Innovation is about finding a better way of doing something. Like many of the new development buzzwords (which many of them are over-used on many business documents), the concept of innovation originates from the world of business. It refers to the generation of new products through the process of creative entrepreneurship, putting it into production, →
I have read more than year ago (2012) interesting articles about Digilent‘s Analog Discovery Kit. I even quickly tried the WaveForms Software the cames with it (freely available and testable without hardware). It looked interesting, but I decided that maybe I don’t at the moment need this and skipped it (I did not even write →
Nowadays the most commonly used microphone types that need power from microphone connector are PC sound card microphones (3.5 mm plug) and Phantom powered professional microphones (XLR connector). Those two microphones are not compatible with each other, but there are cases where you might want to interchange them. In this posting I will describe how →
Computer microphones: Interfacing Microphones to Computer Sound Cards is a nice compact document on interfacing different microphones to PC sound cards. It starts with the same basics as I covered on my electret mic interfacing document an continues with some more sound card interfacing details (including some stereo mics on some sound card). The document →
Sparkfun has pretty interesting to look at article How LEDs are Made. How LEDs are Made factory tour article shows how LED supplier YunSun (Shenzhen China) makes LEDs. YunSun buys their LED dies from Taiwanese company (thin sheets contains thousands of LED dies). LED wire bonding machine attaches a hair-thin gold wire from the top →
Multimeter design has been somewhat of a stagnant craft, the basic look and layout being maintained for a several decades. The shape has been pretty much the same, and they are typically stand-alone instruments that don’t usually connect to any other device (although some meters have had PC connectivity typically through RS-232 or USB). Now →
Every electrical engineer who does DIY projects knows that dozens of free resistor calculators are out there that can save quite a bit of tedious work. Other simple tools can be found, but traditionally the free tool arsenal would stop there. To help sort out the nonsense from the useful online tools, check this blog →
I mentioned Fritzing two years ago and now I find coming back to use this software. Fritzing is an open source software initiative that was to support designers and artists ready to move from physical prototyping to actual product. Today Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for →
When I was designing the measurement circuit used in my How to measure smartphone power usage posting, I needed to design a RC low pass filter to it. I could have picked an electronics book and formulas in it, but instead of manual calculation I used Google to find a tool for that on-line. There →
The problem: I need to measure how much power different Android applications make the phone to consume. Measurement method: Measure how much current the phone takes from it’s own battery. So I needed to somehow attack a measurement device between battery terminal and battery contact on the phone. This could be made by using a →