T'was the night before Christmas..... by Sarsen Technology!

T'was the night before Christmas, we were still at the shop.
The town was deserted; you could hear a pin drop.
Our families were at home, the egg-nog was flowing,
And outside the window it had just started snowing.

T'here was still work to do, and orders to place
We were working away at a furious pace!
Sarsen Technology was so busy in December,
When last this much to do we couldn’t remember!

T'he team was still smiling (it was more of a scowl),
And our moods were becoming increasingly foul.
When outside the office a roar did sound,
An engine, getting closer. Our heads turned around….

T'he moon was shining on the new fallen snow,
And it lit up the ground and the houses below.
Then what to our tired eyes should appear?
The boss parking his car, full of good cheer!

More jolly than Santa, he strode up the stairs,
And entered the office to a faceful of stares.
Under our breaths we asked “Why's he so cheerful?”
And why was he here? We were suddenly fearful...

Had we not done enough of the workload this eve?
We’d nearly completed what we set out to achieve.
We had no idea about what was his game,
Then to our surprise he called us by name!

Now Laura! Now Colleen! Now Angela and Tim!
And of course not forgetting Robbie and Lynn!
You’ve worked really hard, and you deserve a big cheer,
Take some time off, come back after New Year!

As we packed up our stuff, and put on our coats,
Our hats and our gloves, and wrapped scarves round our throats,
We heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Sarsen Technology!
We will be back in the office on Wednesday 2nd January.

Putting the spotlight on Danville Signal Processing

Danville Signal Processing, Inc. was founded in 1998 to manufacture products for the communication, audio, military and instrumentation markets using digital signal processing (DSP) technology as their core technology base. Sarsen Technology has represented Danville in the UK for over 10 years.

Solutions include:

• COTS DSP Boards and I/O Modules
• Embedded PCB assemblies
• DSP and FPGA combination solutions
• Standalone products
• Rack mount systems
• Custom board solutions

The dspblok family of products combine an Analog Devices SHARC DSP with the supporting circuits necessary to implement a powerful DSP Function Module.

Danville Signal's dspstak™ Engines are available for the latest Analog Devices SHARC® family processors. These modules generally consist of a DSP Processor, memory, power supplies and standard digital I/O such as RS-232 and USB.

The dsprak™ high performance audio platform is a semi-custom solution for OEMs. The basic 1U system supports 2 to 8 analog and digital inputs and 8 analog and digital outputs. Additional motherboards can be stacked to create larger systems with up to 32 channels.

Danville have also have gathered a number of DSP resources, ADI data sheets and application notes, DSP-related web sites and online tutorials to assist you in your DSP applications. They will continue to add information and resources to their website, to assist developers in gaining the DSP knowledge necessary to make their designs better, faster and more reliable.

Their goal is to become a repository of SHARC Related Resources and Reference Material for the DSP Developer. If you have a DSP trick, SHARC-related Article or Web Site that you'd like to add to Danville's reference library, please contact us and we will be happy to add it to the collection.

If you have any questions about Danville, or any of our other product lines, please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email.

The Sarsen Technology Christmas Party - In Photos

Christmas comes but once a year, and the Sarsen Technology Christmas party was the perfect way to get us all in the festive spirit.

The gang at Komedia, Bath
L-R - Angela, Nigel, Tim, Laura, Lynn and Colleen

There was someone important missing from the party - Robbie couldn't make it unfortunately, but we tried our best to enjoy the evening without his sparkling company....

Angela and Nigel

Tim and Colleen

Laura and Tim

Clive and Lynn

We all had a good time on Friday, thanks very much to Colleen for organising a great night out!!

It's the most wonderful time of the year.....

Yes, its Christmas party time again.

Tonight the Sarsen Team are off to Komedia in Bath to eat, drink and get merry. I mean, be merry.

Its a good time to review the highs and lows of 2012; it's been an interesting year, with successes in new markets, a host of new boards from all our manufacturers, and loads of new brand new technology to get our little heads around.

But there's no rest for the wicked; there will be even more happening in the New Year!

Thanks very much to our manufacturers for their continued support, and we look forward to another exciting year in 2013.

Have a great weekend!

The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarsen Style.

Today is the twelfth of the twelfth of the twelfth. So we're carrying on the theme and bringing you the Twelve Days of Christmas, in our own special way.

(Feel free to join in....)

