch, the trend that drove decades of Moore's law. The breakthrough came from two engineers at Bell Labs, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who fabricated the first working MOSFET in 1959. Their key insight was using a thin layer of silicon dioxide, ordinary glass, to insulate the gate from the silicon underneath. That oxide layer turned out to be the unlock that made silicon the dominant material in electronics, edging out the germanium used in the very first transistors of the late 1940s. Why it beat every earlier transistor The point-contact transistor demonstrated in 1947 and the integrated circuit of 1958 were both monumental, but neither was easy to mass-produce by the standards we take for granted today. The MOSFET was different. It was simpler to fabricate at scale, drew far less power in its complementary (CMOS) configuration, and lent itself to the photolithographic processes that let manufacturers pr

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ThingsBoard is one of the most capable open-source IoT platforms out there. But the first time you try to get a device publishing telemetry over MQTT, the documentation sends you in three different directions of device profiles, transport configurations, topic formats, and credential types. There are a lot of setups before you see a single data point on a dashboard. This post cuts through that. By the end, you will have a device sending live sensor data to ThingsBoard over MQTT and seeing it in the Latest Telemetry tab. No fluff, just working code. What You Need Before Starting A running ThingsBoard instance, Community Edition, is fine. You can use the live demo for a quick look, though a local Docker setup is more reliable for following along since the demo instance has usage limits. You also need mosquitto-clients installed for quick command-line testing and Python 3 with paho-mqtt for the scripting part. # Install mosquitto client tools sudo apt install mosquitto-clients # Install Python MQTT client pip install paho-mqtt Step 1: Create a Device and Grab the Access Token In the ThingsBoard UI, go to Entities → Devices and click the + button to add a new device. Name it something like sensor-01. Once created, click on the device and copy the access token from the credentials tab. This token is your MQTT username. No password needed. ThingsBoard uses it to identify which device is sending data. Step 2: Send Your First Telemetry via Command Line Before writing any code, test the connection with mosquitto_pub. This tells you immediately whether the setup works. mosquitto_pub -d -q 1 \ -h "YOUR_THINGSBOARD_HOST" \ -p 1883 \ -t "v1/devices/me/telemetry" \ -u "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN" \ -m '{"temperature": 25.4, "humidity": 62}' If you are running ThingsBoard 3.5 or later, you can use the shorter topic format: mosquitto_pub -d -q 1 \ -h "YOUR_THINGSBOARD_HOST" \ -p 1883 \ -t "v2/t" \ -u "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN" \ -m '{"temperature": 25.4, "humidity": 62}' Both do the same thing. v2

It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. Yesterday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 °C (about 97 °F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it felt like 39 °C. It’s frightening that we are seeing such temperatures in…

Environment And Situation Control room of an apartment Number of installed product : 3 (PC-based NVR, dual-LAN supported) Remote support : X (I actually went to the site and diagnosed) Reported Issue In viewer, when user changes play speed while playing back the recorded data, it randomly plays the data in hyper speed(almost 30x~60x) For example: 4x play means 4 seconds in video per a second. But in the site, it played 30~60 seconds per a seconds, showing the video stutturing. Diagnosis Checked the overall environment. System(CPU / RAM usage), network environment(bandwidth), resoulution, stream configurations, etc. -> Nothing suspicious. Some of the installed cameras had unusual fps and gop values Normally, fps and gop values are set to be equal(for exmaple, if fps is 30 then gop is also 30 so that iframe can appear every second) But the cameras' set up values were fps 15, gop 60(iframe per 4 seconds) Assumption Somehow the viewer keeps failing to find iframe to play. And it's maybe because iframe appears with a long gap. Quick note: iframe is kind of a key-frame. Since the viewer starts decoding from an iframe, it's necessary when it comes to playback. What I Tried Set all the cameras' gop value to 15(same as fps) Result Ran a test with data before changing the gop values and after. During interval before changing the gop, the issue occurred almost every time I tried. But after chaning the gop, the issue no longer occurred. Concolusion The issue was triggered by large GOP value (GOP 60 with FPS 15). With only one iframe every four seconds, the viewer sometimes failed to find an appropriate iframe after changing the playback speed, causing abnormal playback behavior. According to the viewer developer, this is likely related to the viewer's iframe searching logic, which is still under investigation. Keep This In Mind Check camera settings(especially gop and fps) first when it comes to playback issue. Always check before/after data to confirm assumption.

