Design Guides
Collection of articles to help you design better embedded systems.
Demystifying Thermopile Sensors
Thermopile temperature sensors offer the advantage of non-contact temperature measurement, which has made them more popular than traditional contact-type temperature sensors. These sensors use...
Heat-Blocking Features Imaged by Ultrasound
When power is applied, an integrated circuit begins to heat up within its package. It shortly reaches the operating temperature range for which it...
FPGAs in Data Centres: Opportunities and Challenges (Part 1)
Data centres play a major role in expanding the enterprise computing capabilities. These are a centralised repository for storage, management and dissemination of data...
How to Correctly Design a DIY Smoke Sensor System
Fire sensors are essential elements for detecting fires in homes accurately, quickly and for reliably accomplishing both first-order firefighting and second-order disaster prevention. To...
Iso-Buck Converters: Better than Flyback Converters?
Input voltages below 60V are considered to be safe to touch. Still, there remains a need for isolation in this operating range. After all,...
How to Reduce Size and Weight of Pulse Load Power Supply
There are a number of electronics devices that require clear, pulsed power supply. For instance, power consumption of contemporary high-performance processor devices directly depends...
Ensuring Lower Thermal Dissipation for Higher Efficiency
A renowned manufacturing firm incurred heavy monetary losses when clients returned 5000 units of its LED lights after discovering that the supplied units failed...
Implementing Small, Efficient Power Subsystems for New Li-Ion E-Bikes
The market for electric bicycles (e-bikes), particularly those with lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, is growing worldwide. When designing power systems for e-bike controllers, it’s important...
15 Free Mechatronics e-Books
Presented here are 15 free mechatronics ebooks, that will come in handy for robotics and mechatronics enthusiasts.
1. Robotics
Author/s: Wikibooks
Publisher: Wikibooks, 2012
The author of the...
Understanding Signal Frequency Spectrum
A signal can be viewed as a composition of a number of sinusoidal signals with varied amplitude, frequency and phase. Distinguishing this composition requires...
Why Run Gate-Level Simulations?
Gate level simulation is used to boost the confidence regarding implementation of a design and can help verify dynamic circuit behaviour, which cannot be...
With the Right Converter, a Single Battery Can Power Your Portable Design
When it comes to low-power portable devices, why not rely on a single battery for the power? I see many such applications that require...
Processors undergoing changes to save power
Power versus performance is an ongoing battle, with the best involving a compromise between the two. High-performance system(s)-on-chip (SoC) designers often struggle to achieve...
Controlling A Linear Actuator with an Arduino
There is a wide application of linear actuator where one wants to move something, but they do not want to physically get involved in...
A Filterless Design For Air Pollution Control
This article takes a look at the causes, effects and control of air pollution in the urban environment. It also introduces easy-to-construct home and...
Smart Coding Techniques And Their Benefits For Electronics
Electronic devices feature a large number of small components, each piece being highly important to their overall functionality and safety. The responsibility for ensuring...
Material and Design Come Together To Forge Reliable PCBs
As we moved towards touchscreen phones with ultra-smart features, we also reduced the lifetime of our mobile phones. A case that comes to mind...
Suggestions for Replacing Film Capacitors with Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitors
As the capacity of multi-layer ceramic capacitors increases, the number of cases in which multi-layer ceramic capacitors are being used in areas that were...