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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Every time when developer is selecting a transducers for their projects they have to look through various parameters and select part which best fits the design needs. This time lets look at some transducer characteristics that can be found in specifications.
Transducer Range
First of all lets clear out what is a range of a transducer. Range [...]

Simply speaking X10 protocol allows transmitting data over power lines. X10 uses a PLC(Power Line Carrier) technology. How does this work? Specification says that each time 60Hz AC signal crosses zero line there is a 120kHz burst transmitted with duration of 1ms.

 
One crossing burst forms one information bit. Simply speaking if wee need to form [...]

Hall sensors are common sensors of many types measuring devices including linear or angular motion, magnetic field, current, etc. main convenience of hall sensors is that they don’t have to be mechanically connected to object. Also they are simple, cheap that makes them attractive in many industries like automotive, manufacturing, aviation. There are manu manufacturers [...]

In specifications of operational amplifiers there are maximum limits of allowed voltages on pins. Maximum currents are limited as well. So voltage and current they both limit allowed dissipated power Pmax=Umax*Imax.
In well designed circuits Op Amps should have protection circuits from various overloads like short circuit, high common phase voltage level in differential inputs, electrostatic [...]

All regular voltage regulators (like 7805) have several disadvantages like output voltage is always lower than input and some power is dissipated in control element. Dissipated power is approximately equal to I(Vin-Vout).
There is another way to generate regulated voltage. Method is different from previous. In switching regulator a transistor operates as a saturated switch which [...]

Most of op-amp circuits run from symmetrical bipolar supply source lets say ±15V. The simplest way to generate symmetrical split supplies is to use a pair of 3 terminal voltage regulators. For instance lets take two voltage regulators: 7815 and 7915.

 
If you need an adjustable variant of dual polarity regulated voltage source you can [...]