The Internet of Things is now a phrase you see on product boxes, in boardroom slide decks, and across thesis titles in engineering departments everywhere. But it has a surprisingly precise origin. The term was coined in 1999 by a British technologist named Kevin Ashton, and it was not born in a research lab or an academic paper. It started its life as the title of a corporate sales presentation. A slide deck, not a laboratory In the late 1990s Ashton was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods giant behind products you would find on any supermarket shelf. He was wrestling with a mundane but expensive problem: store shelves kept running out of a particular shade of lipstick, even though the warehouse had plenty in stock. The supply chain simply had no reliable way to know, in real time, what was where. Ashton's proposed fix was radio-frequency identification, or RFID: tiny tags that could be attached to products and read automatically by sensors, with no human scanning each item by hand. The vision was that physical objects could report their own location and status, feeding that data up into computer systems without anyone typing it in. To sell this idea to executives, he needed a title that would make supply-chain tagging sound as exciting as the technology dominating headlines at the time. So he linked his RFID proposal to the hottest topic of 1999 and called the presentation "Internet of Things." By his own account, years later in RFID Journal, the choice was deliberate. Tying tags and sensors to the red-hot word "internet" was the surest way to get senior people in the room to pay attention. The pitch worked well enough that the phrase stuck, and Ashton went on to help found the Auto-ID Center at MIT, a research group that did much of the early standards work that made networked RFID practical. Why the name was actually a good description It would be easy to dismiss the term as a marketing flourish, but it captured something real. Ashton's point

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mqttkit: Elysia-style application framework for MQTT An ordered middleware pipeline, typed topic routes, MQTT 5 RPC, and auto-generated AsyncAPI docs — sitting on top of any MQTT broker. If you've ever built a serious MQTT backend in Node, you've probably written this code at least once: client . on ( ' message ' , ( topic , payload ) => { if ( topic . startsWith ( ' devices/ ' ) && topic . endsWith ( ' /events ' )) { const uid = topic . split ( ' / ' )[ 1 ] // ad-hoc auth check // ad-hoc JSON.parse + validation // ad-hoc error handling // ad-hoc metrics // ... } else if ( topic . startsWith ( ' server/ ' )) { // ... } }) That's the MQTT equivalent of writing an HTTP server with http.createServer((req, res) => { if (req.url === '/users') ... }) . We solved that pattern for HTTP a decade ago with Express, Koa, Fastify, and more recently Hono and Elysia. For MQTT, we haven't. That's the gap mqttkit is filling. The design choice: don't reimplement the protocol There are already excellent MQTT brokers in the Node ecosystem — most notably Aedes , which handles CONNECT, SUBSCRIBE, PUBLISH, QoS, retain, sessions, persistence, and MQTT-over-WebSocket. EMQX and Mosquitto cover production scale. None of these need replacing. What's missing is the application layer — the part where you ask: How do I declaratively say "this topic requires this auth check"? How do I validate payloads with the same schema I already use for HTTP? How do I do MQTT 5 request/response without writing correlation-id bookkeeping? How do I get AsyncAPI docs for free? How do I attach Prometheus / OpenTelemetry without lifting broker internals? mqttkit is purely that layer. It plugs into Aedes via @mqttkit/aedes , but the broker is just an adapter — you can write your own for EMQX, NanoMQ, or any other broker. What the code looks like import { aedes } from ' @mqttkit/aedes ' import { MqttApp , router } from ' @mqttkit/core ' import { z } from ' zod ' const app = new MqttApp < { principal ?: { uid : string

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Almost everything that makes the modern world hum, from the phone in your pocket to the sensor on a factory floor, traces back to a single quiet afternoon in a nearly empty laboratory in Dallas. In the summer of 1958, a newly hired engineer named Jack Kilby built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. It was a crude little thing, a sliver of germanium with a few components and some fine gold wires, but it carried an idea that would reshape electronics: that an entire circuit could be made from one piece of semiconductor material. Every microcontroller and connected device we build today is a descendant of that prototype. The engineer who was left behind Kilby had only just joined Texas Instruments and had not yet earned any vacation time. So when the company shut down for its traditional summer break in July 1958 and most of his colleagues left, he found himself nearly alone in the lab with time to think. The problem on his mind was one the whole industry called the "tyranny of numbers." Circuits were getting more capable, which meant more transistors, resistors, and capacitors, each one a separate part that had to be wired together by hand. Every added component meant more connections, more soldering, and more chances for something to fail. The complexity was becoming a wall. Kilby's insight was disarmingly simple. If resistors and capacitors could be made from the same semiconductor material as transistors, then every part of a circuit could be fabricated together in a single block. No separate components, no forest of hand-soldered wires. He sketched the idea, and when his managers returned he had something to show them. September 12, 1958 On September 12, 1958, Kilby demonstrated his prototype to Texas Instruments executives. The device was a phase-shift oscillator built on a bar of germanium, with its elements connected by delicate gold "flying wires." He connected it to an oscilloscope, flipped the switch, and a steady sine wave rolled acro