Anablog

My CTO buddy John Haggis over at Aerielle sent a link with a great idea on a product that will mean you will never lose your remote control again. As you can see, it builds on the great engineering of the bathroom key for Mr. Hartounian ‘s gas station in the movie The Jerk. I am sure that there will be a big patent fight over this.

There is a good article by William Kimmel and Daryl Gerke in Evaluation Engineering about EMI (electro magnetic interference) caused by the connectors in your system. Well worth a read. EDN contributor Eric Bogatin has an article on the same subject over at PCB Design. EMI is always both an electrical and mechanical problem. Because it crosses department boundaries it can turn into a political nightmare. Just make sure you understand all the issues and save your company from the whole blame game.

Circuit Cellar magazine has a nice article by system designer Jeff Bachiochi on how to use the Linear Tech LTC6802 IC to monitor a battery stack. The title of the article is “Smart Circuitry for Battery Monitoring” and I can only get you a contents page since Circuit Cellar charges for subscriptions and web content. Don’t let that turn you off. Circuit Cellar does have a slight bent towards electronics hobbyists as opposed to working engineers, but it is one of the few places you will see articles about complete systems. I let my subscription expire last year, but I happened to pick up the September 2009 edition as a freebie at the PCB West show. They a...Read More

Power Electronics Technology has a nice article by Vinaya Skanda Nagaraj from Microchip about using one of their chips to do power factor correction (PFC). The article is an extension on a year-old application note the author did for Microchip. Here is an STMicro pdf about analog vs. digital control for PFC that was in EETimes India. Also a Pulse piece I did for EDN about Microchip’s...Read More

Analog guru Paul Grohe sent a nice link to pictures of the rework at Sutro Tower in San Francisco. Now that the digital television (DTV) transition has taken place and broadcasters don’t have to broadcast both analog and digital signals, they are swapping the digital antennas into the higher locations and boosting power where the FCC lets them. The DTV transition was not as smooth as some hoped and not the disaster some predicted. Like the entire planet, it was analog, some good and some bad. I rescanned my TVs and was amazed to get KRCB channel 22 ...Read More

Fellow Croatian Andy Turudic sent me an interesting link about exoskeletons being developed to help soldiers carry heavy packs and other loads. I was a little put off by the company name of Cyberdyne. Is not that from some science fiction moves where robots take over the world? Anyway, military applications notwithstanding, the real benefit to these exoskeletons may be in helping handicapped people achieve independence and mobility. And the name of the robot, HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb), well that is right out of 2001 Space Odyssey, even I can remember that.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that tells of the King of England touring James Watt’s steam engine. The monarch was a bit bored and dismissive. He looked down his nose and said, “I can’t see of whatever good use it could be put to.” Watt, a little pissed off, responded, “One day you shall be able to tax it, sire.” So I guess governments all around the world are seeing that vehicle telematics can be used to report the mileage, speeds, locations and times that a car travels and, voila, they can tax you for your use. In some ways this is a needed advancement. One of the problems with electric cars and plug-in hybrids is that they don’t use gasoline. Oh, sure, that is the whole point to you and me, but governments need all the tax money they get from fuel taxes...Read More

I was surprised to get a press release from ZMDI, a mixed-signal analog company that I had not used parts from. Being an analog engineer for 20 years I thought I had used everyone’s chips by now. The release was for the ZIOL2401 high-voltage line driver with integrated dc-dc conversion. ZMDI makes capacitive sensor interface chips that can resolve a pF as well as ADCs and RFID and Zigbee chips. I would like to link to several of the chips but unfortunately the ZMDI website uses frames construction so I cannot link to a specific part, only the top-level product page. When you do manage to get to the product page, don’t be like me and think there are only three ...Read More

Eric dropped me a note that he will be giving his great signal integrity seminars September 29-Oct 7, 2009 here in San Jose, California. There are three seminars total, Essential Principles of Signal Integrity on Sept 29 and 30 that costs $1,895 or $1500 if you are a subscriber to Eric’s program. The second seminar is Advanced Signal Integrity Design on Oct 1 and 2, for the same price and the third seminar is Multi Giga Bit Design on Oct 6 and 7 also for $1,895 or $1500 if you are a subscriber to Eric’s program. All attendees will get a free copy of Eric’s new book on signal integrity.

Also, i...Read More

I just received a note from the effervescent Michelle Ragsdale over at Microchip about their Embedded Designers Forum this fall at locations across the US, Europe, Asia and worldwide, 120 locations in all. Cost is 25 dollars plus tax. Attendees will receive a substantial discount on select Microchip development tools, as well as a free, hands-on training class at any of Microchip's 37 worldwide Regional Training Centers. You will have to register on Microchip’s website where they have a shopping cart system that lets you purchase your class. North American schedule is below. The press release says they are going to New Zealand but the website does not show that, so I suspect they have not put in the 2010 schedule yet.

I started organizing my bookmarks last weekend and came across a few nice sites on Tesla coils and big sparks.

I like the above link because it is a guy that has taken hobby Tesla experiments to a new level. He is even approaching performance art in some of his installations.

Not every spark comes from a Tesla coil and there is a nice site that shows various electrical discharges as well as having a few ...Read More

EDN contributor Martin Cano sent me the link to this great website full of communication theory tutorials. It was written by Charan Langton, the manager of the analysis & simulation group at Loral Space Systems. Her tagline for Loral is "Best Satellite Company in the World". I don’t know if that’s true but I really enjoyed her description of modulation methods (pdf). You can tell she is not trying to impress everyone with how smart she is by talking jargon and waving her hand in front of some math. She really is trying to teach you this stuff, which tells me she is way smarter than a lot of other people out there.

My isolator article next week will explain why every circuit operates at GHz frequencies. That’s because, even if it is just an audio circuit, it has to reject high frequencies that may cause it to malfunction. For instance, if I put my cell phone in the package tray of my 1992 Honda, the interference is so bad it is louder than the music. I can also hear the phone negotiating if I set it near my stereo. But this poor fellow in New York has it way worse than that. His Maytag over turns on every time he gets a cell call. No telling if it is a bad phone that is radiating too much, but the Maytag people should have better immunity to radiation from any battery-powered cell phone. ...Read More

This one is supposedly not an urban legend, it has been verified by the semi-official Darwin Awards website. I searched for a real news report and could not find one. They describe the device he connected as electronic control tester, but I suspect it might be hi-pot, since those are so common in production environments. It is also a pretty safe bet it would kill you, it only takes a few milliamperes across your heart muscle to send it into fibrillation.

This reminds me of my pal Dale Ransom who was a tech at the GE electric motor plant here in San Jose. He told me there was a maintenance man there that used to identify live circuits there by touching them with one hand while touching his other hand to ground. This is the worse thing he could have d...Read More

Reviewing my latest NASA Tech Briefs while enjoying the music in downtown Sunnyvale last night I came across an article about how they have developed a low noise amplifier that works at 160 to 180 GHz. Then there was the feature that describes software to analyze crops, the way I told you farmers are doing in a recent blog post. But the real kicker, one of those “your tax dollars at work” moments was the article about how NASA will be marketing a new “Rehydration beverage”. Hmmm, as a...Read More