Circuit Cellar News Today

How and why the size of tiny embedded boards matter.

It has been said that there is no such thing as an accident, and that most mishaps and disasters actually are predictable and preventable. Technology is only as good as its design—which should incorporate forethought about what could go wrong. In this article, Stuart looks at how lessons from past technology failures from faulty indicators and designs—including one he experienced firsthand—can prevent future problems and disasters.

This month, I discuss the origin of my use of the phrase “in thin slices,” and how it can help us design, debug, and test our embedded systems.

In last month’s column, I discussed a low-voltage solar energy system I built for lighting my Scout troop’s large storage shed. I described the battery I chose, and the Modbus protocol with RS-485 serial communication used for remote monitoring of the system’s performance (“sniffing” or listening to communication on the bus, and decoding each message). This month I expand on this node’s capacity to do much more than just listen and decode.

Digital signal processors (DSPs) and digital signal controllers (DSCs) are designed for time-critical execution of complex algorithms. These chips are crucial to many high-end, high-performance applications today.

Thermal management of electronic components is often a misunderstood area of design. Often thermal solutions are "I hope this works" guesses. In this article, I cover the basics of thermal management so you can design circuits that don't overheat.

Embedded Linux continues to grow in popularity, with uses in every kind of application. Given its ubiquity, the operating system (OS) must be as robust as possible, able to reestablish itself following critical failures and malfunctions. This article discusses how to use watchdog timers to increase the robustness of embedded-Linux-based solutions.

After installing a ductless heat pump, I wondered if I could build a controller that would operate the new unit only when it was more cost-effective than my existing Electrical Thermal Storage units, which operated on time-of-day metering.

Noticing a lack of available materials on the Arduino Debugger, I took it upon myself recently to draft something of an introductory "user manual" for this software. Hence, this article!

In Part 1 of this article series, I tested and reviewed Seeed Studio’s SenseCAP K1100 Kit for prototyping IoT apps. This month in Part 2, I discuss the prototype I built using a Wio Terminal and a Vision AI Module from the kit, and an ESP32-based audio player/web server. The system detects when my dog tries to “mark territory” in my yard, then plays an audio warning file of my recorded voice to try to distract the dog and stop the behavior.