Is plain old FR-4 PCB material suitable for use in RF designs? Many say no, fewer say yes – who’s right? What PCB material do I need to use for RF? article tries to answer this question. It says that FR-4 can be suitable for many RF designs. This is not to say that FR-4 →
Board-level designers often have concerns about the proper way to handle grounding for integrated circuits (ICs) which have separate analog and digital grounds. Should the two be completely separate and never touch? Should they connect at a single point with cuts in the ground plane to enforce this single point or “Mecca” ground? How can →
circuits.io is a new promising looking free circuit editor in your browser. I has browser based schematic and board layout. Circuits.io promises to be an in-your-browser circuit design tool, that makes it fun and easy to design, share and produce electronic circuits. It plans to revolutionizing electronic design and building with open hardware community on →
This Brio wooden train toy table has lots of familiar electronics symbols. But does the robot logo some similarity to Android logo? Who has copied who? →
OpenPLC, for industrial automation to Halloween displays article factories have programmable logic controllers to take care of their automation tasks and they are also good devices to control your Halloween effects. open-plc project is an open hardware design to build your own programmable logic controller. Included in the OpenPLC are four 24V inputs, four 24V →
Low-Voltage I/O Voltages Used for Entertainment Control article tells results of the survey what low voltage I/O voltages are used in entertainment control industry. There are several different possible I/O voltages in use, in both AC and DC variations. According to the survey it seems that 12V and 24V DC are the most commonly used →
It is time for scary hacks. Halloween is just around the corner. Hare are some hacking ideas for Halloween. Arduino voice changer turns you into [Vader] article tells that Phil Burgess over at Adafruit put together an Arduino-powered voice changer to give his voice the gravitas of [James Earl Jones] or the lightheartedness of a →
Protecting your data center against power failure is crucial to providing maximum availability. Power loss or poor power quality is a major contributor to data center server down time. This task takes more than simply having UPS and a backup power source, such as a generator. Dual Power Paths: A Crucial Element in a High-Availability →
It seems that smart phone business have evolved to point where even relatively small companies can start to make their own phones. This developments like: many people who know mobile phones are looking for new jobs (business of many mobile phone companies not going that well) architectural changes (application processor communicating with separate ready communication →
The microprocessor world seems to be going in ARM direction. And so seems to be microcontrollers. Cheap ARM based 32-bit micro-controllers are taking their place and trying to replace less powerful 8- and 16-bit micro-controllers. I wrote earlier that Arduino Goes ARM. It took quite bit of time for Arduino to take that step and →