On the first day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

A BittWare Anemone

On the second day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the third day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the fourth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the fifth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the sixth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

Well done guys, half way through....

On the seventh day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the eighth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the ninth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the tenth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

Nearly there, keep going!

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Eleven Iguanas,

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the twelfth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Twelve Trenton Backplanes,

Eleven Iguanas,

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone!

Hurrah! Next up, We Wish You a Merry Christmas.......

Sarsen Technology Christmas Opening Hours

Christmas is creeping ever closer....

Time is running out to get your orders placed, so its good news that the Sarsen Technology team will be available to help you right up until Friday 21st December.

Our offices will be closed from Monday 24th December until Tuesday 1st January.

We will be back in the office on Wednesday 2nd January.

Please let us know if you need anything before then by calling the office on +44 1672 511166, or emailing us - info@sarsen.net.

Sarsen Technology Manufacturer Profile - Tech Source, Inc.

Established in 1987, Tech Source has been a pioneer in high performance computer graphics hardware solutions for 25 years.

The company has evolved over the years, now serving several markets that include Air Traffic Control/Management (ATC/ATM), avionics, military and embedded systems with several COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) and custom products.
The product range includes graphics, imaging and video capture boards, H.264 encoders and high compression video recorders.

From designing graphics processing units (GPUs) and high compression encoders to FPGA targeted special graphics/imaging algorithms the company has a broad range of knowledge and offers product customizations and new product delivery in a matter of months.

Tech Source XMC and PMC graphics products can be used with most Single Board Computers (SBCs) in various form factors such as VME, CPCI, and ATCA that are most often found in military and defense applications.

The Tech Source Condor series of embedded products for Mil/Aero applications consists of high performance COTS XMC or VPX form factor graphics and video solutions. Air or rugged conduction cooled variants offer Open GL/3D, H.264, video windowing plus GPGPU capabilities. Linux, Windows and RTOS drivers are supported. A key product is the Condor 3000x which is based on the AMD Radeon 6760 GPU and offers exceptional performance with immersive desktop-level 3D graphics and outstanding multimedia features.

For more information on Tech Source or any of our other manufacturers please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or email us.

www.sarsen.net

Sarsen Technology is here if you need us, Santa!

Things are ramping up at the North Pole....

On the run up to Christmas Eve, Santa has to go through his list of names, and check it twice, to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. He then has to decide which toy each child deserves. It’s a long process, and it could be much simpler, using BLITzEN – the BittWare Low latency Intelligent Toy Evaluation Network.

It’s based on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, provides CPU offload, the highest performance transceivers , and with maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements it’s perfect for Santa’s busy Workshop, as it helps him to determine not just what children want but rather what they deserve.

Those Reindeer are an essential part of the process, and Santa knows he needs to make sure they are happy and performing at their best. The UEI Cube is small and rugged, and can be used to measure the tension on their specially adapted harnesses using its strain gauge layers, so Santa knows the second there are any problems. That sleigh is heavy!

Flying around the world in a reindeer-drawn sleigh would be made much easier with a display system running on the Copperhead Core i7 EBX board from VersaLogic. Its performance level allows for the integration of multiple high-bandwidth functions, such as digital signal processing and real-time video processing. The Copperhead features a high-speed memory interface, up to 16 GB on-board RAM capacity, and three independent display outputs, so Santa can check his route, run his aforementioned naughty-or-nice list, and still video-chat with the sleigh-port, an underground facility run by Elves that serves as a command and control centre. 

Phew! Its a busy time for the guys and girls at the North Pole, but don't worry Santa, Sarsen Technology is here to help. Give us a call on +44 1672 511166 or drop us an email!!

BittWare's Anemone - A New Approach to Floating Point DSP

Ah-ne-MO-nee
It’s a word that is quite often mis-pronounced.
It’s not Ane-No-Me. Or worse – An-En-ema. Definitely not that!

BittWare’s first generation Anemone chip, the Anemone104 (AN104) is a completely scalable multicore processor with 16 eCores that provide a total sustained performance of 19.2 GFLOPS while consuming only 1 Watt of core power.

Featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, the BittWare Anemone combines the best assets of both FPGA and floating point DSP technology, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. The FPGA handles all the memory, I/O interfacing, protocol processing, and special functions, in addition to any computational tasks it may perform. This leaves the Anemone free to perform the complex processing tasks that DSPs are ideal for.

