The story so far Welcome to the never ending saga of Andy and his reflow controllers. About a year ago I published a project writeup showing how I built a PID-based reflow controller. It featured a 640×360 graphical LCD from the Sony U5 Vivaz mobile phone and was all-surface mount. It worked well and continues […]
An Android Reflow controller that anyone can build Read More »
Using a hybrid silica sol-gel material and self-assembled monolayers of a common fatty acid, researchers have developed a new capacitor dielectric material that provides an electrical energy storage capacity rivaling certain batteries, with both a high energy density and high power density. If the material can be scaled up from laboratory samples, devices made
Supercap energy density rivals batteries Read More »
Li-ion cells become more and more popular due to their capacity and reasonable prices. In this entry I will show how to build a simple li-ion battery charger based on MCP73831 chip. It’s a quite useful device for DYI projects,in addition its cost is only around 1,5 euro The device uses USB port as a
How to make a USB Li-Ion charger Read More »
The 1Mbit SPI FRAM is in an 8-pin wafer level chip scale package (WL-CSP) which is an additional package variant to the existing product MB85RS1MT. In comparison to the industry standard SOP-8 package, the new WL-CSP package, which measures 3.09 x 2.28 x 0.33 mm, reduces the surface mounting area by 77%, and the device
1Mbit SPI FRAM comes in chip-scale packaging Read More »
The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards “the Internet of things”—the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that
Ultralow-power circuit improves efficiency of energy harvesting to more than 80 percent Read More »
Thermal Conductivity: A measure of the ability of a material to transfer heat. Given two surfaces on either side of a material with a temperature difference between them, the thermal conductivity is the heat energy transferred per unit time and per unit surface area, divided by the temperature difference 1. Thermal conductivity is a bulk
Thermal Conductivity: What is it and Why You Should Care Read More »
A non invasive current sensor is connected to the spark core (with a few components), and clamped around a cable in the Mains distribution unit. No wiring is required, however Do not try this at home, as the Mains Distribution Unit should not be tampered with unless one is Licensed to do so. The
Non-Invasive Smart Electricity Meter Read More »
An alliance led by IBM Research, together with New York academic institution SUNY Polytech and with Samsung and GlobalFoundries, has produced 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. Continuing semiconductor scaling down to feature sizes of 7 nm is expected to yield further gains in performance, and lower power levels, but in IBM’s words,
IBM shows working devices fabricated at 7nm node Read More »
Menlo Park, Calif. — In a study that could improve the safety of next-generation batteries, researchers discovered that adding two chemicals to the electrolyte of a lithium metal battery prevents the formation of dendrites – “fingers” of lithium that pierce the barrier between the battery’s halves, causing it to short out, overheat and sometimes burst
Research Points the way to Safer Lithium Batteries Read More »
Texas Instruments says it is making, “high-accuracy measurement more attainable with the first current-sense amplifier to integrate a high-precision, low-drift 2 mΩ shunt resistor,” – the device can cut calibration effort, system cost, and footprint for test and measurement, communications load monitoring, and power supplies. For highly accurate measurements over a wide temperature range, TI’s
Current-sense amp integrates precision shunt resistor, in single package Read More »
