Tag Archives: drones

Comings and Goings

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Big news: IBM will “sell” its chip operations to GlobalFoundries according to a joint statement by the companies. IBM will pay “the buyer,” owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, a reported $1.5 billion over the next three years to take the chip manufacturing business “off its hands.”

The world’s dozen or so leading chip foundries that account for more than 90% of global production (including IBM) will all be foreign-owned when this deal is completed.

Who benefits the most? Who will protect the innocent (chip users)? Is leaving America “foundry-less” good for the United States?

Back to the future. Lockheed is reported to have three captive PWB shops in the US. Northrup Grumman has an in-house board operation. Whelan is establishing a new highly automated in-house PWB operation. Intel is said to be planning a new captive board facility in Arizona and said to be offering a bounty for “successful” job referrals. Is it to develop new technology that independent shops cannot afford? Is it for secrecy? Is it to shorten supply lines? Is it to gain time to market or some other competitive advantage? Is it the start of a trend?

Is it still just the price? After visiting the Design-2-Part Show  (D2P) we revisited the concept of using value propositions to offset cheaper prices. We were astounded at the number of people that effectively stated that they would the cheapest system rather than the lowest cost equipment. Yes, there is a difference, and sometimes the added cost of using the cheapest system is substantial. We also found that those that bought the newer system with greater productivity, ease of use, updated software, and smaller footprint often ordered more of the units of the newer system after a short (several months) of running production along side of the “older” competitive models who tried to protect their business by simply lowering the price and promising future improvements.

Some things just never seem to change. When one visits some of the leading board makers making advanced substrates and assemblies in Asia today, one usually sees the latest production equipment. Then I thought of the New Jersey manufacturer that I met at D2P show, and wondered what I will see when I visit a new “highly automated” board maker in the U.S. next month.

Move over Amazon. Dragon Circuits in Texas announced that it successfully completed 14 test runs of delivery by drone of packages weighing up to several pounds. It did not state the range of the drones used in the test runs. Dragon has a drone division that builds a wide variety of these systems.

We need more industry participation and on campuses collaborations like the new Raytheon-UMass Lowell Research Institute (RURI). Plans for the center were announced in August. It officially opened on the campus on Oct. 10 in the school’s Mark and Elisia Saab Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center, the school’s new $80 million research center.

Kyle Homan, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, gave a presentation on printable electronics and nanotechnology at the opening. Raytheon has already embedded employees on site and plans to commit $3 to $5 million over 10 years to support the collaborative operation. It’s a great way to move critical technology forward while simultaneously training candidates for the company.*

Have you seen the TPCA’s (Taiwan Printed Circuit Association) first class promotional video on its interconnect industry? Take nine minutes and watch the video on the following link. ??????? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_jIpYu54A

 

*Raytheon currently employs about 1,000 UMass Lowell alumni.

 

Actual and Potential Use of Drones in Precision Agriculture

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Ed.: This is a guest blog by Alex Danovich of San Francisco Circuits.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) or more commonly referred by mass media as drones are gaining popularity and often discussed for many new approaches to old applications. In the last couple years drones are rapidly gaining attention not only due to the traditional military applications but also civilian uses. This transition brings the drone industry closer into new commercial applications that literally pop up every day.

There are many directions of potential use but according to this economic report provided by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) in 2013 more than 80% of civilian drone applications will be connected with precision agriculture (PA), creating many new jobs and billions in market value.

San Francisco Circuits took a look at the growing precision agriculture industry with a supplier and expert in this field, Michal Ruš of e-Dron. “We believe that a low-cost drone can be effective tool for precision agriculture. Our Skyhunter fixed wing configuration (under 2000 EUR) is able to map an area of 150 hectares in less than 30 minutes.”

A few hours after the drone’s flight and scan, an accurate orthophoto map and 3D surface model with RGB and NDVI imagery is created. Such models/images can be exported directly into farm management programs and variable rate prescription maps.

By providing a service-based operation instead of drone ownership, e-DRON believes it is able to remove the burden of operation, maintenance and certification of such drones by farmers. Farmers rely on timely and accurate data to make better decisions. They are focused on their crops and if drones are not bulletproof or easy to maneuver for anyone without proper training, it makes sense to leave its operation to service providers.

Skyhunter fixed wing with RGB and NIR camera dual configuration

e-DRON is currently building such a bulletproof drone with the help of some consultation on custom PCB fabrication and PCB assembly from San Francisco Circuits.

Drone hardware and software. But what is the drone made of? The difference between a drone and a model aircraft/copter is the flight controller with autonomous features. In this case, the heart of the Skyhunter model consists of a Pixhawk autopilot developed jointly by the PX4 open hardware project and 3D Robotics.

The autopilot contains a six-layer PCB with isolated power nets for the main and safety processor. It’s a 1.6mm FR-4 board with 0402 standard components, minimum pitch of 0.2mm and 0.15mm spacing. Copper thickness and stackup are standard with 0.35um copper. The challenge in autopilot electronics is not the base technology, but to ensure highest quality throughout the complete production process from PCB manufacturing to assembly.

Pixhawk – advanced 32bit autopilot by 3D Robotics

The payload itself consists of 2 consumer grade point-and-shoot cameras; one is the original RGB camera and the second is converted to NIR (near infrared).

The processing chain to obtain orthophoto/3D imaging of a desired piece of land has a pretty simple workflow. The mission starts with a drawing a polygon around the desired area in Mission Planner software. Once the mission is complete, the images are transferred to a powerful PC to process the remaining steps.

Depending on customer requirements, ground control points (GCPs) are measured with RTK GNSS (2cm accuracy) before the mission start. These points are then manually assigned together with images from the cameras on the software to produce an accurate geo-referenced orthophoto and 3D model. The NIR-produced orthophoto is then the most useful product for the farmers to spot the crop health immediately. Although more advanced sensors exist that would outrun the performance and accuracy of such a converted NIR camera, this is the lowest cost solution.

Applications in precision agriculture. Drone use in PA is all about saving inputs to farmers. Whether it’s an indication to use fewer pesticides, fertilizers or water for irrigation, PA will make billions of cost savings and greener food products.

The drones are good at monitoring crops for a very low relative price. When compared with satellites or manned planes/helicopters, low cost drones are cheaper and can be deployed every day, even in a cloudy day. The farmers have no other cost effective way to scout their large fields than by drones. Other than the RS detection of the crop health, drones are already able to effectively manage fields by crop dusting with variable rate technology.

Future of drones in PA. Multi-sensor drones with more advanced micro-sensors (like hyperspectral, thermal, LiDAR, etc.) and smart zonal auto-classification analytics are in development.

Swarm operations (multiple drones) with continuous remote sensing (day passive sensors and night active sensors) for larger fields and applications are all viable for scaling.

Powering the drones using solar energy with hydrogen fuel cell technology (unlimited endurance, 24/7 operation), making instant real-time cloud processing of acquired data streamed via high-bandwidth telemetry (no need for many SSD/HDDs onboard of multi-sensor drones) is also a very real application. Drones may eventually be programmed to automatically take actions of the whole lifecycle – from RS detection to immediate application of inputs. Harvest or seeding may be the next drone activity.

The future is in the sky!