Related Links: Ventev Outdoor Power Solutions Water Enviornment Award of Merit SCADA For years, large supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have suffered from an annoyingly simple vulnerability: backup batteries in radio-signal extenders can die, causing a loss of communication. One large utility says a new monitoring device from Ventev Wireless Infrastructure solves the issue.The SCADA for Southern Co.'s electrical grid is a series of devices that sends signals to each other via radio, says Bob Cheney, team leader for the power-delivery test lab at the utility, based in Atlanta. If two of these devices, called "preferred sources," are
image courtesy of D-Link Little monster The DIR-510L router has an Ethernet port and two USB ports to charge devices and transfer data. Related Links: Wiki entry on 802.11ac D-link's 510L wireless router and charger Terms such as "256 QAM," "MU-MIMO" and "beamforming" might sound like jargon out of a "Star Trek" episode, but they are new tech capabilities to boost wireless router speeds. They are hitting the market in the wake of the new WiFi standard called 802.11ac by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association and the emergence, in January, of the first Wave 2 devices
Related Links: Intel's Smart Bowl Announcement The Magnetyze System Juicebar SunBar As construction users increasingly take up mobile devices, battery drain is becoming a drag. Fortunately, innovators are on it. Here are a few neat items that impress ENR as being particularly promising or useful right now, including one from Intel unveiled at the Consumer Electronic Show in January.Click to begin the slide show.
Photo by Tom Sawyer I-Search has an unambiguous interface. If you know your engineering, it is easy to use. Related Links: AISC Offers Win, Place or Show Cash for App Design Contest I-Search American Institute of Steel Construction steel tools Structural engineers often are asked to judge the adequacy of a beam or column under present loads or potential loads of a contemplated modification. This typically requires field measurements and a trip to the office to check references. Now, there is an Android app for making quick calls on the spot.Kip Ping, president of Pinnacle Engineering, Cincinnati, Ohio, developed the
Related Links: University at Buffalo's Bridge Engineering Program National Center for Pavement Preservation Two U.S. engineering schools have opened research centers to help bring the nation's infrastructure up to technological speed, but also to train a rising cadre of engineers."Innovation" and "professional development" are bywords at the new $3.7-million Institute for Bridge Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo."There's not a particularly fat pipeline of bridge engineers," says Andrew Whittaker, director of structural and environmental engineering.He says the institute aims to attract talent and develop strategies to help bridges resist natural and man-made hazards outside current design
Related Links: U.K.s BIM Mandate Driving Major Shift in Digital Tools Adoption Advancing 3D Printing Capabilities Excite Construction Leaders 2013: A Year of Better BIM Collaboration on Jobsites ENR's Construction Science Fiction Collection He’s often called Autodesk’s thought-leader, a futurist about global construction trends, a big ideas man, probably unfailingly polite and, as of late, a construction science fiction author. (See ENR's Imagining Construction's Future collection.)Dominic Thasarathar, a directory of strategy at the design and collaboration software provider, would chuckle at the titles, given that the Londoner still thinks of himself as a technology manager from his days with firms
ENR’s editors are always on the lookout for new and useful electronics that have the potential to improve the construction workflow. Over the course of 2013, we’ve run across or experimented with a few devices that show promise. Some of them might make it a bit easier to stay connected on the road, while others will be more at home in the office or on the jobsite.Click here to begin the slideshow.
Illustration Courtesy of Bentley Systems Approach connects engineering with geospatially defined 3D construction packages. Illustration Courtesy of Bentley Systems Approach offers dashboards to track progress. Related Links: Bentley's Lean CM and Workface Planning Product Construction Industry Institute Report on Advanced Work Packaging A s project size grows in complexity, so does the need for advanced tools for work-face planning. At its "Year in Infrastructure" conference in London, Bentley Systems Inc. in late October announced that its ProjectWise Construction Work Package Server (WPS), a system for managing the life cycle of work packages, is now being validated by industry firms and
Related Links: Contractors See Gains, Gaps With Growth of Mobility Tools To Rent or Buy AEC Software Tools? Vendors Add More Choices Bentley Press Release UK Government Strategy, BIM Mandate Latest Bentley App Brings Geospatial Data to the Field Bentley Picks Up Ivaras Asset Performance Management Tools Data integration with building-information-modeling tools and cloud services is accelerating across the United Kingdom, thanks to the government's mandate that all public projects use BIM, including handover data for asset management, by 2016.For Bentley Systems, which counts some 36% of its annual revenue from its customers in the European, Middle East and African
Related Links: FPDetective Whitepaper Tor Software to Fight Privacy Invasion Belgian researchers are slated to release a free software framework to the public in November that is designed to identify "fingerprinting," a browser-based method of tracing users by tracking features of a specific device, creating a unique ID.In a recent study at the University of Leuven, Belgium, researchers used the framework, called FPDetective, to crawl many popular sites. Results found that more sites use fingerprinting techniques than previously was believed.A device fingerprint is a set of system attributes with a combination of values that are highly likely to be unique