Engineer In Wonderland

Lady Ada, an exemplar of an entrepreneurial engineering if ever there was one, has demonstrated using OpenAI’s ChatGPT Canvas as a live AI design assistant. She creates a set-up library for Vishay’s VCNL4200 proximity and ambient light sensor , giving the data sheet to the AI in .pdf form so that it can look up parameters. See human and machine ...

It is not often that you meet a bloke in a supermarket lift, and discover that he is an electronics manufacturer in the 10 seconds that you travel together. Shout out to his company, BreadboarD GeniuS, which makes educational products that combine test gear, breadboards, pluggable logic gates, Raspberry Pi and Arduino. There is clearly some dedication here – the ...

I needed a wall mount for a 15.6in portable monitor – the sort of thing intended to go alongside laptops and phones – they are thin, weigh just over a kilogram, and sometimes have holes for a VESA 75 mount on the back. Searching the usual on-line stores and market places yielded nothing dainty – if they are made for ...

Having spent years on and off trying to make a pcb using a cnc machine without breaking tool after tool, there was a minor triumph over the weekend (right). The test pcb is still not ‘right’ as an eccentricity in the (cheap) cutting bit collet (noticed afterwards) means that the tracks are ~0.2mm narrower than they should be – hence ...

Analog Devices has an output stage IC designed particularly for arbitrary waveform generators and power supplies. It is rather pricey, at $86 from Digikey, for example ($360 for the eval kit) but can driver up to ±40V, up to ±1A, and up to 1,800V/μs into 1nF. And, AD8460 includes a 14bit DAC with which to generate the waveforms. The technology ...

I was concocting a rather silly low-pass filter design, when I remembered that Messrs Sallen and Key did it better in the 1950s, and decided to use their two-pole design to implement a Butterworth filter (thank you also Mr Butterworth). Wonderfully, there are free Sallen and Key Butterworth filter calculators on the web now – I used the one on ...

There is some hogwash out there, masquerading as engineering white papers, which are really just click bait to get your contact details. And there are some gems available for the same price. And, in my opinion, ‘BJT. Bipolar junction transistor application handbook‘ from Nexperia is one of the gems. The price is handing over your name, company name and email ...

We got to hear of a citizen science project recently, where volunteers regularly sample a river and its tributaries to gather water quality information. Nitrates, for example, are measured using simple chemistry-based test kit. But pesticides need a combination of chromatography and mass spectrometry and cannot be tested in the field by an expert, let alone a citizen scientist. Part ...

YouTube presented me with a video* about a reverse polarity protection IC, On Semi’s NCV68261, which can also be an ideal diode and a load controller. And, being partial to a nice ideal diode, I thought I would take a look. It is a neat chip, called NCV68261 and measuring 2 x 2mm. Acting on the high-side, it is designed ...

I came across a delightful design by the un-named person behind 101 Things, a blog and a YouTube channel. It is an up-to-30MHz software defined radio using a Raspberry Pi Pico for the local oscillator and… …. most of the rest of the radio. Very pleasantly, this design introduced me to a ‘Tayloe’ down-converter (after Dan Tayloe), which uses a ...