Amplifiers which must produce significant output power face challenges of performance and efficiency. The industry has some long-established designations for classes of amplifiers as well as some relatively new classes. First a look at the older but still widely used classes commonly known as A, B, AB, C, and D. The Class A amplifier provides […]
basics
What is Proportional (PID) Control and why is it used? (Part 1)
Closed-loop control is the foundation of our modern automated world. In simplest terms, this approach applies negative feedback to a system to achieve a desired result. Consider the control of temperature, the most widely measured and controlled real-world physical parameter. If the measured value of this process variable is above the desired setpoint value, we […]
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Analyzing the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus
A serial bus can be more efficient than the traditional parallel bus. But there are challenges in representing and making sense of the serial data flow in the context of clock timing. These difficulties can be resolved by using the multi-channel capabilities of advanced oscilloscopes such as the Tektronix Series 3000 instruments. The key to […]
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Basics of working with I2C buses
Back in olden days, parallel buses were used to link electronic building blocks. Today serial buses have largely replaced them. There are numerous components for many applications that have standard serial interfaces, and this trend makes serial technology a good choice for design engineers. Because there are fewer signal lines, serial bus electronics take up […]
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Digital potentiometer or digipot: Applications and uses
A digital potentiometer (or “digipot”) operates like a traditional mechanical potentiometer (pot), which is a variable resistor, except the digipot is an integrated chip (IC) that accepts signal input rather than the physical movement of a shaft or slide for adjustment. Essentially, both types of potentiometer are analog devices that provide variable resistance. However, a […]
Choosing a temperature-measurement sensing method
Temperature is a parameter that often needs measuring. It may be within an enclosure, on a PCB, remotely or even “wirelessly”. Wireless, in this case, does not necessarily mean a remote sensor communicating using radio frequencies, it can mean a pyroelectric sensor. Pyroelectric sensors are very long wavelength detectors which measure radiation in the 6-15μm […]
Ode to reliable USB connectors
Because our work depends so much on the technologies we utilize, one of our year-end reviews covers a post-mortem summary of all failures related to our equipment use. The summary includes system failures, which are thankfully rare, and also encompasses use-model failures such as our discovery that the RF data-link receivers we use on location […]
The best (and nearly) free education that you can get…earning $67K to $103K a year in under 3 months
If this sounds too good to be true, it is not: read on. Abe Lincoln was one of those guys that didn’t have a college education but made it to the top as a self-educated man. Back then, you didn’t have to have a 4-year college degree to get a decent paying job. Nearly everyone […]
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ADC specs: resolution, accuracy, repeatability, and throughput
Here, we review some common specifications for successive approximation register (SAR) and sigma delta analog to digital converters (ADCs.) For converters, resolution is the number of bits per conversion cycle that the converter is capable of processing. For example, a converter with 12 bits of resolution is often referred to as “12 bits wide,” since […]
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The Internal Processor Bus: data, address, and control bus
A bus is a pathway for digital signals to rapidly move data. There are three internal buses associated with processors: the data bus, address bus, and control bus. Together, these three make up the “system bus.” The system bus is an internal bus, intended to connect the processor with internal hardware devices, and is also […]
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