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OEMsecrets.com – Electronic Component Suppliers Price Comparison Search Engine

Posted on 8 September, 2016 by mixos

There are a number of electronic component search engines in the industry, but finding the best price can often be time intensive. Quite often purchasers are simply looking to locate the most competitive price from suppliers and fast!

OEMsecrets has launched the first price comparison search engine in the electronics market. The UK shopping site helps you to find the best prices and compare inventory availability from dozens of the industry’s largest authorised distributors. By entering a manufacturer part number, buyers can save both time and money when searching to purchase electronic components online. OEMsecrets compares prices on over 15 million electronic component products from suppliers such as Digikey, Mouser, Avnet, Arrow, Farnell, TTI, Buerklin and many more. Suppliers are categorised into authorised and non-authorised divisions for ease of use.

Buyers are able enter a quantity to find the total cost of the product, change currency and filter by region. ‘Buy Now’ links can be clicked, which sends users directly into the shopping cart of distributors ready to order. Datasheets, reference designs, images and samples from suppliers such as Texas Instruments to confirm product specifications are also accessible on the search results page. Compare prices of part number OPA333AID as an example.

The shopping site is also close to launching a price comparison BOM tool which auto selects the best prices from suppliers for hundreds of line items on a components list from authorised distributors.

For those buyers looking to save time locating components and finding the best price online, take a look at OEMsecrets.com

Hall sensors consume no more than 1.6 mA

Posted on 8 September, 20168 September, 2016 by mixos

Comprising both switch and latch types, the TLx496x series of Hall sensors from Infineon offers precise switching points, stable operation, and low power consumption. At 1.6 mA, the devices consume 50% less power than comparable products, and the 5-V versions consume just 1.4 mA. by @ Susan Nordyk @ edn.com:

All of the TLx496x series sensors integrate a Hall element, voltage regulator, choppers, oscillator, and output driver, reducing both board space and system costs. The voltage regulator powers the Hall element and active circuits. The chopper ensures that the temperature remains stable and minimizes the effects of process fluctuations.

Hall sensors consume no more than 1.6 mA – [Link]

Photovoltaic simulator system adds automated MPPT Efficiency Test

Posted on 8 September, 20168 September, 2016 by mixos

An added test facility enables test of a 1,500V photovoltaic (solar energy) inverter’s static and dynamic maximum peak power tracking (MPPT) according to European Standard EN50530, with a single command, creating downloadable photovoltaic I-V curves, plus static and dynamic EN50530 test reports. by Graham Prophet @ www.edn-europe.com

Photovoltaic simulator system adds automated MPPT Efficiency Test – [Link]

Touch Weather Station using a DHT22 Sensor and a Raspberry Pi 3 with TKInter

Posted on 7 September, 20167 September, 2016 by mixos

educ8s.tv tests the new Raspberry Pi 3 board, by building a simple but useful project.

A few months back, the Raspberry Pi 3 board was released. It is a great new board because it now offers WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity out of the box! It uses a quad core processor which operates at 1.2Ghz and it has 1GB of RAM available. From the benchmarks I have seen, this board is at least 3 times faster than the original Raspberry Pi. It can run Linux and offers 40 GPIO pins for our projects. The impressive thing is its price. It costs around 40$ and Gearbest.com was kind enough to send me a sample unit in order to test it and build projects with it.

Touch Weather Station using a DHT22 Sensor and a Raspberry Pi 3 with TKInter – [Link]

A miniature persistence-of-vision board

Posted on 7 September, 2016 by mixos

axio.ms published an update of the board and firmware of their SMD POV display.

This device is simply 8 bright SMD LEDs and an AVR uC and makes use of the Persistence of Vision effect. You wave it about, and it writes messages in the air, with no wires, liquids or unpleasant bending! Some would say that it’s quite similar to magic. It’s a double-sided kitchen PCB (toner transfer) with a flower on the back. It has a single button; held for a second, it switches it on/off. When on, a quick click switches between a set of predefined messages. It runs off a CR2032 until the end of time.

A miniature persistence-of-vision board – [Link]

VHF Frequency Counter with PC Interface

Posted on 7 September, 20167 September, 2016 by mixos

Scott has published a new build:

This is the general idea behind how this frequency counter works. It’s so simple! It’s entirely digital, and needs very few passive components. sn74lv8154 is configured in 32-bit mode (by chaining together its two 16-bit counters, see the datasheet for details) and acts as the front-end directly taking in the measured frequency.

VHF Frequency Counter with PC Interface – [Link]

Withings GO activity tracker teardown

Posted on 6 September, 2016 by mixos

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 225mAh. In other words, it could power a device consuming 225mA for one hour. According to the Withings GO product website, the battery can last up to 8 months, so simple math tells us that the tracker consumes only 43.4 microamps. With real life usage, that number will probably turn out a little higher, but even then it’s a very low-power device.

Withings GO activity tracker teardown – [Link]

Time Machine – A Smart Clock That Does What You Say Using Alexa Voice Service

Posted on 6 September, 20166 September, 2016 by Yahya Tawil

With a controller and a seven segment display, showing the time is not a so special feature, but when this clock can listen to the user and do what they want, that’s what worth highlighting a “Time Machine”.

