An HVAC solution was the headliner for an event on Feb. 19 at a 121-year-old building in the nation’s capital named after one of America’s greatest composer-musicians. The event at Duke Ellington School of the Arts demonstrated how stepping beyond traditional non-inverter HVAC systems can preserve a building’s historical architecture, enhance energy efficiencies, minimize noise, and earn design-award accolades.

Friedrich recently sponsored a NEWS webinar titled “Ductless Split System Innovations That Matter to Your Bottom Line.”  Below are questions taken from the Q&A portion of that webinar.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church’s community center in the Tempe, Arizona suburb of Guadalupe now has state-of-the-art HVAC thanks to variable refrigerant flow equipment, accessories, and installation labor donations from RectorSeal, Panasonic Air Conditioning Group (a division of Panasonic Corp. of North America), and Woody’s Heating and Air Conditioning.

Many of Fujitsu General America’s Halcyon mini-split system products now qualify for Energy Star Most Efficient certification.

The equipment in this month’s troubleshooting situation is a split system that has only been in service for two years, but there is a lot of history.

Troubleshooting refrigeration systems can be complex and frustrating, so put aside any assumptions and inspect the system thoroughly before making any diagnosis.

The medical profession and the HVAC industry have a lot of parallels when it comes to learning how to work together as a team.

Timely refrigeration repairs are crucial to avoid product loss; temporary fixes can sometimes keep systems running until parts arrive.

Ensuring a vacuum pump system is evacuated and free of air, nitrogen, moisture, and other contaminants is a crucial step to keep the system running optimally.   

In this month’s troubleshooting problem, the equipment is a split system that’s approximately 8 years old.

Musk confirmed that his company could make use of their current heat pump technology to develop a smart HVAC system for home use.

Determining the right pump to save energy in a given application can be broken down into three general steps.

Johnson Controls announced that it closed an agreement to purchase the EasyIO Building and Energy Management System (BEMS) product line.

BrainBox AI intends to integrate ABB’s MSR business and its installed base of 12,000-plus retail locations in its current operations.

OMG Roofing Products has introduced the PowerGrip Plus roof mount system, a watertight structural attachment system used to secure solar racks, HVAC, and other equipment to roofs covered with thermoplastic (TPO and PVC) membranes.

Every year, The NEWS introduces the latest cooling equipment available for the upcoming summer season in order to help contractors prepare for this busy period by doing the research that will help them to distinguish between brands. The coverage features specific information about each individual product as submitted by the manufacturers.

Each year, The NEWS spotlights the industry’s latest commercial heating products. The manufacturers provided us with a brief description of features included with each product.

This handheld device displays CO, CO₂, air temperature, rh, dew point, and wet bulb temperature measurements.

Designed for HVAC and refrigeration professionals to view electrical and temperature readings, this product logs data remotely using the ExView® W-Series app on smartphones and tablets via Bluetooth.

This product is a leave-behind HVAC analytic device that technicians can install on each unit, regardless of the brand they service.

HVAC has a critical role to play in the future of building automation and digitalization.

Small- to medium-sized buildings make up about 94% of all commercial buildings in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, yet only 13% of those buildings have a building automation system.

IEC Systems is a provider of turnkey proprietary and nonproprietary building automation systems (BASs) and a Distech Controls authorized system integrator.

This climate control solution ensures balanced, room-by-room comfort throughout the home.

For more HVAC contractors to sell zoning systems, they have to understand the benefits, challenges, know how to approach customers to even be able to sell it, and then comes the install.

Customers looking for increased value out of their HVAC systems will find high-end features like connectivity, greater efficiency, and more intuitive controls attractive.

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by CISA on Mar 23

In recent episodes we have discusses statically and dynamically typed languages and domain specific languages - topics that are much talked about in the community at the moment. In this episode we look at the foundation of programming languages : types. We explain what a type actually is, how type systems work and what polymorphism works.

This Episode is a round table discussion about Ultra-Large Scale Systems. In 2006, a number of authors (among them our guests Linda Northrop, Doug Schmidt, Kevin Sullivan, and Gregor Kiczales) have produced a report that addressed the following question: Given the issues with today's software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code? In this episode, our guests discuss many of the issues that arise from this kind of system and provide an overview of the research areas that should be investigated in order to tackle the challenge. If you want to get more detailed information, you can read the ULS Report (PDF).

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

This episode is an introduction to embedded system. It is an introduction in the sense that we cover many topics very briefly: upcoming episodes will provides details for many of these topics. We start by discussing what an embedded system is an what the important characteristics are. Among them is limited resources, concurrency, real time and hardware integration. We also discuss the range of embedded systems from small mirocontrollers to mobile phones to distributed real time embedded systems. We also cover the different business case for embedded systems (per unit cost) and some non-trivial developmental aspects (cross compilation debugging, heisenbugs). We close the episode by discussing some important architectural styles (time triggered, event-based, microkernels, state machines) as well as tools of the trade: languages, operating systems and middleware.

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time systems and how architectures are described in this context. This led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief look at which programming languages are used these days for real time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the discussion focused on some best practices for building real time systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how real time systems can be tested effectively.

This episode is a conversation with Jan Bosch about product line engineering (PLE). Jan has worked in various roles and industries and academia in the context of product lines. In this episode we look at Jan's view of what is next for product lines: software ecosystems. What is their relationship to PLE and how should PLE change to remain relevant?

Recording Venue: Phone Guest: Steve Will IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated […]

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Wil van der Aalst Robert Blumen interviews Professor Wil van der Aalst of the Technical University of Eindhoven, one of the world’s leading researchers in business process management and workflow systems. Professor van der Aalst leads off with an overview of the main concepts in the field business processes, business process […]

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Robert talks to Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy of the Cambridge University (UK) Systems research group about the OCaml language and the Mirage cloud operating system, a microkernel written entirely in OCaml. The outline includes: history of the evolution from dedicated servers running a monolithic operating system to virutalized servers based on the Xen hypervisor to micro-kernels; […]

Senior performance architect and author of *Systems Performance* Brendan Gregg talks with Robert Blumen about systems performance: how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior. The discussion covers the scope of systems performance, systems performance in the software life cycle, the role of performance analysis in architecture, methodologies for solving performance problems, dynamic tracing and tracing tools such as DTrace, the disk and file subsystems, the CPU and memory subsystems, and the challenges virtualization poses for performance analysts.

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

John Allspaw CTO of Etsy speaks with Robert Blumen about systemic failures and outages. Why they cannot be totally prevented, how to respond, and what we can learn from them.

James Cowling of Dropbox tells Robert Blumen about their massive migration from Amazon’s S3 to their own distributed storage system.

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Learn how to simplify your application architecture with the introduction of a messaging system. You'll hear how different messaging patterns can make your application more flexible, easier to maintain, and improve its performance.

Bob Kepford discusses Decoupled CMS. Many CMS practitioners are adopting a decoupled approach to improve scale, allow for more specialized roles, and to separate data collection from delivery. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with Kepford about what makes a Decoupled CMS different.

Nikhil Krishna speaks with Dietrich Ayala about IPFS in depth. They cover what it is, how it works in detail and how one could leverage IPFS and libp2p in one's own application or to host one's content. The discussion goes into the IPFS ecosystem...

Gryphon is a relatively new company aiming to challenge the establishment of consumer-grade networking. We check out the Gryphon Tower today, which aims to combine extensive network security features with excellent performance, mesh network compatibility, and ease of installation and monitoring!... [PCSTATS]