Tag: electronics

12 articles tagged electronics. See all tags or all posts.

Why a LUT Is Programmable: Twenty Transistors, Sixteen Functions

fpga electronics education cmos skidl

A LUT does not compute a logic function, it looks one up. Building a two-input LUT from 20 MOS transistors shows why that distinction is the whole reason an FPGA can be reprogrammed.

A Naive Comparator: Two NPNs, One PNP, and a SPICE Simulation to Prove It

electronics analog transistors comparator differential-pair adc spice ngspice kicad skidl simulation

A follow-up to my flash-ADC Instagram video: how NPN and PNP transistors work, how a differential pair built from two 2N3904 and a 2N3906 output stage turns into a comparator, and what the ngspice simulation in the accompanying repo shows plot by plot.

open.cob.json: One File Between the Chip Designer and the PCB Designer

electronics asic kicad open-source engineering chip-on-board

For years I kept my chip-on-board bonding notes in private JSON files. A conversation with wafer.space made me publish them as a format. This is the story of the decisions that were hardest to make: none versus unspecified, why pad shapes are their own files, and what a real padframe taught the parser.

skAInet Edge-Compute: The Box We Kept Rebuilding Now Has a Product Page

electronics embedded linux monitoring engineering

Auto-Intern's skAInet Edge-Compute is now a product with its own site: a sealed M12-PoE switch, router and 8-core Linux compute module for industrial edge data acquisition. What it is, where it came from, and where I fit in.

Digital Communication: Getting a Thought Out of One Head and Into Another

electronics embedded information-theory education

Communication has one job: move the internal state of one system into another. This is a walk from a thought in your head to a wave on a wire, through the four sides of a message, a water canal, a push-pull driver, Shannon's channel, and the eye diagram that measures it all.

WTF are FPGAs: A Beginner's Overview of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

fpga electronics education

FPGAs are not microcontrollers with more pins. They are a fundamentally different category of IC, and understanding what lives inside one changes how you think about digital hardware entirely.

Enclosureless Cases: When the PCB Is the Enclosure

pcb electronics open-source

Enclosureless Cases: a patented approach to PCB housing where three stacked PCBs form a sealed, EMC-shielded enclosure using a perimeter solder joint — no injection moulding, no tooling, no separate supply chain.

Travelling to China with a Peli Case Full of Electronics

electronics conferences

Practical guide for engineers flying to China with professional electronics — ATA Carnet process, Frankfurt customs, Guangzhou departure, apps to install, and a full pre-trip checklist.

EMC in Dongguan: 2.5 Years of Work, 4 Days in a Test Chamber

electronics monitoring

CE, FCC, and CCC certification in Dongguan — four days at NTC test lab with a PoE-based reflow oven monitoring system after 2.5 years of development. What we tested, what we found, and what the anodized housing almost cost us.

Ten Years of PowerSense: Blood, Sweat, and Ferrite Cores

electronics monitoring engineering

How we built a non-contact PoE power monitor for DB Netz railway switching stations — ten years of E-field sensing, embedded ferrite cores, EMC certification, and the hardware lessons that shaped everything since.

Biofilms in Rivers: EIS at the Clark Fork

electronics monitoring

How a governor's reception in Montana led to a year of instrument development with Montana State University — building a portable EIS datalogger for biofilm detection and deploying it in the Clark Fork River.

OmnAIScope: A USB Oscilloscope for Automotive Diagnostics

pcb electronics automotive open-source

OmnAIScope is an open-access USB oscilloscope for automotive diagnostics, built on RP2040 with multi-channel USB synchronisation — no hardware trigger needed. How it works, the server architecture, and where to get it.

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