ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION
Digi-Key Electronics | July 06, 2022
Digi-Key Electronics, which offers the world's largest selection of electronic components in stock for immediate shipment, is proud to announce it has received special recognition for 10 years of generous support of the FIRST® Robotics Competition.
For the last decade, Digi-Key has supplied the international competition's official Kit of Parts with a $50 voucher to the Digi-Key website to purchase items for each team's robot, which helps ensure that the teams have access to millions of the components they need to build their designs.
In addition to its Diamond-Level sponsorship of the global FIRST Robotics Competition, Digi-Key supports the organization in a variety of ways closer to home. Digi-Key sponsors the Great Northern Regional competition in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and several Digi-Key employees have served as judges at the event. Digi-Key also sponsors the local Thief River Falls Lincoln High School team, ProDigi Team 3277, and Digi-Key employees serve as mentors for that team.
"Digi-Key is extremely proud of our decade-long sponsorship of the FIRST Robotics community, both locally and around the globe, The combination of science, technology and competition challenges students and gives them a taste of real-world engineering to prepare them for futures in the field. It's great to see so many FIRST participants go on to study and pursue careers in engineering and other STEM related fields, ultimately pushing tomorrow's innovative technologies forward around the world."
-David Sandys, senior director of technical marketing at Digi-Key.
Digi-Key is a pioneering FIRST Robotics Competition supporter who changed the Kit of Parts program for the better by allowing teams to select the materials they need directly from the Digi-Key website, said Chris Rake, chief operating officer at FIRST. We are continually grateful for Digi-Key's longstanding partnership as we work together to inspire students in engineering and technology.
FIRST® Robotics is a robotics community that prepares young people for the future. Working with adult mentors, including Digi-Key employees, FIRST Robotics Competition participants have limited time and resources to design, build, program, and test their robots to meet the season's engineering challenge. Teams compete at events that reward design excellence, competitive play, sportsmanship, and high-impact partnerships between schools, businesses and communities.
About Digi-Key Electronics-
Digi-Key Electronics, headquartered in Thief River Falls, Minn., USA, enables the world's ideas by providing the world's largest selection of electronic components and automation products in stock and available for immediate shipment. The leader and pioneer in the high service distribution market, Digi-Key offers more than 13.4 million components from over 2,300 quality name-brand manufacturers. Beyond unparalleled breadth of product, they support technology innovation from concept to production with a wide variety of tools and digital solutions to make innovation easier. Immense technical content, articles, videos, conversion calculators, reference designs and design tools can be accessed online at digikey.com.
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MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY
ThinkIQ | July 05, 2022
ThinkIQ, a pioneer of digital manufacturing transformation SaaS, today announced major enhancements to its Vision platform. The new offering strengthens the company's leading Continuous Supply Chain Intelligence platform and provides unprecedented visibility on the shop floor, eliminating blind spots and increasing productivity and worker safety.
Today's manufacturers require a new level of visibility that can facilitate transformative decision making across the entire manufacturing process and supply chain journey. To achieve this, the industry can't simply rely on data from smart equipment, which leaves over 80% of the process uncovered in the majority of facilities.
ThinkIQ Vision embraces modern vision-processing software combined with powerful pre-packaged Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities to turn cameras on the shop floor into powerful sensors that eliminate blind spots across equipment, materials and people to greatly enhance the available data for Continuous Intelligence.
The latest version of ThinkIQ Vision now has out-of-the-box abilities to detect and digitize dozens of common manufacturing events including:
Vehicle activities in receiving and shipping
Material movements and presence
Anonymous People presence and activity
Machine state and physical events
Andon light status
Safety violations
Values from legacy analog and disconnected digital displays
Values from stand-alone displays
In addition, ThinkIQ now offers edge hardware that includes cameras, sensors, wireless networking, an edge computer, and cellular back-haul equipment. This allows for a rapid deployment requiring little or no effort from the customer. When using the cellular option, the solution is effectively air-gapped from the customer network alleviating any security concerns.
