Articles - Measurement - 4

The pressure-sensor amplifier circuit of Figure 1 offers a number of advantages over the traditional approach using the classic three-op-amp instrumentation amplifier. The circuit can operate from a single supply and uses only two op amps and 1% ...

In test-and-measurement applications, you must provide overvoltage protection for the output terminals of amplifiers, power supplies, and similar components. The conventional way to accomplish this task is to add series resistors with the output ...

Introduction Current-sense resistors, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes, are used to measure current in many automotive, power control, and industrial systems. When using very low value resistors (a few milliohms or less), the resistance ...

While measuring op-amp input capacitance, what should you focus on? The answer is that you must ensure the measurement accuracy isn’t degraded by the stray capacitance and inductance of the PCB or test setup. You can minimize these issues by ...

By adding just two MCU I/O pins, a standard LED can also perform as a light-detecting photodiode. Sometimes people forget that light-emitting diodes can also detect light quite well. They're usable in a wide range of applications as ...

A power supply that I was examining used an opto-coupler in its feedback path for control of its output voltage. This is a commonplace and well established design approach, but the feedback loop’s unconditional loop stability was not ...

Machine vision systems use very short flashes of intense light to produce high speed images used in a wide variety of data processing applications. For instance, fast moving conveyor belts are run through machine vision systems for quick label and ...

For most applications, current measurements are made by sensing the voltage drop across a resistor. There are two locations in a circuit that resistors are commonly placed for current measurements. The first location is between the power supply and ...

Using a PN-junction diode for temperature measurement usually depends on its 2 mV/K temperature coefficient. Conventionally, you must amplify and digitize this voltage with an ADC before you can use the value in a microcontroller. Less well-known ...

In multiple-output power supplies in which a single supply powers circuitry of vastly different current draws, two perplexing steps are sensing the current that each output draws and deactivating the power supply in the event of an overload on that ...