Basic constant current dummy load using an Op Amp and a by-passing MOSFET is very easy to build and had been made quite popular following Dave’s video on EEVBlog. I happened to have an old aluminum hard disk cooler case…
In my earlier posts (1, 2, 3), I showed some examples of using the I2C protocol with TI’s MSP430 Launchpad. Many MCUs in the MSP430G2 family also support the SPI bus. In today’s discussion, I will give a couple of…
LM95172 is a 13 to 16 bits wide temperature range automotive-grade temperature sensor in a ceramic SOIC package. Besides its wide range temperature measurements capability (-40 Celsius to 200 Celsius), it can also be programmed to trigger over-temperature/under-temperature alarms and…
I got myself a Raspberry Pi (Model B V2) last month. After having played with it for a while, I have to say that I really like this tiny single-board computer. Since it runs on Linux, you can compile and…
A typical 3 ½ or 4 ½ multimeter can measure voltage in the low mV range and current in the low mA range. Voltage measurement in the µV range and current measurement in the nA range are typically only available…
It is well understood that resistors are typically binned in such a way that for a given tolerance the actual resistance values are distributed within the specified tolerance but are outside the range of the next tighter tolerance specification. So…
I bought a used Keithley 196 bench multimeter a few weeks ago. This is a 6 ½ digit 3,030,000 counts meter, capable of measuring voltages down to 100nV and currents as low as 100nA. It can also be used to…
I have been mainly using perf-boards for my electronics projects. Since most of the stuff I build are not very complicated and are one-offs, using perf-boards has been more than adequate. With that said, I did find wiring the headers…
For current measurement in the low micro-amp and nano-amp ranges, a feedback ammeter is usually an excellent choice (see Keithley Application Note 1671). Because of the very high gain of an Op-amp, the burden voltage can usually be ignored when…
I have used DS3232 RTC (real-time clock) in many Arduino based projects before. DS3232 utilizes a temperature compensated oscillator, which makes it far more accurate than devices like DS1307. In this blog post, I will give some code examples on…
SHT21 is a neat little temperature and humidity sensor from Sensirion and I have used it in a couple of my Arduino projects before. Given that the Vcc is 3 V for these sensors, interfacing with a 5V ATMega chip…
ADS1224 is a 24-bit delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter with 4-channel differential inputs multiplexer. This ADC chip offers a 20-bit effective resolution (6 to 7 digits of resolution in full scale), which makes it ideal in high-resolution voltage measurement applications.
I upgraded my Code Composer Studio (CCS) to 5.2.1 a few days ago. An interesting thing I found out was that while building existing Lauchpad projects, I was receiving a “program will not fit into available memory” error:
I have a few Western Digital WD1001FALS 1 TB hard drives and they have been pretty reliable for the past few years until recently. One of my WD1001FALS’ died suddenly a few months ago. Since it was still under warranty,…
I did a review on Topward’s 6603A linear power supply last time. In my opinion, Topward 6000 series power supplies are really well made and offer exceptional performance. One minor annoyance though, as I mentioned, is that the two cooling…