Whenever I find myself harboring a constantly nagging thought, I know I will eventually have to get busy and find a way to put it to rest. When I read EDN’s Design Ideas, I look for the range of ...

On two days in the course of every year, one in March heralding the start of spring and another in September marking the first of fall, the Earth’s axis of rotation aligns perpendicular to the rays of ...

Fig. 1: The dimmer circuit schematic showing the filtering capacitors. Rob Atkinson, K5UJ, is an engineer out of Saint Charles, Ill., and one of the many readers who enjoy the DIY projects we feature ...

In this session of Logic Noise, we’ll be playing around with the voltage-controlled oscillator from a 4046 phase-locked loop chip, and using it to make “musical” pitches. It’s a lot of bang for the ...

Many microcontrollers or PICs will have uncommitted digital-to-analog converter (DAC) outputs that can be used to generate sine waves. But these are generally low resolution (8 to 10 bits), yielding a ...

A common PC sound card can be used as a sine/square/triangle function generator, but the output suffers from limited rail-to-rail swing, plus its zero-centered has no dc offset. This circuit overcomes ...