Tag Archives: Electronics Manufacture

iPhone Green Factor

Posted on by
2

How Green is my iPhone?

Have you ever wondered just how green an iPhone really is?

 

Today’s blog post was sent to me by Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist. It’s an Infographic taken from DailyInfographic.com. At Successful Endeavours, we’re always interested in recycling and sustainable technologies and solutions. You will have seen some of that is past posts on how to be greener with the Electronics Design including Electronics Design for Green Manufacture? , Green Electronics Strategies Reduce Power While Awake and Green Electronics Strategies  Sleep Saves Energy .

 

For this post we will use the infographic to specifically look at how GREEN the iPhone 4 is versus the iPhone 3G from the perspective of the production, use and disposal of the phone. Some key figures I noted or calculated are:

  • Production Emissions are 57% of all emissions in the iPhone 4 product lifecycle
  • 58.9% of the weight of the iPhone 4 is in materials that are easily recycled
  • Packaging Reductions save 14% in transport fuel

The Packaging Reductions are an excellent example of simple things we can all do to save on emissions. And Apple offer a full recycling service that is aimed at being environmentally friendly which is also a great thing to put in place.

 

Electronics Manufacturing Energy

The area that stands out for me is the energy that is consumed in production of the iPhone 4. This is not an iPhone 4 specific problem but a general problem for Electronics Manufacture. If we want to talk about Green Electronics, then this has to include not just the product we use and the Electronics Waste and Recycling / WEEE, but we also have to get to the point where the Production Emissions, the energy to produce a product, is way less than the energy to use the product. This is a huge issue for Battery Operated Products, such as the emerging Electric Vehicle market, where the Production Emissions for just the battery can be close to half of all the Production Emissions.

 

Enjoy the infographic from the dailyinfographic Keeping it Green.

How Green is the iPhone 4

How Green is the iPhone 4

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Green Electronics Strategies – Reducing Power Consumption

Posted on by
Reply

What is so good about Low Power Electronics?

 

If you read my last post, you would have noticed that this has the potential to reduce overall Power Requirements. Up until now, only Battery Operated Devices have really cared about Power Consumption. If you could plug it into a wall outlet then all was OK unless you were consuming more power than a standard circuit allowed.

 

Today, things are different. Climate Change is a global concern and reducing the Carbon Footprint for a product is important, regardless of what sort of power it consumes.

 

If we can reduce the Power Consumption of an appliance by 50%, then provided its Electronics Manufacture does not add that back again, we have a net Carbon Footprint gain. In fact, if we can do this across all products then we will meet our Global Carbon Reduction target of 50% by 2050 with this strategy alone.

 

 

How to reduce Electronics Power Consumption

This is not a new topic, and much of what I present here represents the combined experience of the Electronics and Embedded Software industry. Here is the short list:

  • reduce the Supply Voltage for Microcontrollers, Microprocessors and CMOS Circuits in general
  • use Sleep Modes and keep the Wake Periods as short as possible
  • replace High Power Consumption Devices with Low Power Consumption Devices
  • replace high utilisation Digital Filters with Analogue Electronics equivalents
  • replace Polled Operating Modes with Event Driven Operating Modes
  • use Low Power Smart Peripherals that Wake the rest of the System only when required
  • reduce the Time To Wake and the Time To Sleep
  • optimise the Software Execution Flow
  • use Energy Harvesting
  • Remove power from sections of Electronics Circuitry when not in use

There is overlap and interdependency between these but that is a good starting point.

 

Next I will start look at specific examples.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

 

 

Successful Electronics Needs a Successful Name

Posted on by
1

Electronics Development and Success

Hello again,

 

A couple of posts ago in Electronics Manufacture Shines in Melbourne I said I would explain the origins of our company name. Many have suggested that Successful Endeavours sounds more like a personal coaching enterprise or a business that handles products by people like:

And the list could go on for a long time.

