A few years ago, I worked at a disk-drive company. We had a plating facility that required square waves to drive the high-voltage plating operation. The challenge was that the square wave's pulse width had to be variable, along with the duty ...
A “swamp cooler” is an easy way to obtain effective air conditioning, especially in hot and dry climates, if a water source is readily available. Although most units are very reliable, the storage-reservoir control usually uses a single ...
Figure 1 shows a flyback power supply that has low noise and uses a simple CMOS CD4093 IC for its control. The electrical noise of a converter arises mainly when current switches on. Diode recovery and charging parasitic capacitances create high ...
In a water-cooled power converter, analog-output sensors measure the cooling water temperature at three locations. If any of the three temperatures rises above a preset threshold, an alarm sounds and attracts the attention of the system's ...
Signals ranging from music to complex control-system waveforms may contain unequal positive and negative peak amplitudes. An envelope-follower circuit can track unequal peaks, but the ability to select a desired peak can enhance the circuit's ...
When using an optocoupler in a linear application, you should consider its gain drift with temperature. Traditional single- and dual-transistor-output devices have a notable gain drift with temperature. In recent years, some temperature-compensated ...
The residual-current circuit breaker in Figure 1 continuously monitors the supply lines for any leakage current and immediately disconnects the supply if necessary. Load-supply wires, both live and neutral, pass through the magnetic core of the ...
Supervisory circuits normally monitor a microprocessor's supply voltage, asserting reset to the IC during power-up, power-down, and brownout. In this way, the circuit ensures that the supply voltage is stable before the microprocessor boots, ...
The easy way to clamp a signal to a given value is to use two zener diodes, connected back-to-back. This method has several disadvantages. The accuracy of the clamping depends on the tolerance of the zener diodes, and the clamping is not ...
A designer who uses a phototransistor to convert a modulated optical signal to an electrical signal frequently encounters problems when high-intensity background light saturates the phototransistor. When its base terminal floats, a ...