Articles - 17

Designing astable circuits using the industry-standard 555 timer is a straightforward process when duty cycles are 50% or greater. However, you must overcome the many pitfalls of low-duty-cycle circuits to arrive at a desired result. Using only ...

There was an interesting article in the January 1961 issue of Popular Electronics, “Sweet Sixteen” by Jim Kyle. It was followed up in April 1961 with a second article entitled “Sweeter With A Tweeter.” You can find some ...

Galvanically isolated power supplies are used in numerous applications for different reasons. In some circuits, galvanic isolation is necessary due to safety considerations. In other circuits, functional isolation is used to block any interference ...

Using measurements of anomalies in the Earth’s magnetic field and machine learning to extract data from raw signals, then matching them to accurate magnetic-anomaly maps, it may possible to navigate aircraft with reasonable accuracy ...

What you’ll learn What is the Raspberry Pi 400? What the Raspberry Pi 400 is not. Why you may want one. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a Raspberry Pi 4 inside a keyboard (Fig. 1). That’s it. We’re done. Figure 1. The Raspberry Pi 400 ...

Decibels are commonly used in electronic systems that include RF, audio, and more recently, signal integrity. While many engineers already think in decibels, if you mostly work in the time domain, you may not think the same way. Because much of my ...

Certain designs need a programmable-gain amplifier with a wide gain range and high accuracy and common-mode rejection. Usually, it's wise to exploit a programmable-gain instrumentation amplifier, such as an AD625 . Unfortunately, the gain range ...

Grinding out copper is one way to create a printed circuit board, and low-cost CNC milling machines have improved to the point where it’s possible for many. One challenge with focusing on the latest high-tech solutions is that with so much ...

Voltage supervisors have provided analog voltage monitoring to digital circuits for decades. Texas Instruments released the original TL7705 in 1983; it consumed 1.8 mA, came in a plastic dual-inline package (PDIP) and you can still purchase it ...

A four-quadrant dc-dc converter offers an elegant way to control currents and voltages, and is able to set current to any level. While simple voltage converters can generate a fixed output voltage from an input voltage, this behavior isn’t ...