Articles - 11

Machine vision systems use very short flashes of intense light to produce high speed images used in a wide variety of data processing applications. For instance, fast moving conveyor belts are run through machine vision systems for quick label and ...

Over the past few decades, the circuit board and electronics industry have seen tremendous innovation and technological advancement. Consequently, many types of circuit boards have emerged to fulfill the different electronics and industrial ...

For containing large amounts of bulk capacitance, controlling inrush currents poses problems. The simplest approach involves placing an inrush-limiting resistor in series with the capacitor bank, but a resistor wastes power and adds a voltage drop. ...

Reducing low-frequency (1/f) noise generated by an IC voltage reference can prove difficult. In theory, adding a lowpass filter to a reference's output reduces noise. In practice, a lowpass RC filter for suppression of noise frequencies below ...

The simple circuit shown accomplishes full-wave signal rectification with only one transistor (Fig. 1). This is done by exploiting the “gain reversal” phenomenon exhibited by a saturated bipolar transistor. This circuit will find ...

The human ear is very good at detecting noise or missing cycles in a waveform, and since we have two ears, we can monitor two signals at once. I recently repaired an older lab instrument containing a quadrature encoder made with an incandescent ...

For most applications, current measurements are made by sensing the voltage drop across a resistor. There are two locations in a circuit that resistors are commonly placed for current measurements. The first location is between the power supply and ...

It’s been nearly six years since we unleashed the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero on an unsuspecting world. Of all the products we’ve launched, Zero is still the one I’m proudest of: it most perfectly embodies our mission to give people ...

Using a PN-junction diode for temperature measurement usually depends on its 2 mV/K temperature coefficient. Conventionally, you must amplify and digitize this voltage with an ADC before you can use the value in a microcontroller. Less well-known ...

Solar-photovoltaic arrays seem to get cheaper and more efficient every day, making them increasingly practical in renewable and/or remote power supply applications. Still, the voltage generated by any given array varies significantly with loading, ...