The AN104 features an internal high-throughput mesh network, with separate data paths for on-chip and off-chip communications. Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 76.8 GBytes/sec full duplex, with an additional 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth.

The BittWare Anemone Evaluation Kit provides a cost-effective way to begin evaluating the Anemone co-processor for FPGAs, featuring an Anemone104 and Altera Stratix III FPGA based evaluation board - ready to use out of the box, with the Ubuntu Linux OS and Anemone development tools installed on an included laptop.

This is pretty new technology – if you would like more information give the Sarsen sales team a call on +44 1672 511166 or send us an email.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas…. With the help of our lovely Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund Christmas Cards

As well as all the other stuff we get up to here at Sarsen, it’s very important to us that we support charities where we can. This year we have chosen to support the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund by buying all our Christmas cards from their wonderful collection.

The Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund (PCRF) is a national charity dedicated to supporting research to improve diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer. It was founded in April 2004 by Maggie Blanks, following the death of her husband Alan from the disease in May 2003. The PCRF directly fund research into the disease by offering grants to researchers in universities, research institutes and hospitals in the UK and Ireland.

Pancreatic cancer has the lowest survival rate of all cancers – just 3% of those diagnosed in the UK survive for 5 years. It accounts for 5% of cancer deaths but attracts very little research funding. You can find out about the work the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund are doing in their newsletter.

You can buy their Christmas cards here, and the great thing is that with every PCRF Christmas card you send, as well as supporting them financially, you'll be making people aware of the charity and the world-class research it's funding to defeat pancreatic cancer. There are other ways to support the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund - Nigel is also offering his support by volunteering to help with research into pancreatic cancer at St Barts hospital in London. Find out more here.

Why not take a leaf out of our book and support a charity this Christmas - it'll give you a warm fuzzy glow faster than a hot toddy by an open fire!

Sarsen By Numbers - Friday Facts from the Team at Sarsen Technology

12 – The number of years Sarsen Technology has been supplying embedded hardware solutions to our UK customers.

10 – The number of US-based manufacturers we currently represent.

5 – Exciting new board variants from VersaLogic released this year.

8 – Ways to contact us….
The obvious ones; email, phone and direct contact through the website.
The retro choice – fax and snail mail.
For the social butterfly – LinkedIn, Twitter or even a visit to the office here in Marlborough. We like visitors….

830 – The number of hits on our blog last month. We are actually very interesting….

3 – New COM Express modules from Extreme Engineering. For more info click here…

25 – days until Christmas!!!

5 – Twitter feeds from the team here at Sarsen.
@Laura_Sarsen
@Nigel_Sarsen
@Robbie_Sarsen
@Embedded_Tim
@Sarsen_Tech

24 – Current issue of NewsBytes, released today. There are lots of new technology releases from our manufacturing partners this month including OpenCL support for Altera Stratix V FPGA COTS boards, plus a new technical paper on "many-core" strategy written by Jeff Milrod, President of BittWare.

½ - The new S5-PCIe-HQ from BittWare is a half-length PCIe x8 card based on the Altera Stratix V FPGA. Check it out here.

2 – Number of times we have had cake in the office this week. Soon to be 3.

Have a great weekend!

Super Speed HFT with BittWare FPGA PCIe boards

High Frequency Trading is made even faster with FPGA Solutions from BittWare!

In layman’s terms, high-frequency trading (also known as HFT) is the buying and selling of stocks at super fast speeds, with the help of very powerful computers. Using complex algorithms, these computers can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces at the same time and execute millions of orders a second.

High-frequency trading is highly dependent on ultra-low latency as well as ever-faster analysis/data correlation. The products used also need to achieve maximum performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements. BittWare offers a range of FPGA-based PCIe COTS solutions to address the challenges of developing financial applications.

BittWare’s Stratix V PCIe cards offer the industry’s highest performance FPGA for network and algorithm acceleration. These boards provide the ultimate in low latency with high performance FPGA transceivers (no external PHY) and optional TCP/IP offload engine. With maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements and QDR II/II+ combined with 10GigE straight to the FPGA (no conversion to XAUI) for ultra-low latency, BittWare’s PCIe boards are ideal for applications in the High Frequency Trading (HFT) market.

