From the Editor's desk: what's cooking at Elektor?

After the production of the Summer Circuits edition, there’s this short period of relative quietude at Elektor House. Desks are cleaned and solder irons switched off, short holidays are planned and an evaluation meeting is held to discuss Summer Circuits production problems and unauthorised workarounds to meet printer deadlines. This year’s double issue for the summer has attracted positive feedback and is generally judged as an improvement on last year’s edition. Four articles in particular, The OC171 Mystery (solved), Logic Goats, Lamp in a Wine Bottle and Underwater Magic drew a lot of debate and response. The positive feedback we got from you, confirmed by initial sales and subscription figures, seem to buck the economic crisis out there.

Over the previous weeks the main articles, projects and events have been planned for the Autumn issues (I hate to think of Autumn when it’s mid Summer but that’s an editor’s fate I guess). As most of the projects and activities are now confirmed by the powers that be I feel safe to use this space to list a few.

• A free virtual e-CAD DVD will be made available with the September 2008 issue.
• Elektor Italy will be launched in September.
• Two Elektor Workshops on microcontroller programming will be held at TIC, Birmingham, on 4 October.
• The Elektor Reflow Oven will be launched in the October 2008 issue.
• ElektorLive! will be staged on 22 November in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
• The second Elektor Study Trip to China is now taking registrations.

All this and more will be upon you later this year, but first do enjoy browsing the 2008 Summer Circuits edition, analyse and perhaps build the odd circuit or just read whatever stuff arouses your curiosity — that’s what the 136-page issue is all about: food for electronics enthusiasts to last over the summer period.