Analysing human voice and take action based on that is not so simple. That’s why using a ready made solution is needed.
Intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software designed to perform tasks specified by user voice instructions. Alexa from Amazon, Google Now and Siri from Apple are examples of intelligent personal assistant software.

Some IPAs are designed to be integrated within IoT devices and Alexa is one of them. Amazon has an intelligent cloud service that allows developers to voice-enable any connected product only using a microphone and speaker, it’s called Alexa Voice Service (AVS).

Nick Triantafillou in his project, “Time Machine” used AVS to take the voice command.
The project contains Raspberry Pi 3, 1.2″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display, wireless speaker and a push button switch.

Nick followed the steps to enable Alexa Voice Service (AVS) for his Raspberry Pi 3 using this tutorial. To make the project more exciting he used IFTTT service so he can make any conditional action using Alexa’s voice orders with IFTTT.

To see the full instructions and details of getting all hardware to work with Raspberry, please go to the project page on hackster.io.

Nick demonstrates the project in the video below:

Public Release of ESP32 SoC The Big Brother Of ESP8266

Posted on 5 September, 2016 by Yahya Tawil

It has been about one year since the announcement of ESP32 SoC and the beginning of its beta testing for some developers.

ESP32Leter — A Letter From Espressif Systems Announcing The ESP32 – Source: twitter

Last Month we covered the release of ESP-WROOM-32 module datasheet, which promised that “New SDK features, tutorials and example applications will be released over the next few months.”.

The ESP-32 datasheet was released at the end of August. So let us discover the details of ESP-32 SoC.

ESP32 Connectivity

ESP32 is a single 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combo chip available in QFN48 (6×6 mm) package. The new chip supports 802.11 b/g/n/e/i protocols with a data-rate up to 150Mbps. The previous ESP8266EX SoC supports 802.11 b/g/n only.

The security is enhanced in ESP32 by supporting WPA/WPA2/WPA2-Enterprise/Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), while ESP8266EX supports only WPA and WPA2.

ESP32 features a BT4.2 controller and host stack with Xtensa Dual-Core 32-bit LX6 microprocessors up to 240 MHz. Keep in mind that ESP8266 has single core and lacks a bluetooth transceiver.

ESP32 Peripherals

A lot of peripherals were added and enhanced. Up to 18-channel ADC with 12-bit resolution, two DAC channels with 8-bit resolution, 4 × SPI, 2 × I2S, 3 × UART and 2 × I2C.
ESP32 also features 1 host (SD/eMMC/SDIO), 1 slave (SDIO/SPI), Ethernet MAC interface with dedicated DMA and IEEE 1588 support, CAN 2.0, IR (TX/RX), Motor PWM and LED PWM with up to 16 channels.

Internal Sensors

Hall, 10 × touch and temperature sensors are internally available in ESP32 SoC.

Cryptographic Acceleration Hardware

Cryptographic acceleration hardware is for AES, HASH (SHA-2) library, RSA and ECC with Random Number Generator (RNG).

Memory

ESP32’s internal Memory units are:

448 KBytes ROM for booting and core functions.
520 KBytes on-chip SRAM for data and instruction.
8 KBytes SRAM in RTC, which is called RTC FAST Memory and can be used for data storage and main CPU during RTC Boot from the deep-sleep mode.
1 Kbit of EFUSE, of which 256 bits are used for the system (MAC address and chip configuration) and the remaining 768 bits are reserved for customer applications.

ESP32 runs user application from external memory just like ESP8266EX. ESP32 supports 4 x 16 MBytes of external QSPI Flash, while ESP8266EX supports up to 16 MBytes only. Could we have in the future a version of ESP32 with an internal ROM for user application like ESP8285 (the ESP8266 with internal ROM version) ?

Price And Development Tools

You can order ESP-32 SoC -the chip only not a module- for about 2.9$/unit from the Espressif store on Taobao.

Ai-Thinker, one of the third-party manufacturers of ESP modules, introduces ESP-3212 module on their Taobao store.

The demo board is currently for some beta users, and not yet officially available for public.

ESP32 Demo board - Image courtesy Ady — ESP32 Demo board – Image courtesy Ady

LTC Design Note: Dual 9A, step-down μModule regulator with digital power system management

Posted on 4 September, 2016 by mixos

Jian Li, Yingyi Yan and Marvin Macairan have published a Design Note based on LTM4675 dual DC/DC regulator.

The LTM4675 is a dual 9A or single 18A step-down μModule (micromodule) DC/DC regulator featuring remote configurability and telemetry monitoring of power system management (PSM) parameters over PMBus—an open standard I²C-based digital interface protocol. Its 16mm × 11.9mm × 3.51mm BGA package includes analog control loops, precision mixed-signal circuitry, EEPROM, power MOSFETs, inductors, and supporting components. It features a wide 4.5V to 17V input voltage range, and a 0.5V to 5.5V output voltage range with ±0.5% DC accuracy over temperature. LTM4675’s power outputs can be digitally adjusted, margined, and powered up/down at programmable slew rates and sequencing delay times. Maximum turn-on time is 70ms. Telemetry read back parameters include V_IN, I_IN, V_OUT, I_OUT, temperature, running peak values, uptime, faults, and warnings. Current read back accuracy is ±2.5% at 9A load over temperature.

LTC Design Note: Dual 9A, step-down μModule regulator with digital power system management – [Link]

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