Posts by Olin Lathrop
i dont know how to control two outputs with a single control loop Neither does anyone else. Your output has two degrees of freedom, and your control input only one. That's a fundamental problem ...
I guess it would work. I have used electrodes on a PCB to detect whether water level got high enough to turn on a sump pump. It worked, although it hasn't been installed very long. In that case ...
I have run into an interesting phenomenon related to ceramic capacitors. This question is part of the effort to understand the issue, and eventually work around it. But first, some background of ...
First, let's redraw your schematic so that it's not so annoying to look at. High voltages go at top, low voltages at bottom, and logical flow left to right: This is not a great soft-start circu...
I would not do deliberate ground pours on a board like that. It's relatively small, and not exceptionally high frequency. I also wouldn't try to guess what effect or not it might have on the boar...
First, we have to clarify what you really mean by "embedded systems". There are many systems where something that is logically a PC is embedded. There is a whole industry around "single board com...
It appears you want a positive current source with the following specs: 0 to 28 V compliance range. Up to 100 mA, adjustable via 10 bit or more digital value. 36 V supply is available. The diss...
There are two predominant reasons you see N channel FETs more than P channel: N channel is the natural polarity for ground-referenced switches controlling loads with positive voltages. This is co...
You need a real transformer that converts 208 V to 230 V, so a ratio of 1:1.11. This can not be an auto-transformer because you need isolation between the primary and secondary. That is because y...
One way we can grow this community is to have existing users here mention the site at relevant gatherings. Unfortunately, those have been non-existent or virtual due to covid. Passing on a recomm...
You can't eliminate all noise, use no memory, no processing cycles, and not add some lag. However, you can do much better than a brute force "moving average" filter. FIR versus IIR filters There a...
First, let's draw the schematic properly so that it's not so annoying to look at: Yes, it's a differential amplifier. Q1 sinks current as a function of VIN+. Q3 and Q4 are a current mirror tha...
There is no "standard" 12 V DC jack. Asking end users to buy a separate power supply is asking for trouble. Don't expect users to know about center-positive versus center-negative, and inner and ...
Pure water does indeed have very high resistivity (different from "resistance"). Reasons water is dangerous around electricity include: Even small amounts of impurities greatly increase the condu...
Manufacturers can call their IC pins whatever they like. NC stands for "No connection", as the datasheet even says. There is nothing wrong with that. The only questionable part is "Must be conne...
Lundin's answer notes: I just realized that the on-topic page https://electrical.codidact.com/help/topics doesn't address electronics assembly. It does now. I just added: Physical construction ...
You are right in that at high speeds, like over 2 GHz, things are different than in "ordinary" circuits. The post of mine that you quoted was written in the context of such ordinary circuits. The ...
First, let's nail down what circuit you are asking about. Your description is somewhat vague, so I picked this interpretation: Q2 is the emitter follower stage, driven by the previous common emit...
The days of socketed microcontrollers are long gone. In most cases, the socket would cost more than the micro. Nowadays, microcontrollers, whether in quad flat pack packages or not, are surface mo...
Lower ESR can sometimes be a reason, as you say. However, most of the time the advantage is a wider frequency range over which the combined capacitor has low impedance or low dissipation. The fre...
PCB antennas are not designed by electrical engineers, but guys with pointy hats and wands They use trial and error after starting with the result of some mystic ritual including lots of mumbling ...
Repair questions can be on topic if it's about the underlying electronic principles. Just "How do I fix this?" is off topic. There is little wiggle room for trying to repair a consumer device tha...
It seems you want to protect a device against power spikes. The power supply is nominally 12 V, but can have spikes up to 79 V with an impedance of 500 mΩ. Two timing values were given, but they ...
At first this sounded like it might be a classic case of forgetting the flyback catch diode across the relay coil. However, now that you've posted a schematic we can see that a diode is built into...
