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Engineer In Wonderland

Engineer In Wonderland

One I missed – cunning hysteric dc-dc converter

EinW OnSemi NCV30161 interestign dcdc

NCV30161 is a dc-dc converter intended to drive leds with a continuous current – albeit with a superimposed triangle wave. It is a buck converter – slightly up-side-down because it has its switch on the negative side. There is no output capacitor, and the inductor and the leds are in series, so they both get the same current at all ...

Raspberry Pi makes RISC-V more accessible

Raspberry Pi RP2350 mcu block

In choosing to put RISC-V cores on its new microcontroller – fear not, there are Arm Coretex-M33 cores too – Raspberry Pi will be helping put this architecture on the map. Proc0 and Proc1 can independently be set to be an Arm Cortex-M33 or a RISC-V core at boot Not that RISC-V is not already climbing rapidly in the instruction ...

One I missed – a whole new sort of pylon for the UK

I had no idea that National Grid has installed a new sort of pylon – T-pylons, all the way back in 2021/22 in Somerset. There are 36 of them, rated at 400kV, between Bridgwater and Loxton in Somerset, part of the 57km Hinkley Connection Project, which also has 8.5km of underground cables across the Mendip Hills (from which all existing ...

Slightly fiddly-to-find ATtiny412 information

The delightful 8pin ATtiny412 comes in a few versions, all with 4kbyte of flash and 256byte of ram, and it takes a while to dig out the following: ATtiny412-SSNR 20MHz 1.8-5.5V -40 to +105°C tape and reel ATtiny412-SSN tube or tray ATtiny412-SSFR 16MHz 2.7-5.5V -40 to +125°C tape and reel ATtiny412-SSF tube or tray  

Someone, please explain how this two-npn voltage reference works

EinW odd Vref LM311 data sheet

I was digging around in the LM311 (and LM111, LM211) comparator data sheet, and came across this unusual voltage reference (diag right). It consists of an npn cascsode pair of transistors, the top one connected (collector to base) as a diode, and the two bases tied together. I have no idea how this works, and am going slightly bonkers trying ...

TI is a good steward of classic Nat Semi designs

TI updated the LM339 family of comparators a few years ago, when it moved them from a 150mm wafer manufacturing process to 300mm high-voltage junction-isolated process. These comparators, which come in quad, dual and single versions, were initially released 50 years ago with such a good design – they were the first ‘single-rail’ types which included the 0V rail in ...

Current source rectifier confusion

EinW triple constant current

The LM334 is not only an adjustable current source, but it is also a rectifier. Right on the front page of the TI data sheet are the words: “Reverse applied voltages of up to 20V will draw only a few dozen microamperes of current, allowing the devices to act as both a rectifier and current source in AC applications.” Which ...

World’s biggest land-based crane

mammoet-sk6000-with-fixed-jib

Oh what a delight when an interesting email drops randomly into the inbox. Apparently, Mammoet is assembling the world’s biggest land-based crane at Westdorpe in the Netherlands even as I type. SK6000 is a ‘ring crane’, sitting on a circular track, and able lift huge weights around over large areas – and it looks like separating the counterweight allows for ...

One I missed: Arm Cortex-A53, 2x Risc-V and 8051 – all on the same chip

MilkV SG2002 block

Shenzhen MilkV Technology has a chip that combines: 1x 1GHz C906 RISC-V CPU 1x 700MHz C906 RISC-V CPU 1x 1GHz Arm Cortex-A53 CPU 1x 8051 CPU 1x 1Top/s (INT8) neural processor Called SG2002, it also has 256M (byte, probably…) DRAM, a camera interface, video acceleration, an audio codec and a crypto engine. Peripherals include 100Mbit/s Ethernet (with a phy), USB 2.0, ...

Can LoRa find my dog?

I was out in the countryside with a partially-obedient dog over the weekend. It spontaneously bolts off, the owner told me, for up to a couple of hours. Why not use a dog tracker? I asked naively. It has one, said the owner, but the tracker does not work without mobile phone coverage – when you get home, you know ...