Month: September 2019

Products

What is the Purpose of Push Buttons in Electrical Systems?

Miley on September 16, 2019

In the vast majority of cases, a circuit must be capable of being switched on and off to be useful. According to ph-el.dk an uninterrupted flow of electricity through the various components is usually key to the functioning of a circuit. However, there are also times when the current must be arrested in order for a given system to function properly.

This is why switches were created.

Offered in a variety of different types, design concerns, functionality and aesthetic considerations can often combine to create situations in which the use of rotary, rocker, slide, or toggle switches are inappropriate. The purpose of push buttons in electrical systems then becomes apparent.

Advantages of Push Buttons

Typically requiring less space on a faceplate or a console, push-button switches are ideal when placement is a major concern. They can also be easier to use, as they require a simple touch rather than a range of movement.

Further, the potential for accidental engagement is reduced with push buttons. There’s less chance of inadvertently bumping into it and activating or deactivating the circuit. Push buttons must be definitively touched to function.

How Push Buttons Work

A common variety of switches employed on industrial control panels, most push buttons, like some of those offered by Schneider Electric, have internal spring mechanisms returning the buttons to their “out” or “unpressed” positions for momentary operation.

This spring contacts two wires, allowing electricity to flow when the switch is in the “on” position. The spring retracts; interrupting contact and breaking the circuit when the switch is in the “off” position.

Types of Push Button Switches

By and large, push button switches fall into one of the following categories.

• Normally-Off: The circuit is broken until the button is pressed. A good example of this a doorbell. Touching the button completes the circuit and causes the bell to ring. The ringer continues to function as long as you hold the button depressed and stops when you release it.

• Normally-On: The circuit is complete until the button is depressed, and interrupts the flow of electricity. In other words, pressing the button turns the device off.

• Non-Momentary Contact: Typically found on radios, television sets and audio amplifiers, these push buttons require a touch to close the circuit and another touch to open it. In other words, the device will continue to function once you press the button, until it is pressed again. In some instances, a non-momentary pushbutton will require the user to physically pull the button out to interrupt the circuit once it has been activated.

Push Button Categories

Separated into types, usually based upon the method by which they function, push button switches are categorized based upon the following attributes.

• Single-throw

• Double-throw

• Contact type

• Mounting type

• Actuator type

• Panel cutout diameter

Regarding the latter, the most commonly employed industrial size is 30 mm.

Push Button Ratings

Push button switches are also rated according to the current and voltage they are designed to manage. This is important to understand, as system designers must specify the appropriate component for everything to properly function.

You’ll need to specify larger, more expensive parts when you’re dealing with higher voltage and/or current requirements. However, it’s also important to ensure the switches employed are only as large as necessary to keep costs in line.

Simply put, the purpose of push button switches in electrical systems is to serve convenience, aesthetic, and safety needs. While their basic function is to close and/or open a circuit, push button switches also give designers a wider range of configuration options.

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Psychology Tricks That Will Help You Improve Your Online Shop

Miley on September 16, 2019

Every shop owner knows just how important it is to appeal to her or his customers. When you’re setting up an online shop, your website plays an essential role in the process of determining whether your product, brand, or services are suitable for the visitors that scroll through your online store.

Understing what drives your potential buyers is one of the most crucial aspects of running any business that aims at being successful. That’s why you need to use every trick in the book to maximize your profit and ROI (return on investment). There are arguably only a few better ways to accomplish this than by using psychology.

A huge part of the discipline is connected to trying to better understand our behaviors, desires, needs, ideas, cognitive functions, the way we perceive the world and how we react to it, as well as how we interact with one another. That’s why this field of human practice can be proven to be so effective in business-related things. And that’s exactly why, in this article, we’re going to talk about some psychology tricks that you can use and implement to improve your online shop.

Get the Most Out of ’Priming’ – Use the Power of Associations to Your Advantage

Priming is a technical term used to describe a memory effect where one stimulus triggers another, through the process of making associations. The fact that we constantly use associations to better understand what happens around us can be a deciding factor in what a person will buy, for example.

One study, in particular, showed that there’s a big difference in which wine the consumers were choosing to buy, depending on the type of music that played in the background. When the store owners were playing French-sounding music, there was an increase in sales of French wines. On another occasion, the store owners were playing German-sounding music and they sold more German wines as a consequence.

There are many more examples similar to this, but all of them show you that anything you put on your website will hugely impact how the visitors perceive your brand. The fact that you can influence their decisions like this shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Steer the Visitors Into Making the Right Choice

Because you have this power to influence your visitors’ opinions about your brand, product, or services, you need to make sure to use the most of it. With the right graphic design solutions, like those that Orion Creative provides, for instance, you can point your visitors into any direction you like. For example, if you want them to opt for a certain product, you should direct them towards your priority choice.