Fixnetix, global managed services provider for trading, market data and risk control, were the first fintech (financial technology) company in Europe to offer the Altera Stratix V FPGA on the BittWare PCI Express slot-cards. The Altera Stratix V FPGA with integrated 10GigE and BittWare PCIe Gen 3 slot card is ideal for iX-eCute, the Fixnetix FPGA firmware for nanosecond trading and pre-trade risk checks across multiple asset classes. BittWare PCI Express slot-cards are the hardware boards that iX-eCute operates on whilst Altera Stratix is the industry's highest performance FPGA with over 1 TeraFLOPS of processing.

If you would like more information about how the BittWare hardware could work in your application please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email!

Military Simulator Technology from UEI

When someone says “Simulator” most people immediately think “Flight Simulator”.

However, simulators are now also used to train ‘drivers’ on fire trucks, tanks, military ground vehicles and even conventional and nuclear power plants. Military trainers in particular are basing much of their driver training on very complex and realistic simulators.

The simulator can provide a realistic experience of driving a tank, personnel carrier, or MRAP in a convoy at night while under attack. These are very real conditions that are very difficult to train for in actual vehicles. The combination of small footprint and real-time update speed make the United Electronic Industries (UEI) RACKtangle an ideal ground vehicle simulator solution.

Interestingly, UEI’s wide selection of I/O capabilities is often more critical in ground simulators than flight. In addition to the standard analog and digital I/O, most military ground simulators also require a combination of serial, CAN, ARINC-429 and/or MIL-STD-1553. UEI offer support for all these functions through their range of boards and chassis.

The UEI RACKtangle I/O chassis has been selected by FlightSafety International as the computer-based I/O hardware for future flight simulators. The UEI system provides the interface between the controlling computers and the simulator’s various systems including Avionics Instrument Control (AIC), Control Loading and Motion (CLM) and Flight Deck I/O (FDK). In PowerDNA mode the system can be almost arbitrarily large - UEI have been used on military aircraft flight simulators requiring greater than 7000 I/O points!!

For more information on how UEI can work in your simulator application, please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email with your requirements.

Thanksgiving - What does it mean??

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the USA. It’s a holiday that British people haven’t really adopted, and don’t really understand or appreciate. In fact, a lot of what we know of Thanksgiving has been learned from ‘Friends’!

As a representative of 10 US-based manufacturers, we are always keen to learn a bit more about their traditions, and to understand why they are taking 2 days off work!!

In 1621, the Mayflower pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians shared a feast, after their first successful autumn harvest, which is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.”

Today, Thanksgiving is a time to, well, give thanks! Although it has lost some of its original significance, it’s still one of the most important holidays in the year. Thanksgiving now centres on cooking and sharing a bountiful meal with family and friends, and sharing what you are thankful for.

There isn’t really any reason why the UK shouldn’t celebrate a form of Thanksgiving Day. Halloween is becoming a huge occasion in the UK, but I think we might have picked the wrong American tradition to adopt.

Because Thanksgiving isn’t based on any religion, unlike Christmas or Easter, it’s an opportunity to get together and do the one thing we don’t do enough of – give thanks for everything we love and are grateful for, whether its friends, family, pets or a stable job.

And what is worth celebrating more than that?

Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends and colleagues.

SUMIT - I/O Expansion Module Development Made Easier....

Stackable Unified Module Interconnect Technology (SUMIT ™) is a stackable, form-factor independent expansion format that includes both high and low speed bus signals. The SUMIT spec is targeted for products using state-of-the-art serial buses and legacy chipset expansion buses all in the same form factor.

The specification is an I/O-centric approach, which defines the connector and stacking method, but it doesn’t address the specific location requirements for the connectors on any specific form factor boards. Only the location (placement) of one connector relative to the other is specified, to ensure proper routing of signals that are passed from one connector to another as they continue up the stack.

A SUMIT stack is designed to be processor independent, as it focuses on bus and interconnect technology rather than any single processor or DSP architecture. Two connectors are used on each module, SUMIT A and SUMIT B. These connectors carry multiple high-speed serial PCIe and USB 2.0 buses and include Low Pin Count (LPC), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), and SMBus/I2C for legacy requirements. While the optional SUMIT B connector carries mostly PCIe interfaces, the SUMIT A connector carries a single x1 PCIe and four USB 2.0 buses, as well as the legacy interfaces.

With no hardware configuration needed to route multiple interfaces, SUMIT gives designers a solution for creating embedded expansion modules that require high-speed interfaces as well as legacy support.

