Many recent Design Ideas ( Ref, 1 ) have involved button-pushing to control power. Some may have been more resistant to contact-bounce than others but how can we really check that? This DI describes how some simple circuitry can simulate bouncy ...
Precision-matched capacitor pairs are commercially available items, but only in a limited range of values, working voltage, and dielectrics. Plus, sometimes an extra critical application with extra tight tolerances (or an extra tight budget) can ...
Applications such as turbidity measurement and densitometry require cleanly pulsed light sources with stable amplitudes. The LED driver in Figure 1 illuminates retinal neurons in a biological experiment that has similar requirements. For a given ...
I recently published a simple design ( Ref. 1 ) for a platinum resistance detector (PRTD) 4 to 20 mA transmitter circuit, illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1. The PRTD 4 to 20 mA loop transmitter with constant current PRTD excitation that relies on ...
High accuracy, stability, and wide operating range make platinum RTDs (resistance temperature detectors) popular temperature transducers. Signal conditioning these devices requires care to utilize their desirable characteristics. Figure 1’s ...
In today’s world, both households and industrial facilities are exploring ways to improve power reliability by harnessing multiple energy sources, not just the electricity from the grid. One clever solution: Automatic transfer switch (ATS). ...
Accurate, inexpensive, and mature platinum resistance temperature detectors (PRTDs) with an operating range extending from the cryogenic to the incendiary are a gold (no! platinum! ) standard for temperature measurement. Similarly, the 4 to 20 mA ...
Boost converters are non-isolated DC-DC converters that step up voltage. In some applications, users expect protection against reverse polarity, short circuits, and other anomalous conditions. The basic PWM boost topology is shown in Figure 1. ...
Conventional astable oscillator circuits that use CMOS logic gates, bipolar transistors or low current op Amps, often require more current than necessary. The circuit shown generates a low frequency square wave signal while drawing only 0.5 ...
Design Idea (DI) contributors have recently explored various possibilities for ON/OFF power control using just a momentary contact “shiny modern push-button,” many of which build off of Nick Cornford’s “To press on or hold ...