Circuits & Schematics - Measurement - 4

In the early days of personal computers, incorporation of one or two (or more) RS-232 serial ports as general purpose I/O adaptors was common practice. Recently, this “vintage” standard has been largely replaced (after all, it is 64 ...

A variety of analog front-end functions typically assist ADCs to do their jobs. These include instrumentation amplifiers (INA), digitally programmable gain (DPG), and sample and holds (S H). The circuit in Figure 1 is a bit atypical in merging all ...

There are many circuits of soldering station controllers, but absolutely all close the temperature feedback loop using the soldering iron heater thermistor. The performances of the soldering station can be improved and the circuit can be made ...

Using the system shown in Fig. 1, you can quickly test a cable containing twisted-wire pairs and detect open or reversed pairs, shorted pairs, and shorts between unrelated pairs. The tester consists of an active test set that plugs into one end of ...

Introduction Photovoltaic (PV) modules are popular and affordable sources of renewable energy. Most photovoltaic modules last about 20 years, but thermal stress and moisture ingress, among other causes, can degrade a module’s output power ...

In 1986, famed analog innovator Jim Williams, in “Designs for High Performance Voltage-to-Frequency Converters” ( Reference 1 ) published his 100 MHz “King Kong” VFC. If anyone’s ever done a faster VFC, I haven’t ...

Analog-to-digital conversion based on the classic combination of a voltage-to-frequency converter (VFC) with a counter has been around for (many) decades, mainly because it has some durable time-proven advantages. VFC digitization is naturally ...

Some applications, such as ADC testing and calibration, require a DAC with extremely good resolution, monotonicity, accuracy, and resolution. In these categories of performance, the circuit in Figure 1 is hard to beat. Its typical specifications ...

The exposure tester in this Design Idea measures the on time of a light source, whether an LED, an incandescent lamp, a halogen lamp, or another source. It can be made with an ordinary stopwatch and a few simple components (figures 1 and 2). An ...

Recently I published a simple platinum resistance temperature detector (PRTD) design idea ( Reference 1 ) that was largely inspired by a deviously clever earlier DI by Nick Cornford ( Reference 2 ). Remarkable and consistently constructive critical ...