Is it oscillating like an out-of-tune orchestra? Your microcontroller won’t lock. You’ve used the right part number. You can read the schematic and everything seems … Read More

Inexpensive: The 555 timer is cheap, but it also has lots of application. Want to create a precise pulse generator for a hobbyist robot? No … Read More

The way pulse width modulation functions is to turn a voltage on and off rapidy. To your eye… Or to some sort of mechanical load, … Read More

If you’ve worked with an Arduino hooked up to a motor, then you know that the resulting high-pitched whine sounds like this: You control how … Read More

If you’ve ever watched a movie where a helicopter’s rotors seem to turn backwards, you’re witnessing an example of something called aliasing, a sampling artifact … Read More

But then you connect it to an analog-to-digital converter. Your pretty analog signal gets converted to an ugly digital one. There’s all this nuance and … Read More

Period is the time between events occurring. Frequency is number of events that occur per second. To get period from frequency, just divide 1 by … Read More

What is the radio horizon distance? How far will a signal travel before being blocked by the curvature of the earth? This is useful for … Read More

Maybe you’ve stood in a room that had only one bar of signal on your phone. Maybe you’ve heard about the signal to noise ratio, … Read More

When you see a decibel readout, you’re measuring a relationship. You’re not measuring power. It sounds like semantics, but that difference matters when you think … Read More