One of the good things about simulating circuits is that you can easily change component values trivially. In the real world, you might use a potentiometer or a pot to provide an adjustable value. However, as [Ralph] discovered, there’s no pot component in LTSpice. At first, he cobbled up a fake pot with two resistors, […]
[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 […]
As [Sam Ben-Yaakov] points out in a recent video, you don’t often see flyback converters these days. That’s because there are smarter ways to get the same effect, which is to convert between two voltages. If you work on old gear, you’ll see plenty of these, and going through the analysis is educational, even if […]
We know not everyone who likes to build circuitry wants to dive headfirst into the underlying electrical engineering that makes everything work. However, if you want to, now is a great time. Many universities have most or all of their material online and you can even take many courses for free. If you want an […]
In years gone by, trying out a new circuit probably would have meant heating up a soldering iron. Solderless breadboards have made that even easier and computer simulation is easier still, but there’s something not quite as satisfying about building a circuit virtually. [Thedeuluiz] has a way to get some of the best of both […]
If you play with high speed design for long enough, eventually you’re going to run into clock skew and other weird effects. [Robert Feranec] recently ran into this problem and found an interesting solution to visualizing electric fields in a PCB. A word of warning before we dig into this, for most of the projects […]