Electronics Design

Shields are your friend, except when… | EDN

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/the-practicing-instrumentation-engineer/4418080/Shields-are-your-friend–except-when-?utm_content=buffer6cce1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Engineers just love to put shields on circuits, mostly as a defensive measure against signals on the outside getting into and disturbing our circuits, but they also keep signals inside from getting out and this really makes the folks responsible for EMI compliance happy. So what could go wrong? Well 10 years ago, not

How to pre-test your product’s antenna | EDN

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-waves/4458585/How-to-pre-test-your-product-s-antenna?utm_content=bufferf9cb7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Your wireless product’s end-to-end success dictates that your customers will rely on your antennas to perform well in their system. Most hardware and software is thoughtfully tested before sale or deployment, but why are so many antennas ignored? There is no reason to defer or ignore your antenna evaluation; help is available. This article

Banana connector types

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

Small switch mode PSU module MPS MP2307 fail

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

Bespoke Processors: Cheap, Low-Power Chips That Only Do What’s Needed – IEEE Spectrum

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

LED current regulator has low dropout | EDN

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.

IMS 2017: RF/microwave test equipment, part 1 | EDN

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.

Death of Moore’s Law Makes Open Hardware Possible – Hackster’s Blog

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

Inside an isolated RS-485 transceiver | EDN

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