Unlike traditional electrical light-producing filament or gas components, LEDs can produce specific colors of light spanning the entire visible range, as well as IR and UV. Their use in automotive applications increases the safety in both daytime and nighttime driving scenarios, and their increased efficiency can extend battery life in electric vehicles. Multiple LEDs in … Read more
Current sources are less familiar than voltage sources like batteries and AC wall power. Current sources usually are buried, unseen, inside electronic circuitry. Learn what they are and how they are designed. Most of us understand voltage sources. Whether you plug only one device or several devices into your wall outlets, the voltage stays the … Read more
For poorly illuminated stairs to a lower level, I wanted to create automated lighting that would add a ‘wow’ factor and be fun and very different. Yes, of course, it would have been possible for some sort of normal overhead lighting controlled by a switch, but that requires someone to do something (simple enough, I … Read more
The LED lighting industry lost one of its founding fathers on September 18th of this year with the passing of Nick Holonyak, Jr, known as the “Father of the light-emitting diode”. His invention of a diode that could emit visible red light in 1962, was a major milestone in a line of scientific and commercial … Read more
A new piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasound Transducer (pMUT) array now claims to serve large panels and displays for mid-air applications such as haptics after ultrasound transducers being successfully employed for in-body imaging applications. According to imec, the new pMUT array is compatible with flat panel display (FPD) process technologies and can serve large-area sensor surfaces. The … Read more
Traditional digital comparator ICs are electronic analogs of mechanical lever scales. Like their mechanical counterparts, they compare two logical signals and produce an output (typically a voltage level) indicating the relationship of the inputs, i.e., A > B, A < B, and in some cases, A = B. Wow the engineering world with your unique … Read more
Even before Tim Cook and other Apple execs hit the stage this Wednesday (quick aside: Apple events are normally on Tuesdays; I assume the reschedule this time was due to Labor Day proximity, but I have no idea why they held the event so early this month this year), the media was already damping the … Read more
In my previous design idea, a design for a simple GPS disciplined oscillator (GPSDO) 10 MHz reference was presented. A note at the end of that article describes the realization that a frequency counter could be derived by simple changes to the circuit. This article follows up by presenting a simple circuit for a frequency … Read more
LightFair 2022, held June 21-23 in Las Vegas, was something of a reboot after last year’s show that took place in New York City during the pandemic. Attendance was approximately the same as last year (about 10,000) but exhibitor count was slightly lower (327 exhibitors) with several significant customary participants choosing to skip this year … Read more
I was recently working on an experiment for a new design and was using a function generator. Although new function generators have pretty good frequency tolerance specs, I needed something with more accuracy and precision. The way to get more accuracy in frequency generators, arbitrary waveform generators, and frequency counters is to use the 10 … Read more