 

While I do hope we motivate and encourage our clients to improve their results, we assist them by undertaking activities such as:

 

 

Electronics Development Activities

  • Electronic Circuit Design
  • Electronic Circuit Simulation
  • Analogue Electronics
  • Analogue Design
  • Printed Circuit Board Design
  • Printed Circuit Board Layout
  • Electronic Prototyping
  • Electronic Testing
  • Embedded Software Design
  • Embedded Software Development
  • Embedded Software Coding
  • Embedded C
  • Embedded Software Debug

 

Development Statistics

The name came from some industry statistics on the success rate for Product Development. You can read more details in Reducing Electronics and Embedded Software Product Development Costs and I will summarise here:

  • 80% of embedded development projects fail in someway or another
  • Embedded software is 80% of the cost of an embedded development project
  • Embedded software is responsible for 80% of the delays and shortcomings

 

Successful Product Development

So it seemed to me that many Product Development Projects are unsuccessful endeavours. I wanted to change that. We have a success rate significantly better than all the industry norms. Our short USP ( Unique Selling Proposition ) is:

 

We Make Stuff Work

 

That’s it. The details are complex but the philosophy is simple. So for me, Electronics and Embedded Software Development should be a routinely Successful Endeavour. And so the name Successful Endeavours was chosen.

 

I am passionate and committed to assisting Australian Electronics Manufacturers who want to keep making their products in Australia. Made In Australia is what we are pursuing and we are focusing on this segment.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

The Internet Turns 40 – Happy Birthday

Posted on by
Reply

There are a lot of news feeds running this story. Here is one:

 

Timeline ABC News

 

And when the Internet first began, no-one knew what we would be doing with it today.

 

This has happened to a lot of other technologies. Low Cost Electronics and Low Power Design that can be Battery Operated has made many thing possible such as mobile phones, portable computers including netbooks, notebooks and laptops; portable media players, MP3 players, PDAs and the list has just begun.

 

But where is it going? Realistically, you need a few things to come together and the environment and carbon footprint considerations now sit alongside the more traditional requirements such as:

  • Low Cost Electronics Manufacture
  • Low Power Electronics Design
  • Design Tool Productivity improvements
  • Electronic Design Automation
  • Increased Processing Power per milliwatt (mW)
  • Embedded Software of immense complexity and flexibility
  • Flexible circuits
  • Transparent Electronics
  • Compact component size
  • Reduced Polluting and Increased Recyclability and reuse

Vernor Vinge looked into what might become of this in his book Rainbows End which I recommend as a good read and full of well thought out ideas about how augmented reality might operate including concepts such as wearable computers, gesture recognition, graphic overlays, the equivalent of doing a Google search on any object in your field of view, and other ideas like that. It is set 20 years from now.

 

The most interesting for me was the way work was conducted in the future and how much advantage there was in having 100,000 people as affiliates on a program. Pay is based on royalties for contributions. You choose what you join and contribute to. Your income directly reflects the product of your contribution and your negotiated royalty rate. A large company has 3 direct employees and everyone else is an affiliate on one or more programs of work. This produces phenomenal synergies.

 

It will be very interesting indeed to see how much of his vision matches the future.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

________________________________________________

Electronics Manufacture Shines in Melbourne

Posted on by
1

National recognition for local Casey Business

OK, I couldn’t resist that blog title or this headline. It isn’t often you get a chance to say something like that. If you hadn’t heard yet, we are finalists in two categories in the EDN Innovation Awards for 2009. Melbourne is the Electronics Manufacturing capital of Australia and we are based in Narre Warren which is administered by the City of Casey.

 

Electronics Manufacturing

Our aim is to turn Australian Electronics Manufacture into Low Cost Electronics Manufacture through improving the total cost of a product throughout its life cycle. This is not a quality reduction process. Quite the opposite. Getting the product right so it doesn’t fail and does do what it is meant to do is one of the things necessary to reducing cost.

 

Located on the outskirts of Melbourne we primarily serve Melbourne based Electronics Manufacturers by providing them with Electronics and Embedded Software Development services that save them up to 70% compared to traditional linear Product Development.

 

So how do we do that?

 

Firstly, there are a few blog posts you can refer back to that will fill in some of the details.

 

Successful Product Development

Australian Electronics Manufacturing

Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia that competes favourable with China is feasible. Ignoring the trade offs discussed in the links above, the steps to take are:

  • Identify the primary priority – is it time, cost, performance?
  • Reviews costs – all the costs – see the last link above if you are sure what they all are
  • Reduce Cost through redesign to remove unnecessary labour and to streamline manufacture
  • Implement
  • Deploy
  • Monitor and correct as required

Written like this it sounds simple, and conceptually it is. Where it gets lost is in the assumption that it can’t be that simple. But there aren’t any hidden traps in this process.

 

We have had a few queries about how we came up with our company name, Successful Endeavours. Next post I will reveal all.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

________________________________________________