One way to effectively accomplish this is by giving them multiple choices. Let’s say you have a product 1, 2, and 3, and you want them to buy the product number 2. You make a design that accentuates the merits of product number 2. Product numbers 1 and 3 are there only to emphasize these benefits of product number 2. You should note that this should be done rather discretely since you don’t want your customers to realize that you’re steering them in a certain direction.

Establish a Connection With the Potential Consumers

Another great way to further engage your potential clients is to establish a strong connection, the one that’s long-lasting preferably. You want the consumers to come back time and time again and shop at your online store. The best way to accomplish this is by having a good brand or product, naturally. But in many cases, this is not enough. That’s why you have to consider these effective psychological tricks.

For instance, one way to engage your consumers better and make this connection with them is by addressing them in an effective tone of voice. You need to know what your target audience is first, to make this work. You’re not going to talk the same way to all age groups and genders. Your potential buyers should have a feeling like you’re talking directly to them. No one likes to read automated messages or sentences – you need to realize that you’re addressing living beings, not robots.

Use Different Perspectives to Attract and Target Different Audiences

While we’re on the subject, we also want to talk about using different perspectives to attract and target different audiences. The fact that you’re talking to the living, human beings also means that you need to pay attention to the way you’re addressing these people. We’ve already indicated that you’re probably not going to talk the same way to someone who’s 7 or 77.

This is why you want to make sure you’re using a different perspective to talk to these persons. You should always keep in mind this fact and adjust the lingo accordingly. If you want to appeal to teenagers, for example, you probably don’t want to sound too rigid or uptight. And if your website aims at addressing a certain scientific community, for instance, you definitely don’t want to sound too informal and laid-back.

In Summary

Psychology is a field of human practice that has developed many powerful tools. Some of them can be used effectively in business-related things. In this article, we’ve tried to show you some psychology tricks that can help you improve your online shop. These include getting most out of priming, steering the visitors into making the right choice, establishing a connection with your consumers, and using different perspectives to attract and target different audiences. It goes without saying that all these techniques are useful only if you develop a strong visual identity for your online store or a brand.

Development Insights Martech

Why a Data-Driven Construction Process is the Only Way Forward

Miley on September 12, 2019

Being data-driven means building abilities, tools and a culture that acts on data. With the emergence of big data seeping in the construction industry, construction companies are adapting and innovating construction technology tools to process large quantities of construction data and extracting their value to their advantage. As more construction technology suppliers continue to study construction data and how to utilize them, it has become apparent that data-drivenness not only advances individual construction companies, it is vital for maturing the entire global construction industry.

How do we create a data-driven construction company?

According to Carl Anderson in his book, Creating a Data-Driven Organisation, for a company to become data-driven, it has to have the following company qualities:

1. It must collect data.

For a construction company to be data-driven, it has to collect the right data. The collected data set must be relevant, timely, accurate, clean, unbiased and reliable. Data alone is not enough, quality data is what’s valuable.

2. It can access and query its data.

Other than being accurate, timely, and relevant, data must also be:

Joinable. The data must be in a form that can be joined to other enterprise data, when necessary.
Shareable. For data to be joined, they must be shareable within a data-sharing company culture.
Queryable. There must be proper tools to query the data. Data reporting and analysis require grouping, filtering, and aggregating of data to prune large raw data into smaller sets of quality numbers and to compute metrics easily.

3. It has the right people with the right skills to use its data.

For a construction company to be data-driven, it has to have the right people to ask the correct questions of the data with the skills to extract the right data and metrics and to use that data for future steps. The right people should be able to utilise the data for:

Reporting. Reporting is basically extracting data and generating a report from it.
Alerting. Alerts are basically reports of what is currently happening. They provide specific data with well-designed metrics.
Analysis. The analysis is the investigation of data assets into usable insights that will help in decision making and drive actions using people, processes, and technologies.

The hallmarks of data-drivenness

A data-driven construction company does at least one of the following three things that prioritize high-quality data and skilled analysis for future-proofed decision making, according to Anderson:

A data-driven company performs continuous tests for process improvement.
A data-driven company has a continuous improvement mindset.
A data-driven company is involved in predictive actions.

Data-driven processes demand transformation

Other than promoting an evidence-based culture, being data-driven makes construction processes and operations more precise, predictable and efficient. From greater demands in quality construction execution to building end-user comfort, data-driven efficiency demands for transformation in a lot of construction aspects.

