Electrical and Computer Engineering

The batteries in this UPS lasted less than a year. It was because those battery were "no name" batteries, or because they were connected in series directly to the AC after the transformer? Shouldn't they have a rectifier and condenser before that? It seems that in this way the battery is connected to AC 24/7

Related, relevant advice on SSD reliability (dated 2015, still relevant? inquiring minds want to know): https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

This blogger booted an F1C100s from scratch, even though they made a mistake buying 16MBit instead of 16MByte of Flash. (Requiring to be booted off of USB-bootloader / Allwinner's FEL Protocol instead of Flash).

Pretty basic but I've been enjoying Vik's articles on RF topics.

For those EEs interested in Wireless Communications like myself. Coming from more cellular communications type of stuff, I find the fact that 4096 QAM is possible over the air crazy.

This is from a module I'm using and I don't understand this part of it. https://files.waveshare.com/upload/3/3c/RP2040-Touch-LCD-1.28.pdf

This post demonstrates a microcontroller bit-banging an old version of Bluetooth LE

MIT has a tradition of putting classes online for sharing. There's lots of good links here, so it should be a good reference for yall.

This Mastodon post hit #1 on Hacker News today, I think people around here would be interested.

Modern AVR has a wide variety of Timers (TCA, TCB most commonly, but TCD, TCE, and TCF are uncommon and specific to particular AVR chips).

1.5 c Microcontroller alert.

What really interests me about this design is the buck Boost-converter

Hacker News discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560300

A random article talking about I2C on the NuttX RTOS.

Edited the "I" for less confusion. The blogpost's title is "I made a...", but "I" (Dragontamer) didn't do this. I just found this blogpost and though it was relevant for this sublemmy.

I don't care what's it gonna take. I just want a connection. I guess I can connect the VCC to another voltage source, but I have the same thing happened to TX on another circuit board, although that one can "flip" (it is still attached marginally... at one end).

Some poor sap made a few hundred DIP chip labels for breadboarding that are designed for a little more functionality than is typical. They were uploaded to github along with a GIMP file, templates, instructions, and ready to print PDF files for labels and popular kits/projects like Ben Eater's breadboard computer and 6502 projects.

This PDF talks about blue and infrared LEDs + photodiode and how to create a smoke detector out of them.

Atmel / Microchip created this Application note on how to drive the low-power and low-cost LCD segment displays.

Seems like a curiosity that people would like here.

Wurth is one of the biggest capacitor companies in the world, and they gave this webinar about 7 months ago.

Lcamtuf conducts the classic "Hook up a signal generator to a coax-cable" to study some basic transmission line theory.

So I made an antenna based on a design on thingiverse/blog post. IIRC this is some Yagi variant. I did the math and did a bunch of tedious stuff to try and make it a proper project at the time. I do not have a network analyzer, smith charts are for shaman/wEEzards, and radio is the work of the devil. I was looking to extend the range of the 2.4G channel across my house just slightly using directionality. Empirically, it worked at first. I'm here half trying to diagnose, and half trying to understand some fundamental circuit design basics. The 2.4G output has two channels coming from the same peripheral radio chip. Normally these go to the dipole antennas. I used the same micro coax connector and proper coax throughout, with proper grounds/solder station/flux/etc. The continuity tests good still. The router automatically tries to move the transmit and receive signals between the two separate 2.4G channels under normal operation, but it drops one channel regularly now. I can see this on the network status of a connected device, and the drop happens regardless of proximity. I have not physically tested that the dropped channel is the one that had my DIY antenna. It could be a software problem. My curiosity is could this asymmetry cause a common failure mode, other than something obvious like ESD?

I noticed a few $20 screen+resistive touch screen (4-wire) being sold on Digikey, so I started looking into the 4-wire Resistive touchscreen info.

While we live in a day-and-age of overwhelming microcontrollers, the Analog Sensor world continues. A few resistors, capacitors, and an amplifier (General Purpose, Zero-Drift, Instrumentation...) can likely still have far superior performance than $1, $2, or $3 microcontrollers in practice. Bandwidth, detection and analysis of microvolt-level signals, and all at lower costs.

On the other community, I have a post (https://lemmy.world/post/5214451) where I rough out 5 tiers of skill.

I posted this to someone else's Microcontroller Lemmy, but I want to see how many people at Lemmy.world might be interested in this kind of material too