The classic wooden breadboard is obsolete, but its name refers to a vital engineering tool that has changed to meet today’s component and design realities. Wooden breadboards are obsolete as platforms for circuits using modern components, of course, and so-called solderless breadboards are also of very limited usefulness. At the same time, the way designers […]
Featured
Breadboards evolve to meet 21st-century design needs, Part 2: Recent past and present
The classic wooden breadboard is obsolete, but its name continues to refer to a vital engineering tool that has changed to meet today’s component and design realities. As leaded components such as discrete transistors and low-pin-count ICs in DIP packages came into use in the late 1960s and 1970s, breadboarding technology evolved as well. Among […]
Breadboards evolve to meet 21st-century design needs, Part 1: The “Ancient” Past
The classic wooden breadboard is obsolete, but its name continues to refer to a vital engineering tool that has changed to meet today’s component and design realities. Breadboards have a special place and multiple meanings in the engineering lexicon. So, what is a breadboard? It can be a crude try-out version of a subcircuit to […]
How many types of radar are there?
Radio detection and ranging (radar) uses reflected radio waves to detect and determine the distance, angle, and velocity of objects relative to the radar system. A basic radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves in the radio or microwave spectrum (these can be pulsed or continuous), a transmitting antenna, a receiving antenna (often […]
How can a machine recognize hand gestures?
Gesture recognition is a user interface that allows computers to capture and interpret non-verbal communication, including facial expressions, head movements, body positioning, and hand motions as commands. Hand gestures are an increasingly common mode of computer control, and the types of sensors used to recognize hand gestures is growing. This FAQ briefly reviews how hand […]
Want to feel better?
With its 1-mm thick RoboSkin smart fabric sensor technology, BeBop Sensors, Inc. can provide tactile awareness for humanoid robots and prosthetics so they can feel interactions similar to humans. The skin-like coverings enable a true nervous system and human-like touch sensing of objects for any part of a robot including limbs, fingers, feet, head and […]
D-sub connectors: Everyone speaks of them incorrectly
You probably don’t know it, but you’ve been referring to most D-sub connectors incorrectly for your entire career. Here’s how to get them right, but you’ll be speaking a language that few understand. D-Subminiature (D-sub) connectors, you find them in consumer PCs, industrial equipment, and even in networking equipment. They’re everywhere and manufactured by many […]
Measuring and using static electricity
Many moons ago, a future member of our editorial staff was playing with his very first multimeter. He was a farm kid. One of his first experiments was to put the negative lead of the meter on a ground rod and the positive lead on one of the metal bands used to reinforce the interlocking […]
How to gauge LED flicker
A few years ago, back when ordinary LED bulbs still sold for north of $10 a piece, there was a great brouhaha about LED light flicker. Light flicker can certainly be dangerous. Sufficiently intense flicker at between 3 and 70 Hz can cause epileptic seizure in a small percentage of the population. And flicker that […]
What is “orthogonal”? (Part 4): eye diagrams
The phrase and concept “orthogonal” is widely used in engineering, but it is also often misunderstood. Just as both the time domain and frequency domain are two legitimate ways of looking at a signal from different perspectives linked by the Fourier transform, the constellation diagram has a time-domain complement called the eye diagram or eye […]
