Today in power electronics, the folks over at Texas Instruments have put together a video covering low-dropout (LDO) linear regulators. For a hacker, power is pretty fundamental, so it behooves us to know a little bit about what our options are when it comes time to regulate power to our projects. In this video [Alex […]
If you’ve seen a big air-variable capacitor, you may have noticed that some of the plates may have slots cut into them. Why? [Mr Carlson] has the answer in the video below. The short answer: you can bend the tabs formed by the slots to increase or decrease the capacitance by tiny amounts for the […]
Everyone loves a full-wave bridge rectifier, but there’s no denying that they aren’t 100% efficient due to the diode voltage drop. Which isn’t to say that with some effort we cannot create an ideal bridge rectifier using active components, as demonstrated by [Mousa] with an active bridge circuit. This uses the NXP TEA2208T active bridge […]
LED bezels (also known as LED panel-mount holders) are great, so how about 3D printing the next ones you need? Sure, they’re inexpensive to purchase and not exactly uncommon. But we all know that when working on a project, one doesn’t always have everything one might need right at hand. At times like that, 3D […]
If you read about Hall effect sensors — the usual way to detect and measure magnetic fields these days — it sounds deceptively simple. There’s a metal plate with current flowing across it in one direction, and sensors at right angles to the current flow. Can it really be that simple? According to a recent […]
Currently quartz crystal-based oscillators are among the most common type of clock source in electronics, providing a reasonably accurate source in a cheap and small package. Unfortunately for high accuracy applications, atomic clocks aren’t quite compact enough to fit into the typical quartz-based temperature-compensated crystal oscillators (TCXOs) and even quartz-based solutions are rather large. The […]
[Sam Ben-Yaakov] has another lecture online that dives deep into the physics of electronic processes. This time, the subject is magnetic transformers. You probably know that the ratio of current in the primary and secondary is the same (ideally) as the ratio of the turns in each winding. But do you know why? You will […]
We’re all used to Bluetooth chips coming in QFN and BGA formats, at a minimum of 30-40 pins, sometimes even a hundred. What about ten pins, with 1.27 mm pitch? [deqing] from Hackaday.io shows us a chip from WCH, CH571K, in what’s essentially a SO-10 package (ESSOP10). This chip has a RISC-V core, requires only […]
When it comes to PCs, Westerners are most most familiar with x86/x64 processors from Intel and AMD, with Apple Silicon taking up a significant market share, too. However, in China, a relatively new CPU architecture is on the rise. A fabless semiconductor company called Loongson has been producing chips with its LoongArch architecture since 2021. […]
Over on YouTube [DENKI OTAKU] runs us through how a 4-pin MOSFET works and what the extra Kelvin source pin does. A typical MOSFET might come in a 3-pin TO-247 package, but there are 4-pin variants which include an extra pin for the Kelvin source, also known as source sense. These 4-pin packages are known […]