Archive for September 2010

Multimeter safety

Safety must always remain priority number one when doing measurements with multimeters. Working safely, while making electrical measurements, is not rocket science. It’s a simple combination of careful planning, safe practices and using the right tools in the right way. The more voltage and current is present in the circuit, more careful you have to

Web pages for mobile devices

How to fit your website for the Apple iPad article tells what to do to make your web site work nicely on mobile devices like iPhone, iPad and many other. The viewport meta tag was introduced by Apple for the iPhone, and it has since been picked up by Microsoft for Windows Mobile and Nokia

XLR connectors

The XLR connector is an electrical connector design used mostly in professional audio and video electronics cabling applications, for microphones and line level signals. The most common is the three-pin XLR3, used almost universally as a balanced audio connector for high quality microphones and connections between equipment. XLR connectors are superior to many other audio

Secret world of oscilloscope probes

Secret world of oscilloscope probles article written by Doug Ford and published by Silicon Chip magazine, describes how high frequency oscilloscope probes really work. Most textbooks treat scope probes as a combination of a resistive divider in combination with capacitors to provide an extended frequency response. But as will be revealed, the reality is that

Compression using Canvas and PNG

This is one crazy web coding idea to compress web data! If you want to compress JavaScript and CSS you could reverse engineer a packing algorithm in JavaScript or you could use a lossless packing system that is already in use and supported in browsers (and designed for completely different things). Compression using Canvas and

Ceramic capacitor failures

Multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCs) have become one of the most widely used components in the manufacture of surface mount assemblies, and are inherently very reliable. But because they are made of ceramics that is brittle, these normally trustworthy devices can fail unexpectedly if they are not handled right in the electronics layout design and manufacturing.

Audio equipment tweaking

Some people love tweaking their equipment. Quite often some tweaking does not really change anything you hear, and sometimes there might be noticeable change, but not always for the better. Most of the time, second-guessing a piece of equipment’s designer component choices results worse than original performance. There are cases where tweaking can have difference,

Web design for engineers

I hate e-book flippy magazines. I am repeatedly amazed at the collective delusion that seems to strike otherwise sensible engineering magazine publishers and editors when they are exposed to this Flash-based junkware. The publishers try to make the magazine to look a magazine page: with excess white space, multiple columns, unnecessary page footers and page