Leading Edge Design Group

Have you heard about this yet?  The ZigBee wireless protocol?  If you haven’t, no worries, some company will announce how they’ve harnessed the latest and greatest use of ZigBee to make their product save YOU money in the near future.   

So what is it?  To be short, it’s a protocol that creates its own mesh network.  There is a gateway and then a series of downstream nodes.  The power of the “mesh” is that the downstream nodes don’t have to directly link to the gateway to pass its information along.  The nodes work together as team and pass information from node to node that eventually makes it back to the gateway for the data to be processed.  Think of it as a linear approach to networking.  Nodes can stretch far away from the gateway without ever losing touch.  As long as a node can find another node to talk to, all the nodes can communicate with the gateway.

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“Where’s the wire between the generator and the BMS module?” asks customer X.

Contractor Y replies, “The plans didn’t show a wire between the two, so I didn’t pull it in.”

The above conversation is the start of an unfortunate headache.   A critical detail missed in the design phase. A change order is issued, finger pointing begins and now everyone’s looking for someone to blame. So who’s truly at fault?  The designer who didn’t note the wire? The generator rep that didn’t show the specs required for a BMS tie in? The customer who didn’t mention they wanted integration between the generator and their BMS system during the design phase?

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I’ve been a fan of Apple products since computers have been a part of my life.  They’re sleek, efficient and most importantly different.  Every time I see their logo it brings a smile to my face.  Their aura emits a “simple” glow, yet behind the scenes a complex set of developed pieces is working together to make an end users experience painless.  Apple has effectively targeted different groups of end users and offered a plethora of products to cover the different needs/wants of these audiences.  One of their latest releases has received a slight buzz of criticism surrounding it’s presence; the iPad. 

You’ll either love or hate the iPad; the middle ground between these emotions is scarce.  Critics deem it pointless, unnecessary and under accessorized.  I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum; iPads serve multiple purposes, they’re quite useful and come out of the box ready to serve.  E-mail?  Absolutely, the real question is how many of your email accounts do you want delivered to the iPad (including your exchange account from work).  Music, Movies and Photos?  Of course.  Need the weather?  Done, there’s free app waiting to show you more than the 6:00 news. Need something else?  Browse the 10,000 plus apps, chance would have it you’ll find what you need.

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OM1?  OM3?  RCD2?  What do these cryptic fiber optic acronyms mean anyways?  In this case the first two are different grades of glass, the third being a horrible joke that got your attention.  Regardless, I’d like to take a minute to view the world of fiber from a strangers point of view.

Fiber optic cable: a wave of the future in the world of communications (and a slight trip to the past in some cases).  Simply put it’s just a piece of glass that’s drawn extremely thin with some “special” ingredients added to the center, aka core.  Light enters one end and on a good day, it will come out the other.  The real magic of fiber is what concoction of “special” ingredients they lace into the core.  Heading away from the glass there are a slew of different jackets, coatings, tubes and armor options available to help protect the glass for whatever application it’s needed for.  Five sentences later, you’ve just completed Fiber 101.   

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The Pledge: An IP camera surveillance system and a card access solution. Two completely independent systems. One assists covering the details you missed while you weren’t watching and the other guards access physical entry into or around your facility. Most of the setups I’ve come across traditionally stand alone, are separately managed and a link between the two is nonexistent.

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Social networking has officially carved out its own niche in the operation of many businesses. Whether its LinkedIn, Facebook, Del.ico.us, or Twitter, chance would have it that someone you do business with is actively using one of the aforementioned sites. The strategies of how businesses harnesses the power of these sites will vary from business to business, but they all have a common denominator: Exposure to an interested audience.

When I first stumbled upon AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) in high school, I was instantly hooked. It was a new form of communication amongst my friends and I suddenly found myself adding as many people to my buddy list as possible. The more buddies in the list lead to more instant access information. Personally, I found the away messages the most useful feature; what's Jonny doing right now besides not sitting at his computer? These days AIM is rather limited in its ability to spoon feed you information compared to some of the other social networking sites, but it served as a great stepping stone for the social media scene.