Usually, when measuring a child's height at home, a mark is drawn on the wall then the height is measured using a measuring tape. This process is not always easy and it may has low resolution. In an attempt to simplify this procedure, a new project was developed using an Arduino and a...

James @ seeed.cc has compiled a list of the most popular Arduino boards including schematics and PCB. You can download the files here. Arduino is now a very popular open source development board, many people are using the Arduino Development Board to develop interesting, creative...

Andy Brown wrote a detailed article on reverse engineering a CPU voltage regulator: A recent ebay fishing expedition yielded an interesting little part for the very reasonable sum of about five pounds. It’s a voltage regulator module from a Dell PowerEdge 6650 Xeon server. I...

Ken Shirriff did a teardown of a Sonicare electric toothbrush: The photos below show the top and bottom of the toothbrush internals. I expected to find a simple, low-cost mechanism, so I was surprised at how much complexity there was inside. The vibration mechanism (right) is built...

Graham Prophet  @ www.edn-europe.com discuss about LT3086 LDO. The 40V, 2.1A low dropout linear regulator (LDO) includes current monitoring with externally settable current limit and temperature monitoring with external control of thermal limit temperature. The device includes a...

Thomas Scherer @ elektormagazine.com shares the news about a CoolMOS Mosfet from Infineon. The latest 800V CoolMOS P7 800V MOSFET from Infineon is based on their superjunction technology. The device is available in twelve classes of RDS(on) beginning with  0.28 Ω and in six...

This is a very simple mains isolated dimmer with a triac output (phase control). It uses timer0 to do the timing. There is no user interface, the value of the triac ignition delay after a zero crossing is defined by setting the reload value of timer0 (Tmr0) in the software...

Dan Meeks shares his design idea on edn.com: This Design Idea presents a low power short circuit finder that capitalizes on the ear’s sensitivity to changes in frequency. The heart of the circuit is a voltage-to-frequency converter (based on Linear Tech’s AN45, Figure 13, by Jim...