John Foster

POWERING THE BUILDOUT SERIES By Libra CEO Andrew Williams Backup power is having a historic moment. Generator lead times across the industry are still running well past a year, commonly quoted between 50 and 80 weeks on large standby sets and longer on some configurations, and manufacturers who can beat that number are winning deals … Read more

By Joe Egbert, VP / General Manager, Libra Industries — Dayton, Ohio Why capacity in this business moves slower than anyone wants it to When people ask whether we can take on more work, they usually mean do we have machines. The machines are the easy part. We run 45 CNC machines in Dayton. If … Read more

By Andrew Williams, Libra CEO ARTICLE 2 – POWERING THE BUILDOUT SERIES Rack PDUs come in tiers: basic, metered, monitored, switched, and the intelligent units that combine monitoring and switching in one. All of them are still being built and sold, because not every cabinet needs the same thing. Anyone who tells you the basic … Read more

By Joe Egbert, VP / General Manager, Libra Industries — Dayton, Ohio What happens between a print arriving and a number going out People ask how long a quote takes and why the number varies so much between shops. I can only speak for ours, so here is what actually happens here between a print … Read more

By Libra CEO Andrew Williams AI did not change the physics of the data center. It changed the density, which at the rack amounts to the same thing. Racks that drew 10 kilowatts five years ago are being specified at 120 to 140 and climbing, and somewhere between 30 and 50 kilowatts — depending on … Read more

The infrastructure that runs Texas runs on distributed electronics. RTUs at compressor stations, flow computers on gathering lines, SCADA nodes at substations, smart meters across service territories, protection and control boards in cabinets nobody opens for years. This equipment is installed at remote sites, expected to operate for decades, and noticed only when it fails. … Read more

Dallas-Fort Worth has become one of the fastest-growing robotics markets in the country. AMR fleets are deploying across metroplex warehouses and distribution centers, cobot suppliers are building out their Americas operations, and robotics companies across Carrollton, Coppell, and Plano are moving platforms from prototype toward production. Every one of those platforms is, electrically, a set … Read more

For two decades, offshoring PCBA was the default math. Labor arbitrage made the unit price unbeatable, and everything else — lead time, freight, engineering distance — was treated as friction to be managed. Then came 2020 through 2022: factory shutdowns, port backlogs, component shortages, and ocean freight rates that multiplied several times over. Procurement teams … Read more

Run a supplier qualification for industrial control electronics and a pattern emerges quickly: every supplier who survives the first screen looks the same on paper. IPC-certified workmanship. A registered quality system. AOI and X-ray on the floor. Traceability. The certificates that were once differentiators are now the price of admission — and if every finalist … Read more