Inadequate shielding and bad grounding are often blamed when measurements are inaccurate, especially in high-impedance applications. In fact, shielding and grounding problems are frequently responsible for measurement errors, but many test system developers aren’t quite sure why...

Jim McLucas, author of the Design Idea Circuit measures capacitance or inductance wanted to respond to some discussion about using this Design Idea...

Engineers usually have access to signal and function generators, as well as frequency counters and oscilloscopes, but they may not have access to capacitance or inductance meters...

This is a simple and fully automatic, 12 V uninterruptible power supply system for small/medium power appliances...

The common JFET current-source has average output impedance and depends heavily on the JFET's VP and IDSS variations. These manufacturing variations limit the initial accuracy of the current setpoint that the circuit can obtain with a fixed R1...

ISFETs and MEMFETs (ion-sensitive and membrane FETs) are solid-state chemical sensors that provide an electrical signal associated with the change of a chemical concentration in a solution. These types of sensors need a stable operating point...

LEDs find wide use as indicators and as light emitters in devices such as optocouplers. In some applications, the LED or the emitter may be located remotely at some distance from the main unit...

Recently, my neighbor expressed a deep interest in building a low-power inverter from scratch. This portable power inverter takes the dc output from a low-voltage accumulator and creates a stable 230-VAC/50-Hz mains suitable for powering small items of equipment...

If you want to swap charge in either direction between unevenly loaded positive and negative battery buses, you need an inverting dc transformer. One implementation is the symmetrical flyback converter...

Off-chip losses include those across the equivalent series resistance in the input, output and flying capacitors, as well as the inductor. Choosing ceramic capacitors with very low (<20 mΩ) ESR renders their losses almost negligible...