Construction technologies and big data

The development and use of digital technologies and processes are essential in the required transformation of construction as an industry. Digitalization creates new functionalities along the entire value chain from the early phases of design to the final handover, up until the operational maintenance of a building project. The use of big data and analytics generate quality insights from the data gathered during the construction and the operations phase. Simulations and virtual reality identify clashes (clash detection) during the design stages. Using mobile connectivity allows real-time communication within companies and provide their construction teams with vital on-site information.

A single platform for construction management

No two projects are identical but useful concepts and processes from one project can prove helpful when applied to another. The ideal goal is for companies to standardize these “lessons” for construction management to go through continuous improvement across projects. To facilitate the implementation of such standardization, using a company-wide software tool is ideal while taking note of the following steps.

Collect and consolidate construction project management data. Ideally, a monitoring system with a robust reporting tool should be in place to enable the continuous collection of project data.
Standardize best practices. Evaluate individual projects and develop a list of best practice processes that can be used in a variety of different projects.
Apply best-practice standards at the project level. Make your best practices mandatory and apply at the project level.

Better management of subcontractors and suppliers

Poor coordination of purchasing materials and components delay projects and can create serious scheduling and costing problems. Hence, it is critical to integrate suppliers and subcontractors more effectively. Adopting construction technologies and related tools can help integrate the supply chain more closely and establish an agile and transparent supply chain throughout the entire project. These digital tools can improve service and reduce costs by providing end-to-end visibility and solution to the supply chain.

BIM

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is gaining importance as a platform for central integrated design, modeling, planning, and collaboration. BIM provides all stakeholders with a digital representation of a building’s characteristics throughout its life cycle and provides several important opportunities. It facilitates a collaborative way of working among all stakeholders, from early design until operations and maintenance. By doing so, it promises great efficiency gains.

Lean construction methods and management

A lean approach reduces complexity and uncertainty by reducing waste and non-value-adding activities throughout the entire value chain: it reduces, for instance, schedule deviations, waiting, stocks of building materials, transportation, rework and unused or underutilized resources. In that way, it makes processes more stable, predictable and efficient. That’s according to Lean Station. Other than improvements in cost and delivery, lean processes also better quality and safety with new digital construction tools that can help greatly in performing crucial safety processes and inspections.

Meticulous project monitoring

Project monitoring, especially on site, needs to be more real-time, forward-looking and future-proofed. It is also imperative for it to provide actionable data that can bring projects back on track.

Smart buildings

With more technological advances being incorporated in modern buildings and construction, the cost of sensors, data storage, and computing services have gone down. With the prices getting more affordable, the general consumers and the government have been demanding greater energy efficiency in buildings and improved safety and convenience through connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). These improved and automated lighting and temperature controls and remote servicing also benefit the building owners and building end-users: reduced operating costs, reduced energy usage, greater comfort, and increased operational efficiency.

Construction software and apps play an important role in the implementation of the mentioned demands and needed transformations. They can also play a role in the crucial process of capturing as-built data from projects versus “as-designed”, which contains the original design drawings. The current construction industry transformation will rely increasingly on construction management software tools and BIM: they are capable of coordinating all stakeholders of a project and can facilitate on-site construction processes. The key is rethinking the approach to these construction processes and operations, that they can be receptive to these digital tools.

The Way Forward

The construction industry has been slow in adopting new technologies and is only embarking on a journey of the modern transformation. According to the World Economic Forum, this new era in construction will bring benefits for the wider society, the environment, and the economy by

reducing construction costs and adverse social effects
improving the efficient use of scarce materials and reducing adverse environmental impact of buildings over time
narrowing the global infrastructure gap and boosting economic development in general.

This promise will unfold very soon, and very remarkably. Sweeping changes are taking place, however not yet on a wide scale. A lot of things are to be done.

To move the industry forward, all stakeholders along the construction value chain should take action. The industry in its entirety should improve coordination and cooperation and agree on standards and common industry goals. Many of the challenges are common across the sector, but the industry remains variegated and fragmented. Construction companies have to choose their own paths of innovations and actions that suit their own visions and their clients’ needs to secure their individual futures and ensure an inspiring future for the entire industry.

About the author

Anastasios Koutsogiannis is Content Marketing Manager at LetsBuild.

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Top Perks of LED Lighting for Our Environment

Miley on September 9, 2019

Keeping our environment safe is everyone’s responsibility. You already know of eco-friendly products such as solar panels and recycling processes to keep our ecology safe for the years to come. These initiatives help in reducing the waste that’s produced every day and minimizing the carbon footprint. Most offices today have gone green with a paperless environment. Then, many people are still unaware of new technologies and products. An ideal example is LED lighting in homes and streets.