These hardware kits are shipped pre-configured allowing manufacturers to have cameras as IoT sensors that can be connected and functioning in just a matter of hours.
"Many manufacturers are still effectively blind to a staggering percentage of events on the factory floor. With these latest enhancements, we're eliminating their blind spots and giving them the full picture by measuring machines for utilization, materials and products for status, and people for efficiency, We're constantly adding new detection and visibility capabilities to give manufacturers more context and meaning to their data."
-Doug Lawson, CEO of ThinkIQ.
ThinkIQ's SaaS Manufacturing cloud-based platform simplifies the creation of web-based applications and leverages the strengths of the Internet of Things, Big Data, Data Science, Semantic Modeling and Machine Learning. The platform collects data across the operation (existing and IIoT sensors) to provide actionable real time insights (e.g., identify correlations and root causes, traceability and yield issues, etc.). It creates a new level of capability beyond what independent disconnected operating environments can provide today.
About ThinkIQ-
ThinkIQ, a pioneer of Continuous Intelligence across the material-centric supply chain, delivers unprecedented material traceability and insight into ways to improve yield, quality, safety, compliance and brand confidence. Our continuous intelligence platform captures granular data in real time and continuously contextualizes that data to deliver a new level of visibility that can facilitate transformative decision making across the entire manufacturing process and supply chain journey. Our customers have saved $10's of millions by identifying waste and underperforming assets, as well as reducing warranty reserves for quality and safety issues.
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ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions | July 06, 2022
MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions of Mundelein, IL, announces the grand opening of the MacLean Additive facility in Sterling Heights, MI. This new facility will be focused on the production of 3D printed components and tooling, as well as the distribution of MacLean Additive's award winning "Formetrix L-40" steel powder for tooling applications.
"With the addition last year of the Formetrix portfolio to our existing additive manufacturing activities, we quickly outgrew our initial MacLean Additive space in Macomb, MI. This facility gives us the room we need to develop our durable tooling product lines, support our ever-growing steel powder customer base, as well as continue our 3D printed production part activities."
-Greg Rizzo, Vice President and General Manager for MacLean Additive.
A Grand Opening ceremony will take place at 2 p.m. on July 6, 2022 at the MacLean Additive facility located at 7689 19 Mile Rd. Sterling Heights, MI 48314. Credentialed media is welcome to attend, however no photographs will be allowed inside the building. Among local dignitaries and invited guests, the ribbon on the new facility will be cut by MacLean-Fogg President and CEO, Duncan MacLean. Our Grand Opening guests will see that we have a lot of room to grow in this 35,000 square foot facility. We didn't choose this large a facility because it was the only one available, we choose this facility because we know we'll have the demand to fill it, stated MacLean.
MacLean Fogg had a choice of where to locate this new additive manufacturing facility, and they chose Sterling Heights, said Sterling Heights Mayor Michael Taylor. Their decision to locate in our community underscores the solid reputation we have for welcoming our business community and really engaging with them to ensure their success. The Sterling Innovation District is strategically located at the heart of customer demand and access to the specialized engineering and technician talent needed to fill that demand. That makes it a perfect fit for cutting-edge manufacturing facilities like MacLean Additive.
About MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions-
MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions, a division of the MacLean-Fogg Company, is a leading supplier of fastener solutions, engineered solutions, plastic solutions and additive solutions for automotive, heavy vehicle, military and other industrial markets. Visit www.macleanfoggcs.com or contact mediarelations@macleanfogg.com to learn more.
About MacLean-Fogg-
MacLean-Fogg Company is a worldwide enterprise with 35 global manufacturing facilities, annual sales in excess of $1 billion (USD), and a workforce of 3,500 dedicated employees. MacLean-Fogg Company operates through two primary businesses, MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions (MFCS) and MacLean Power Systems (MPS).
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