Category: Miscellaneous
Use a transistor as a heating element
REC Johnson, B Lora Narayana, and Devender Sundi share their design idea on how to use a transistor as a heating element. It is common to use transistors for driving resistive heating elements. However, you can use the heat that a power transistor dissipates to advantage in several...
Continue Reading8 Channel Relay Board with onboard 5V regulator
This is a general purpose relay board accepting 8 inputs to drive 8 relays providing control requirement in your project. This board can also be used as an add-on card for the various Development board that we provide and various microcontroller boards. Features Robust Design...
Continue ReadingWithings GO activity tracker teardown
nick @ novemberfive.co tears-down the Withings GO activity tracker. First, we removed the battery. This is easy: you can simply open the back of the casing with the included tool or with a regular coin. The included battery turned out to be a Panasonic 3V CR2032 with a capacity of...
Continue ReadingICS501 simple frequency multiplier
Scott from SWHarden has published a new build: Today I made a high frequency multiplier using a single component: the ICS501 PLL clock multiplier IC. This chip provides 2x, 5x, 8x (and more) clock multiplication using an internal phased-lock loop (PLL). At less than a dollar on eBay,...
Continue ReadingHow to compare your circuit requirements to active-filter approximations
By Bonnie C. Baker (WEBENCH® Senior Applications Engineer): Numerous filter approximations, such as Butterworth, Bessel, and Chebyshev, are available in popular filter software applications; however, it can be time consuming to select the right option for your system. So how do...
Continue ReadingApp note: Solid-State Relays
Solid-state relays introduction from Vishay, (PDF) MOSFET SSRs feature an optocoupler construction, but have a pair of MOSFETs on the output instead of a phototransistor. A pair of source-coupled MOSFETs emulate an electromechanical relay by providing bidirectional switch capability...
Continue ReadingExploring the Transcend Wifi-SD card
James O'Neill explores a Transcend SD that he believes it's the smaller Linux server. It's actually a 16GB memory card, an ARM processor and a WIFI chip all in an SD card package. The way these cards works is different from the better known Eye-FI card. They are SERVERS : they...
Continue ReadingHacking the OWON SDS7102 Scope
Christer Weinigel did a teardown of OWON SDS7102 oscilloscope. He explained how its internals are connected, ported Linux to its Samsung SoC in the scope, succeeded in getting its peripherals working, and set to work programming the Xilinx FPGA that’s responsible for signal...
Continue Reading