Posts by Pete W
Real life example. The machine shop of the company where I work has HAAS VF2 milling centers. At 3.5 tons, you'd figure a big enough to warrant some care and respect. The favored method of data tr...
I recently realized something blindingly obvious that I'd overlooked for a few years - that I can generate a servicable PWM triangle wave from a micro by using two PWM outputs with timers set to sl...
What follows is a proposed concept of a simple (in principle!) way to generate a fixed-amplitude triangle wave, using two clocks, an XOR gate, and not using any processor cycles. It is practical i...
My question is trying to understand if there is an effect on the switching time, on both turn-on and turn-off, between the following configurations. A mirror set up to switch a current, and there ...
Simple thing that I realized I should know but do not -- when is an MOV preferable to a TVS diode (with some associated network to really make it work, in both cases)? Is it even something to routi...
immediate comments, going left to right in circuit: C61 ... can form undamped LC with input wiring, and thus overshoot to nearly twice Vin on plugin (or more likely some V a bit above Vbr at whi...
The simplicity of zero-crossing measurements is attractive. Regarding "Full period" zero crossing (i.e. time between rising-zero-crossings, or between falling-zero-crossings), compared to "half pe...
This answer is regarding the resonance issue that C2 is fixing, and how it could be done with a smaller cap. There are two aspects of it. To start, consider the 5.6uH vs the 10uF capacitors. It ca...
Question about relative humidity specification for electronics. Industrial automation, indoors, cabinet or instrument enclosure. The failure mechanisms at the upper limit are fairly intuitive. I'm...
The USB chip will obviously be fine, and so will that MCU at most speeds. In practice the USB VDD coming out of a computer will be pretty well regulated at low frequencies. One concern is when usi...
Inrush, overcurrent, fuse, etc: That hot-swap IC has both current limit (ie for diode and fuse) and MOSFET-power limit, and the time to blow the fuse is longer than timescales of the semiconductors...
I'm wondering if there are particular aspects of an oscilloscope probe's performance that tend to suffer, or failure points to look out for, if/when buying lower-end makes of oscilloscope probes (l...
Small-shop question here. Is there a convenient tool for making the bend shown below, other than a pair of pliers that happens to be just the right size, and is it worth it for qty low 100's? ...
Background: I have several microcontroller based projects with custom PCB that have been in very-low-volume production, but the quantities are starting to go up. (batch sizes now ~100 and threateni...
If the main function is logic and activation of on/off signals, and the number of output combinations and their timing needs are not prohibitive, The minimal test with actual mcu hardware, actual r...
It's suboptimal. You could try to greatly oversample and average it out, but it would raise questions about aliasing. Depending on how fast the ADC is sampled, you might get aliasing of the 10mVa...
PCB's and components are expected to be used with the common SAC solder, there's little reason to use SnPb, IMO. I learned on SnPb. After a brief transition for RoHS to re-calibrate the "feel" of i...
UPDATED. based on clarification to original question. To be clear, just an idea, not tested for this situation! It is abusing the V_I_L margin on the 3.3V CMOS input, so series diode should be sc...
A bit of a tangent, but in mcu firmwares, higher order filters can also be implemented directly with biquad sections. More work to implement vs single pole, but very reusable. Although to be honest...
What is causing this [ABC-news video via Twitter] spectacular power-line phenomenon? [image: still from ABC News]
Regarding string-based common protocol vs binary, there are indisputable reasons why binary is simpler, faster (these days rarely limiting), and arguably less trouble prone up to the level of compl...
I'd guess surge resistance and redundancy, rather than power dissipation. Looks like 10 stages of 5x parallel 2k going left to right?? So that's 10x400 = 4k. Perhaps used for parallel damping the...
