Troubleshooting notes from days past, TTL, Linear

Ed Nutter June 19, 20181 comment

General Troubleshooting

  • Follow safety precautions.
  • Always think “what if”.
    • Analytical procedures
    • Precautions when probing equipment
    • Insulate all but last 1/8” of probe tip
  • Learn from mistakes
  • Don’t start with electronic test equipment, start with analytical thinking.
  • If you get stuck, sleep on it.
  • Many problems have simple solutions.
  • Whenever possible, try to substitute a working unit.
  • Don’t blindly trust test instruments.
  • Coincidences do happen, but are relatively...

Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XV: Error Detection and Correction

Jason Sachs June 12, 2018

Last time, we talked about Gold codes, a specially-constructed set of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) with low mutual cross-correlation, which are used in many spread-spectrum communications systems, including the Global Positioning System.

This time we are wading into the field of error detection and correction, in particular CRCs and Hamming codes.

Ernie, You Have a Banana in Your Ear

I have had a really really tough time writing this article. I like the...


Tenderfoot: How to Write a Great Bug Report

Matthew Eshleman May 31, 20184 comments

I am an odd sort of person. Why? Because I love a well written and descriptive bug report. I love a case that includes clear and easy to follow reproduction steps. I love a written bug report that includes all the necessary information on versions, configurations, connections and other system details. Why? Because I believe in efficiency. I believe that as an engineer I have a duty to generate value to my employer or customer. Great bug reports are one part of our collective never-ending...


Who else is going to Sensors Expo in San Jose? Looking for roommate(s)!

Stephane Boucher May 29, 20186 comments

This will be my first time attending this show and I must say that I am excited. I am bringing with me my cameras and other video equipment with the intention to capture as much footage as possible and produce a (hopefully) fun to watch 'highlights' video. I will also try to film as many demos as possible and share them with you.

I enjoy going to shows like this one as it gives me the opportunity to get out of my home-office (from where I manage and run the *Related sites) and actually...


Voltage - A Close Look

Ralph Morrison May 23, 201811 comments

My first boss liked to pose the following problem when interviewing a new engineer.  “Imagine two boxes on a table one with a battery the other with a light.  Assume there is no detectable voltage drop in the connecting leads and the leads cannot be broken.  How would you determine which box has the light?  Drilling a hole is not allowed.”

The answer is simple. You need a voltmeter to tell the electric field direction and a small compass to tell the magnetic field...


What is Electronics

Ralph Morrison May 3, 20186 comments
Introduction

One answer to the question posed by the title might be: "The understanding that allows a designer to interconnect electrical components to perform electrical tasks." These tasks can involve measurement, amplification, moving and storing digital data, dissipating energy, operating motors, etc. Circuit theory uses the sinusoidal relations between components, voltages, current and time to describe how a circuit functions. The parameters we can measure directly are...


Linear Regression with Evenly-Spaced Abscissae

Jason Sachs May 1, 20181 comment

What a boring title. I wish I could come up with something snazzier. One word I learned today is studentization, which is just the normalization of errors in a curve-fitting exercise by the sample standard deviation (e.g. point \( x_i \) is \( 0.3\hat{\sigma} \) from the best-fit linear curve, so \( \frac{x_i - \hat{x}_i}{\hat{\sigma}} = 0.3 \)) — Studentize me! would have been nice, but I couldn’t work it into the topic for today. Oh well.

I needed a little break from...


Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIV: Gold Codes

Jason Sachs April 18, 2018

Last time we looked at some techniques using LFSR output for system identification, making use of the peculiar autocorrelation properties of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) derived from an LFSR.

This time we’re going to jump back to the field of communications, to look at an invention called Gold codes and why a single maximum-length PRBS isn’t enough to save the world using spread-spectrum technology. We have to cover two little side discussions before we can get into Gold...


Crowdfunding Articles?

Stephane Boucher April 12, 201828 comments

Many of you have the knowledge and talent to write technical articles that would benefit the EE community.  What is missing for most of you though, and very understandably so, is the time and motivation to do it.   

But what if you could make some money to compensate for your time spent on writing the article(s)?  Would some of you find the motivation and make the time?

I am thinking of implementing a system/mechanism that would allow the EE community to...


How precise is my measurement?

Sam Shearman March 28, 20183 comments

Some might argue that measurement is a blend of skepticism and faith. While time constraints might make you lean toward faith, some healthy engineering skepticism should bring you back to statistics. This article reviews some practical statistics that can help you satisfy one common question posed by skeptical engineers: “How precise is my measurement?” As we’ll see, by understanding how to answer it, you gain a degree of control over your measurement time.

