ipXchange Weekly Digest 12

Hello to all you design engineers!

It’s been a mad week at ipXchange with one of our posts going about as viral as we’ve ever experienced! Please enjoy a snapshot of our latest boards in our 12th weekly digest:

On Monday, we posted about Ai-Thinker’s Hi-12FL, a 2.4 GHz low-power WiFi module with ?an integrated MCU and RF circuitry for reduced design time, AND, another video interview, this time showing what TouchNetix’s aXiom technology looks like in action; writing about and playing with the technology are two very different beasts!

On Tuesday, we continued our TouchNetix video demonstration with part 2, this time showing their innovative dial-on-display technology for hybrid HMIs, after which we were given a better look at the evaluation boards and pressure-sensing demo kit!

Wednesday spelled a return to a favourite with Haechitech’s EVK1000 evaluation board, this time in conjunction with their MXH2101?low-power digital temperature and humidity sensor with multiple output options and field-proven endurance in 85?C, 85%-RH environments, AND, a fun interview with Cambridge GaN Devices and their ICeGaN-powered quasi-resonant flyback reference design and evaluation board!

On Thursday, we hit the nail on the head with Vekatech’s VK-RZ/V2L microcomputer platform, a low-cost, Renesas-MPU alternative to the Raspberry Pi? 4, with full compatibility with all Pi shields for seamless product (re)integration and testing! We’ve been flooded with requests from this relatively unknown board that Eamon spotted at Electronica…

And today, as teased on Thursday, Eamon met Ayman with a video on Pearl Semiconductor, a company that makes a high-stability, single-die programmable reference clock, AND “SpurFree”, a new technology that provides any-rate reference clocks with sub-75 femtosecond phase-noise performance at up to 3 GHz! Evaluation boards are coming soon for general release.

In the meantime, the office has been relatively quiet as members of the team try to use up the rest of their annual leave, but relatively is a strong word given the excitement over Vekatech’s popularity. Jake and Eamon also had that chat with Canairy, who should have some Edge-AI-integrated development boards available early in the new year; we’ll keep you posted!

Though the team has been a little thin this week, we’ve tried to start some interesting conversations with engineers, namely about whether shield boards are as interesting as full evaluation or development boards and whether connectors are truly interesting or just a component that every engineer must have on their radar. Another great statistic to come out of our community was that nearly two thirds of those who answered the poll said they would be looking for components through ipXchange right up until the 23rd of December. Boy, they do work hard, don’t they, but we suppose every second counts, especially with shortages still an issue…

And to end on a little bit of sad news, ipXchange was informed of Renata Batteries’ decision to halt production of their ICR2430 rechargeable button cell, for reasons related to market demand rather than the merit of the device itself. Hopefully, we will be writing more content on them soon as the company, people, and technology are very nice, but that is the nature of the game and the first of ipXchange’s ‘boards’ that we have had to retire. Truly, winter is coming, but we’ve noticed that things are starting to snowball…

Keep designing!