Grounding and shielding is an often misunderstood process. It is common to hear quotes ranging from “it’s just black art!” to “the rules change all the time!” and “there’s no way to understand it!” These statements are often repeated but not true. There is a process, it hasn’t changed, and the more one knows about →
Electronics industry hopefully starts to glow after not so good year 2012. It’s safe to say that 2012 has been a wild ride for all of us. The global semiconductor industry has demonstrated impressive resilience in year 2012, despite operating in a challenging global macroeconomic environment. Many have already ratcheted back their expectations for 2013. →
There has been articles telling that Boeing 787 planes are grounded over safety concerns in USA. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered U.S. airlines to stop operating the Boeing 787, after a series of battery and fuel system failures have called into question the airworthiness of the newly developed composite aircraft. Japan’s two biggest airlines →
Yesterday the temperatures were at -28 degrees Celsius in southern Finland. That’s really cold. This is so cold that is starts to cause problems in all sorts of devices. I had problems in starting my car. The battery felt weak. I planned to measure the voltage in it with a multimeter I have in my →
EDN magazine articele Ground loops by Howard Johnson (Signal Integrity) article starts with question why in audio circuit designers avoid ground loops at all costs, yet in digital products you normally see a solid ground plane holding hundreds of circuits. This is a good question and the article gives answers to that. Audio designers like →
If you thought that capacitor orientation only matters for polarized varieties like electrolytic capacitors you should read one article to make you change your mind. In PCB Layout Tricks—striped capacitors and more article Bruce Trump looks at why some film capacitors have a stripe printed on one end and why their orientation can matter. Careful →
Many thousands new electronics products were announced during the past year. EDN Hot 100 products of 2012 article lists the ones that especially caught the attention of EDN magazine editors and readers. They range from ICs and components, to software, test instruments, development tools and sensors, and more. Take a look at this list. →
Happy birthday, Transistor article tells that the first working version of transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, was powered up 65 years ago today. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact →
phatIO a different way of interfacing a computer with the world that you might be used to. I first saw phatIO uses file system to control external hardware article at Hackaday.com that mentioned phatIO. phatIO is an USB I/O device that uses a mass storage file system for control. Using mass storage for I/O controlling →
Netduino is an interesting dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with Arduino shields. Netduino is an open source hardware platform that can run .NET Micro Framework 4.2 code. The Netduino is a dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with →