Circuits & Schematics

AC loads are everywhere around us because at least home appliances are supplied with the mains power. Therefore, we always face the situations that we want to have full control (dimming) over an AC load such as a lamp, a motor, vacuum cleaner etc. ...

The challenge of improving analog/digital accuracy by preventing amplifier saturation in systems supplied with only a single logic-level power rail has been receiving a lot of activity and design creativity recently. Voltage inverters generating ...

The key part of any electronic device is the power supply. Any instability or malfunction of the power supply part causes the device to stop working or demonstrate weird behavior. In this article, I introduced an AC/DC flyback switching power ...

It’s common for I 2 C systems to have both standard and fast devices on the same bus. For I 2 C systems, the speed and power consumption both depend on the values of pullup resistors: the values of them should be low enough to secure the fast ...

An obstacle detection unit is an essential part of a variety of projects, such as robotics and security applications. The infrared sensors are widely used for these types of applications. The main drawback of some circuit designs is that the ...

Anemometers are an important category of environmental sensor. Articles about their design, data capture, and linearization have comprised topics featured in EDN Design Ideas, several quite recently. Less well covered, however, has been the topic ...

In electrical heating applications, resistive heaters are powered through phase angle-controlled SCR/triac circuits to vary the applied voltage/power to maintain the required temperature. Phase angle control produces a lot of harmonics leading to ...

Although adequate for undemanding applications, the circuit suffers from several drawbacks which may limit its suitability. The Darlington’s current gain (which can vary considerably from device to device and with temperature) plays a ...

Awhile back I published a simple design idea for a thermal airspeed sensor based on a self-heated Darlington transistor pair (Ref, 1). The resulting sensor is simple, sensitive, and solid-state, but suffers from a radically nonlinear airspeed ...

This design for a photonic switch needs more than approximately 70 V at the cathode of a duo-lateral optical position-sensing device. This voltage gets speedy response at longer wavelengths, such as 980 nm. The circuit uses fast transimpedance ...