According to an article published on https://www.huffpost.com, LED lights are an essential climate change solutions, minimizing air pollution. Read on to learn about the top benefits of LED lights to our environment.

No deadly substances

LED lights have no toxic or poisonous elements. Many commercial establishments use fluorescent strip lights containing toxic chemicals like mercury. Mercury pollutes our environment when the same is thrown in landfills as waste.

Therefore, it is imperative to ditch fluorescent lights and embrace LEDs for a cleaner, safer environment. Even if you have lights with noxious elements, they should be disposed of through proper waste carriers. LED lights are also cost-effective and protect our ecology from air pollution. Install LED lights in your home and office and do your part to keep the environment clean.

Save energy

Did you know that LED lights are up to 80 percent more energy-efficient than conventional bulbs and tubes? Most of the energy, 95 percent of it in LEDs are transformed into light and just five percent into heat. Fluorescent lights, on the contrary, change 95 percent of electrical energy into heat and only five percent into the light. You can read more about LEDs on websites like http://www.ph-el.dk or similar ones.

LED lights also absorb less energy than traditional lighting systems. Did you know that a 36-watt LED could emit the same amount of light and take the place of a standard fluorescent light? Less energy consumption means less demand from power plants, thus cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions into our environment leading to global warming and climate change.

More light distribution

Led lights have much better light distribution capacity and focus the light in a single direction. Conventional lights waste electrical energy by emitting light to all directions, even illumining areas or parts of a room where light is not required, like the room ceiling.

LEDs have the same brightness levels provided by incandescent and fluorescent lights without inflating your power bills. Fewer lights in homes and streets will minimize electrical energy consumption and benefit the environment as a whole.

Durability

LEDs last longer than traditional lights and therefore means reduced carbon emissions. Your LED lights last up to six times more than standard lighting systems. Therefore, you do not need to replace them often compared to traditional lighting. All this means the use of fewer lights and fewer resources required for the production process, packaging, and transportation of lights. It is not only beneficial for our environment but also saves much of your money.

Conclusion

Now that you know about the benefits of LED lights, install these and remove the standard lights. You will save money and contribute to a green environment.

Insights Martech Products SaaS

Toronto: Drone Filming Tips for the Best Videos Ever

Miley on September 3, 2019

Drone Filming has started to become popular and most of the experienced, as well as beginner filmmakers, are using drone shots in the films. As a professional, it is not difficult to understand the kinds of shots that will help in performing the best. However, as a beginner, it is crucial to have certain tips in your mind so that you can get killer shots while drone filming. You need to consider the tips that have been mentioned above so that you can help your footage become unique and stand out.

Combine the different movements of the Axis

Your footage is not going to stand out if your drone is only moving forward and backward. It is your responsibility to add depth to the footage and to do so you must try different combinations of the axis movements. For example, you can fly up as well as backward and fly sideways when you are flying forward and up. Ensure that you are being gentle on the control sticks because steady and slow movements can help in making the footage cinematic. If you are not well versed with operating your drone, you can use the Tapfly method. This method will help you to fly your drone steadily and allow you to achieve complex flights easily.

Orbit

Circling any particular object is responsible for adding a huge and great cinematic impact to the entire footage. You have the option of navigating circles manually by taking care of the target while flying sideways as well as moving in the opposite directions. You have to understand that circling any particular object is going to take the training. You can use the point of interest in intelligent flight mode. This mode will help you to circle any object smoothly, and you have to adjust the radius and height. This is one of the most important and crucial tips that you need to follow if you are interested in drone filming.

Fly your drone at low altitude

Most people are responsible for assuming that drone filming is mostly associated with gaining height. Flying at a high altitude can indeed help in accommodating more shooting space; however, flying your drone at a low altitude can help in showing detailed objects and can also create immersive experiences. Apart from that, when you are speeding up, you have the freedom of conveying intense feelings through the footage. Ensure that you are paying attention to your flight environment, especially any kind of obstacle so that you can ensure the safety of flight.

Follow the subject from various angles

According to www.store.dji.com, following a particular subject right from behind is one of the classic filming moves. However, it is not difficult to film your subject from various angles with the help of your drone and it is suggested that you try them. This is going to help in making your footage creative as well as intriguing and interesting.

Conclusion

Drone filming is extremely exciting. Ensure that you are keeping these maneuvers and techniques on your mind so that it becomes easy for you to get the best shots.