VersaLogic's EBX, EPIC and PC/104 SUMIT platforms are combined with an optional ISA connector to support legacy PC/104 expansion modules. The signals available on VersaLogic's CPU boards include PCI Express lanes, low speed signals such as LPC and SPI, and legacy USB and ISA signals. VersaLogic currently offer 3 SBCs featuring optional SUMIT expansion –

• Komodo - A dual core SBC on a SUMIT-EPIC™ platform. The Komodo features a very high performance Intel® Core™2 Duo processor, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and high performance integrated video.


• Ocelot - An Intel Atom™ based embedded computer in a SUMIT-104 format. The Ocelot uses an industrial temperature Atom version to provide high performance (1.6 GHz) at very low power (7 Watts). The Ocelot, at only 90 mm x 96 mm, is compatible with most SUMIT and PC/104 expansion boards, and is available in both standard (0º to +60ºC) and extended (-40º to +85ºC) temperature versions.


• 'Brand New' Copperhead - The Copperhead is a high-performance embedded computer powered by a 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 processor. Based on the industry-standard EBX format, the Copperhead is available in either quad- or dual-core models (17 to 45W power dissipation). It features several heat management configurations and offers options for I/O interfaces and interface connectors.

VersaLogic Komodo

For more information please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 or drop me an email and we'll answer any questions you might have.

.

Whats new? Intel Core i7 and Freescale based Embedded SBCs from Extreme Engineering!

In the last 3 months, Extreme Engineering has released a host of brand new boards. From COMe to VPX, they offer solutions for a variety of applications.
 
The XPand6104 is a natural convection cooled small form factor system supporting the XPedite7450 Intel® Core™ i7 processor rugged COM Express module. An Ethernet port, two serial ports, a USB port, graphics port, and a SATA port from the XPedite7450 are brought out to standard commercial connectors on the front panel.

XPand6104

The XCalibur4440 is a high-performance, 6U VPX, multiprocessing, single board computer that is ideal for ruggedized systems requiring high bandwidth processing and low power consumption. Supporting 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7 processors and 3rd generation Intel Core i7 processors the XCalibur4440 delivers enhanced performance and efficiency for today's network information processing and embedded computing applications.

XCalibur4440

The XPedite5650 is a ruggedized COM Express mini module (55 mm x 84 mm) that supports an enhanced Type 10 pinout. With four PowerPC e500mc cores running at up to 1.5 GHz, the P2041 delivers enhanced performance and efficiency for today's network information processing and other embedded computing applications. There are plenty of I/O ports, including one copper Gigabit Ethernet port, a single x2 PCIe port, two x1 PCIe ports, two USB 2.0 ports and two SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports.

XPedite5650

The XCalibur4402 is a high-performance, 6U CompactPCI, multiprocessing, single board computer, supporting Supports 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7 processors and 3rd generation Intel Core i7 processors. The XCalibur4402 provides up to 16 GB of DDR3-1600 ECC SDRAM in two channels, two PrPMC/PrXMC slots, 32 MB of NOR flash, and up to 128 GB of NAND flash. 

XCalibur4402

X-ES offers the widest range of commercial and ruggedized 3rd Gen Intel Core i7 processor solutions for embedded applications. As the UK distributor for X-ES we can help with any questions you may have.

Please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 to discuss your application, or email us!

Tech Source in New Deal with RunTime, A Sarsen Facelift, and a Birthday!

Today is Tims' birthday.  

No, we aren't going to mention ages! Happy birthday Tim.

This week Tech Source have announced their new partnership with RunTime Computing Solutions to accelerate GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) development on its Condor 3000 XMC video graphics cards. This will make it much easier for customers using Tech Source boards to develop high performance GPGPU applications in the OpenCL world. For more info please contact us.

The Sarsen Technology LinkedIn page has had a bit of a facelift. Follow our page to keep up to date with new products and news from the team.

 

Remember Remember.......

Sandwiched in between the festivities of Hallowe'en and Christmas is Bonfire Night. A time to remember the Gunpowder plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes was caught guarding explosives hidden under the House of Lords, in an attempt to assassinate King James I of England.

Fireworks date back to 7th century China, where they were invented. Also known as ‘Explosive Pyrotechnics’, fireworks are actually designed not to explode. To give a good visual show the ingredients need to burn slowly, in order to produce the colours and sparkles found in today’s displays. You learn something new every day! 

But don't forget, while that Youtube video of the guy shooting fireworks from various parts of his body is really funny, fireworks are dangerous, so be safe this weekend.