Archive for May, 2007

How to solder SMD at home even better-Part two

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

This is continue of part one. Following advises are for how to solder SMD parts with improved technology.
Oven isolation

As isolation material there can glass insulation be used. In this case glass insulation was packed in aluminum foil:

Inspected improvement in heating speed:

0.95% without isolation;

1.50% with isolation only inside oven;

1.72% full isolation.

How to solder SMD at home-Part one

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Soldering SMD parts isn’t hard task and there are many methods of doing this. Lets go through several SMD soldering methods and examples.
Method 1
For this you will need:

Good eyes or magnifying glass. Better one and another;

Soldering iron with small tip ~10W;

solder wire with diameter about 0.6mm

Steps to follow:

cut solder wire in pieces in length of [...]

Very simple IR detector that controls relay

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

The circuit of this Infrared(IR) detector circuit is a simple light relay which triggers when infrared light is applied to phototransistor Q1. This device can be used in control systems. When infrared light is OFF, Q1 transistor and relay K1 are normally closed.

 
When IR diode is transmitting IR light phototransistor Q1 opens and thus relay [...]

Quality music sound in the car

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

It is obvious that for most of drivers car is more than transportation vehicle. Sometimes people spend hours in the car everyday and listens not only news radio broadcast, but also listens music. To have good quality music sound in the car require more than good speakers and power amps, but also some smart solutions [...]

How PCB files are transfered to circuit boards

Monday, May 21st, 2007

When you are done with “clean” period of task – designing, drawing a circuit and tracing a PCB, you need to transfer a design to a real board. Here starts what I call a “messy” part of design. When designing at home there are several options - to use prototyping boards or make PCB [...]

PCB routing considerations

Monday, May 21st, 2007

One of hardest tasks when fabricating PCB’s is Printed Circuit Board(PCB) routing. There is no unified rules on how properly board should be routed and it would be impossible to write them as situation on each board is different. One of general rules are that the shortest routes are the best because longer routes tend [...]

Microcontroller Simulators and emulators

Friday, May 18th, 2007

Sometimes you just haven’t ability to flash microcontroller in order to test program functionality in development phase. For this there may be many reasons like you don’t have a prototype ready or you need to test parts of code and so on. For this there are software simulators used which simulates microcontroller work without microcontroller [...]

Protect you car from rusting using cathode protection

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

Who has a car know that smal scratch may cause a rusting which will expand even under painted areas. And fight rusting id pretty hard tas. And so there are lots of methods that car keepers using. Ones are using anti-rust coating… but it has shortcomings – succes depends on how good it have been [...]

How does tri-state buffers work

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Those who work with microcontrollers probably know about data buses. Only one device(memory, peripherals), that are connected to bus can work at one moment. So only one unit can have direct connection to bus besides CPU which usually is a host. So decoding circuit determines the desired unit and connects it to bus. Other devices [...]

Using Gray code for rotary encoders

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Gray code is well known and widely used in angular movement systems where angular positions has to be known. Gray code encoder can be constructed pretty easily by masked wheel where tracks are read with photocells.

 
Did you look at the picture and thought for yourself that gray code is same binary code. Well no… main [...]