An accurate, precise...

First-Order Systems: The Happy Family

Jason Sachs May 3, 20141 comment
Все счастли́вые се́мьи похо́жи друг на дру́га, ка́ждая несчастли́вая семья́ несчастли́ва по-сво́ему.

— Лев Николаевич Толстой, Анна Каренина

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Lev Nicholaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I was going to write an article about second-order systems, but then realized that it would be...


Best Firmware Architecture Attributes

Tayyar GUZEL June 4, 20166 comments

Architecture of a firmware (FW) in a way defines the life-cycle of your product. Often companies start with a simple-version of a product as a response to the time-to-market caveat of the business, make some cash out of the product with a simple feature set. It takes only less than 2-3 years to reach a point where the company needs to develop multiple products derived from the same code base and multiple teams need to develop...


The CRC Wild Goose Chase: PPP Does What?!?!?!

Jason Sachs October 23, 20142 comments

I got a bad feeling yesterday when I had to include reference information about a 16-bit CRC in a serial protocol document I was writing. And I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

The last time I looked into CRC algorithms was about five years ago. And the time before that… sometime back in 2004 or 2005? It seems like it comes up periodically, like the seventeen-year locust or sunspots or El Niño,...


VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic

Gene Breniman March 3, 2008

In an earlier article on VHDL programming ("VHDL tutorial" and "VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench", I described a design for providing a programmable clock divider for a ADC sequencer. In this example, I showed how to generate a clock signal (ADCClk), that was to be programmable over a series of fixed rates (20MHz, 10MHz, 4MHz, 2MHz, 1MHz and 400KHz), given a master clock rate of 40MHz. A reader of that article had written to ask if it was possible to extend the design to...


OOKLONE: a cheap RF 433.92MHz OOK frame cloner

Fabien Le Mentec August 12, 201417 comments
Introduction

A few weeks ago, I bought a set of cheap wireless outlets and reimplemented the protocol for further inclusion in a domotics platform. I wrote a post about it here:

//www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/620.php

Following that, I had access to another outlet from a different vendor:

http://www.castorama.fr/store/Prise-telecommandee-BLYSS---Interieur-prod4470027.html

The device documentation mentions that it operates on the same frequency as the previous...


Coding - Step 0: Setting Up a Development Environment

Stephen Friederichs November 25, 20145 comments

Articles in this series:

You can easily find a million articles out there discussing compiler nuances, weighing the pros and cons of various data structures or discussing the  optimization of databases. Those sorts of articles are fascinating reads for advanced programmers but...


Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 2)

Ivan Cibrario Bertolotti February 1, 20169 comments

The first part of this article described the conditions for an exception request to be accepted by a Cortex-M processor, mainly concerning the relationship of its priority with respect to the current execution priority. This part will describe instead what happens after an exception request is accepted and becomes active.

PROCESSOR OPERATION AND PRIVILEGE MODE

Before discussing in detail the sequence of actions that occurs within the processor after an exception request...


Signal Processing Contest in Python (PREVIEW): The Worst Encoder in the World

Jason Sachs September 7, 20136 comments

When I posted an article on estimating velocity from a position encoder, I got a number of responses. A few of them were of the form "Well, it's an interesting article, but at slow speeds why can't you just take the time between the encoder edges, and then...." My point was that there are lots of people out there which take this approach, and don't take into account that the time between encoder edges varies due to manufacturing errors in the encoder. For some reason this is a hard concept...


Using a RTLSDR dongle to validate NRF905 configuration

Fabien Le Mentec January 27, 20146 comments
I am currently working on a system to monitor the garage door status from my flat. Both places are 7 floors apart, and I need to send the data wirelessly. I chose to operate on the 433MHz carrier, and I ordered 2 PTR8000 modules: http://www.electrodragon.com/w/NRF905_Transceiver_433MHz-Wireless_ModuleThe PTR8000 is based on the dual band sub 1GHz NRF905 chipset from NORDICSEMI: http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/Sub-1-GHz-RF/nRF905I...

Introduction to Microcontrollers - Adding Some Real-World Hardware

Mike Silva October 8, 20132 comments

When 2 LEDs Just Don't Cut It Anymore

So far, we've done everything in this series using two LEDs and one button.  I'm guessing that the thrill of blinking an LED has worn off by now, hard as that is to imagine.  What's more, we've just about reached the limits of what we can learn with such limited I/O.  We have come to the point where we need to add some hardware to our setup to continue with additional concepts and microcontroller...