Two ways to learn and share ideas

5/26/2010 12:03 PM EDT

As I'm eager to fill these pages with useful design how-to articles and news aimed at the industrial control engineer, I'm hoping some of you will take these opportunities to share and learn from others (and help me fill these pages with some interesting content):

(1) Send me some photos/video of a system you and your design team have worked on, along with a short description of some of the issues and techniques you used (that you can share). I'll post them here on the Industrial Control Designline and even give you and your team a byline. Other engineers will be able to comment on your system--but don't worry: of any online communities I've seen, the engineers posting on our reader forums are probably the best behaved and most willing to help other engineers. I'll keep an eye on the responses, of course. Send photos and text to susan.rambo@ubm.com. If you have video, I'll let you know how to get it to me.

(2) Attend a conference, such as The Sensors Expo. If you get a chance to go to The Sensors Expo (or ESC or any other show), let me know what you found most interesting.

Here are some miscellaneous notes and notices for this week:

Roger Grace (MEMS expert, Roger Grace Associates) describes interesting MEMS solutions as a preview to the symposium he is moderating on MEMS-based system solutions at The Sensors Expo is occurring June 7 through 9 in Rosemont, IL. "An example [of a MEMS based solution] is the recently introduced high-sensitivity accelerometer introduced by HP that will be used to create a wireless autonomous sensor network for seismic oil and gas exploration applications," writes Roger.

Held in conjunction with the Embedded Systems Conference in Chicago, The Sensors Expo will cover other topics, including novel approaches to measurement, wireless networking, and energy harvesting.

The Robotics Industries Association is holding AUTOMATICA, its International Trade Fair for Automation and Robotics, in Germany, Munich.

The featured design article is a good introduction to setting up an on-board failure logging capability on field return boards. Ashish Nagar describes types of failure logs you'll need, creating a baseline for comparing failures, and what memory and other system requirements you might need in The basics of on-board failure logging. "I am recommending that readers write this OBFL software for their boards," says the author. "This will help them to reproduce the board-failing scenario and quickly find the root cause of the board failure. The proposed OBFL software can be integrated with readers system application software, extracts environment variable, and failing logs and store that into nonvolatile memory for failure analysis at later point in time. Proposed software has also intelligence to compare historical failure data and produce the possible cause of board failure."

Send me your comments, ideas for submitting a feature or other suggestions are always welcome. Feel free to contact me, at susan.rambo@ubm.com.