We celebrated Labor Day in the US on Monday. A co-worker joked last week that the US did Labor Day in September to distinguish ourselves from the Communists. I thought about that comment all week. Why do we celebrate Labor Day in September? 

The holiday got started in New York City on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, when the Central Labor Union organized 10,000 workers to march from lower Broadway to a picnic on 92nd Street. They were frustrated with low-paying and dangerous jobs that required 12 hour days, seven days a week. According to the New York Times, they carried signs reading, “Less Work and More Pay,” and were demanding an eight-hour workday.

31 states adopted the holiday by 1894, and on June 28, 1894 President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday.

I really encourage you to check out “Labor Daze - Pride, Chaos and Kegs on Labor’s First ‘Day’” on the US Department of Labor’s website. The first Labor Day parade was almost a non-starter, but the Grand Marshall of the event kept the faith, and he was rewarded at the last moment as marchers and a marching band showed up!

Keeping the faith is as important to success as just about anything else is! We were tickled this week to share a success story from ADLINK Technology about the University of Hawaii Autonomous Racing Team. These kids had done a tremendous amount of work to qualify to compete in an autonomous electric go-kart competition,

but the event was cancelled due to the pandemic. They held on, took what they had learned building their evKart, integrated an ADLINK ROScube into their autonomous vehicle and are now competing in the Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in October.

It is appropriate that our featured products this week save system designers and developers a lot of work! COM Express is an extremely popular Computer-On-Module standard that allows developers to reduce waste, minimize design risk, and future-proof the systems they are designing. If you haven’t read it yet, check out our blog post on the history and benefits of COM Express.

The ADLINK cExpress SL COM Express® Compact Size Type 6 Module features the extended availability i7-6600U System-on-Chip for the longest lifetime applications. It can support up to 32GB DDR4 RAM. Extended temperature ranges are available.

The Kontron COMe-bKL6 COM Express® Basic Type 6 with Xeon® E3-1505M v6 processor features Xeon performance with integrated Intel HD graphics, up to 32GB DDR4 RAM,and temperature ranges of -40°C to +85°C. I’m told that integrated graphics are highly unusual for Xeons!

And we rounded out the week with an extremely popular COM Express Type 6 Carrier Board from Connect Tech. The Ultra Lite Carrier Board matches the Type 6 form factor exactly and offers convenient PC Type connectors. It supports the latest Intel® processor sets, provides Mini-PCIe Expansion and an additional GbE port, and supports temperature ranges of -40ºC to +85ºC.

Our road warriors, Bob Buchanan and Donnie Springfield, will be at Sensors Converge in San Jose September 22 and 23 in Connect Tech’s booth #1011. We’ll spend next week looking at Connect Tech’s great products as we whip everyone into a pre-show frenzy! Make sure to check out our ​​products-of-the-day at www.wdlsystems.com and our social media posts!