Noted horror writer Clive Barker once claimed that nothing ever truly begins or ends; rather, current things are just continuations of past things, and future things are continuations of present ones. Although interesting, this notion doesn't work well in the world of manufacturing.

Those of us old enough to remember the "good old days" recall that grade school focused on learning the three R's: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. In the world of sensors, there are also three R's: repeatability, resolution and response.

The automotive industry experienced a record number of vehicle recalls in 2018, and this year's tally isn't far behind. Many of those issues have been caused by electronics or software glitches.

Whenever the 1920s are discussed in documentaries, they are first referred to as roaring and then as depressing. Too often, too little attention is paid to what happened in between these two extremes.

Vehicles have become increasingly electrical over the years. This is not just power electronics, but also sensor data, communications and many other coordinated electrical signals. For aircraft or commercial vehicles, wire harnesses can be even more complex with hundreds of interconnection points.

Over the last 26 years, since the founding of CAMI Research Inc., customers and friends have asked why the company would focus its efforts on such a mundane, low-tech, and uninteresting device as a cable tester, particularly since a variety of such devices already existed.

Digitization, Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) are buzzwords we hear quite often today. What do they mean for the wire processing industry? How will digitization affect our business, and how will we measure our performance?

The lives of manufacturers would be so much easier if all their automation processes were homogeneous. Unfortunately, there are many that require customization to satisfy the unique requirements of an automated work-holding or material-handling application.

There's nothing quite like a multistation automated assembly system. Watching robots, actuators and indexers go about their carefully choreographed routines with little or no human intervention can seem nothing short of miraculous.

Engineers are challenged daily to come up with economical product designs that reduce weight, size, raw materials and labor. This competitive mandate affects every design facet, including the fasteners needed to hold components in place.