B&B Christmas Bash

Hi, my name is Mike Fahrion, and every few weeks I dish out practical tips for getting all those pieces of equipment in your care to talk to each other. We give out special freebies too — like specialized reports and tech guides, to make your job easier.

WARNING: If I’m hacked off about something, you’ll hear about that too — if the occasional poke at our own Dilbert lifestyle offends you — well, you might want to skip this one. Sign up today to get the next issue. We respect your privacy and intensely dislike SPAMMERS as much as you do. So your e-mail address is never given, sold or traded to anyone, and of course you can unsubscribe at any time.

B&B Christmas Bash

Dear Friend & Subscriber:

I’m not sure what your company Christmas party is like, but the B&B Electronics annual Christmas bash is a merry good time. This year was no different. In fact some are still recovering. And (I’m told) pictures were taken.

Some politically correct zealot has surely written “The Ten Things not to do at your company Christmas party.” I’m confident we did them all… we had a jolly good time doing it and can’t wait to do it again next year.

But even with the left over yuletide fog, enthusiasm is running rampant through the plant as we wind down another fantastic year.

There are lots of things to celebrate. Not the least of which is the completion of RoHS implementation. It took a Herculean effort by a large team of people and a significant amount of new manufacturing equipment to pull this off, and all without impacting service.

There was even a bit of icing on the RoHS cake. Due to non-RoHS components, we redesigned our popular USB to serial converters. Now these were good products to start with…but now they’re great products. If you ever connect your laptop to a piece of serial equipment in the field, pick up one of these handy little converters for your Christmas stocking.

What’s so special about them? Number one is Isolation.

Please, please, do not, under any circumstances risk using a non-isolated converter for field service applications. There are mean and nasty power surges lurking that would like nothing better than to zap your Dell. And when we’re talking field service, that’s going to cost you a lot of time.

So whether you need RS-232, RS-422 or RS-485, these little converters fit the bill better than anything I’ve seen. They’re small, they feature removable terminal blocks for your 422/485 connections and require absolutely no external power.

Another thing we’re caroling about is the tremendous success our Elinx Industrial Ethernet Switch and Media Converter line has had. But it’s not what you might think. By now you know why you wouldn’t trust a wimpy Ethernet switch from your local home electronics store in a rugged application, but have you really looked hard at just what Fiber Optic versions of those switches can do? The cost of fiber continues to fall, and in many cases we find sites already have unlit fiber already installed. If you might fall into that category you owe it to yourself to check out what that “free” fiber can do for you. You too can live in that Utopian world of zero corrupt data and never lose another piece of equipment to surges or ground loops. And distance – baby these things can travel! Up to 20 kilometers with a single mode fiber. That will get you there and back in most any application you can imagine. So if you haven’t discovered the holiday magic of fiber, dash over to the web site to check out these switches and media converters loaded up with options for fiber optic cheer.

If you haven’t had your company Christmas party yet, don’t hesitate to ask me for advice. Until those pictures surface I’ll still be gainfully employed and eager to share what are certain to be career-enhancing tips so you too can feel the joy of the Yuletide fog.

Happy Connections and Merry Christmas,

Mike Fahrion
support@bb-europe.com