Cool Tech from CES 2024

It’s January and that means it’s time for CES launches. I am sure most of you would be tired of the CES coverage and overuse of the word “AI” over the last few days. When reading through many CES articles with the usual tech upgrades, I found a small gem that didn’t get much attention.

The company is called Eclypia which is into developing non-invasive reliable continuous glucose monitors. An accurate non-invasive glucose monitor is supposed to be one of the grails of medical tech problems many companies are trying to solve. The current state of the art is still pinprick blood draw or a prohibitorily expensive needle patch which needs to be replaced often. So folks with diabetes are still looking for solutions that can measure their glucose levels.

According to a white paper by Eclypia, the wearable device has infrared red lasers illuminating the skin. This excites the glucose molecules in the skin, which creates a thermal signal as they return to their normal state. This signal is amplified by a photoacoustic cell and then picked up by a microphone. So they have only tested this in a digital twin in an in-silico or a simulated computer clinical trial. They use this simulated clinical trial to create a synthetic dataset to fine-tune their deep-learning algorithms. I see that they have registered for a few in-person clinical trials online. The full results of it are not out yet and the paper claims a promising error rate of 18.4%. I wish them all the best for a larger clinical trial. It’s high time that someone finally cracks this problem once and for all.

What was your favourite CES tech this year?

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Tech Tips: TI’s Webench Power designer

When I work with clients I see that most of them don’t know of this tool except for in large companies. Webench Power Designer is a superb tool online virtual wizard by Texas Instruments (TI) which can be used in power supply design. Have been a regular user of it for some time now and can’t recommend this enough.

So what does it do? If you are building a power supply module, AC-DC or DC-DC, this tool allows you to feed in a few parameters like the input, output voltage range, current output, ripple, etc and gives you a massive list of usable designs using the ICs from TI. This design contains all the parts needed and the full BOM of passives. It even provides you with an optimal board layout which you can directly import into a few PCB CAD tools like Altium. It provides the necessary graphs and you can even export a simulation.

It has an awesome feature in which you can tell the tool to optimize for low BOM cost, High Efficiency, lowest PCB space footprint, or even a mix of all the above with a balanced view. This makes life simple for a newbie. It takes in all the datasheet design equations and spits out resistor, inductor, and capacitor values(But I double-check and redo it from the datasheet again, that’s just my paranoia, nothing else). The design it puts out is accurate and you can expect near simulation results if you implement that. I never had issues with it.

It gives you a list of TI’s massive power part ICs, you can pick a design and then fine-tune it if needed. If you have already selected a part, you can specify that in the tool to make a design around that part. I truly hope other companies can develop solutions similar to this using their product portfolio. If you are only working with TI parts for a design, it’s very well worth trying out. Real time saver.

For folks who have used it before, what was your experience with it?

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