Electronics Design

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/chip-hall-of-fame The stories of the greatest and most influential microchips in history—and the people who built them. →

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_connector A banana connector is a single-wire (one conductor) electrical connector used for joining wires to equipment. The term 4 mm connector is also used, especially in Europe,because the pin’s diameter is nominally 4 millimetres (0.16 in).The pin has one or more lengthwise springs that bulge outwards slightly, giving the appearance of a banana. The original plug consists of a cylindrical metal pin about 20 millimetres (0.79 in) long.However other →

I  need power supplies for different eletronics circuits. I decided to get some cheap switch mode power supply modules 5Pcs Mini DC Adjustable Power Supply Buck Module Step Down Module (available also as single unit). The ideas was to try to use them instead of power wasting traditional linear regulators. 5Pcs Mini DC Adjustable Power →

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/design/bespoke-processors-cheap-lowpower-chips-that-only-do-whats-needed This article tells about interesting approach to processor design: Starting with a Texas Instruments openMSP430, they produced bespoke designs. “Our approach was to figure out all the hardware that an application is guaranteed not to use irrespective of the input,” says Kumar. What’s left is “a union, or superset, of all possible paths that data →

http://www.edn.com/design/led/4442091/LED-current-regulator-has-low-dropout?utm_content=buffer1967d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer This article has an intetesting LED current regulator circuit idea built using transistors. The voltage drop on the current sensing resistor r is less than 40mV.  The nominal LED current here is 7.2 mA at 9V. Increasing to 20V causes a current change of +15%, giving a dynamic resistance of about 10kΩ. →

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4458491/IMS-2017–RF-microwave-test-equipment–part-1?utm_content=buffer9eaa6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer The IEEE International Microwave Symposium is in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2017. Here is some of the new test equipment seen by EDN staff. →

https://blog.hackster.io/death-of-moores-law-makes-open-hardware-possible-7aaad86e47bf Bunnie argued that while Moore’s Law held if you started developing a project at the point when a vendor released their silicon it would be obsolescent even before you managed to ship it.  We may well have reached the point where our computing is “good enough.” That, at least as far as computing is concerned, we’re →

http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4458434/Inside-an-isolated-RS-485-transceiver?utm_content=buffer1c35d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Over the past decade, legislation has changed and now requires machinery and equipment operating in harsh environments to implement isolation for their data transmission systems. As a result, the trend away from legacy single-channel isolated systems to applications utilizing multi-channel isolation has led to the introduction of new isolation components. Many of these applications →

This article can be seen as continuation to my Powering microphones document and  PC microphone phantom powering improvements blog posting. Jon Blackstone said in comment: Tom – I’ve got a solution for this that’s very simple, and is working for me. I connect the ECM capsule (cheesy computer mic) directly to pins 2 and 3, →

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-spray-can-turn-any-surface-into-a-touch-screen/ This looks interesting. The technology, called Electrick, was developed by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, with the findings published in an open access paper. The spray consists of an electrically conductive carbon-based material. By applying electrodes to the object, and then measuring the voltage at different points, the position of a person’s finger can →