One Size Never Fits All

Sometimes a lot is made of new technology. There is a tendency to talk about the next big thing in whatever field as “The Solution”. But there’s rarely just one solution that works for everyone.

Currently in the “car wars” (a favorite topic, since we are all effected by gasoline prices) many ideas have been advanced as “The Solution”. We heard a lot about bio-fuels reducing our dependency on oil by 30%, but now are primarily contributing to rising food prices. Hydrogen fuel cells will replace gasoline engines, but not anytime soon because we don’t have an infrastructure that can produce hydrogen as a fuel, nor an acceptable means to store it. And so it goes. This progression of ideas, and attempts to market same, makes the point that there is rarely a single solution that suits everyone. Read more

Mechatronics

Why should you care? Because whatever the term “mechatronics” might mean to you, it affects so many aspects of our daily life.

We’ve all seen commercials with a production floor full of welding robots making automobiles. Certainly automotive manufacturing would not be possible without numerically controlled machine tools, robots and much more. And the automotive manufacturers continue to advance the field of automated manufacturing resulting in higher quality products at lower costs. Read more