Consumer Electronics
The Google TV Streamer 4K: Hardware updates on display(s)
Within my year-back coverage of Google’s August 2024 multi-product launch event, I devoted multiple prose paragraphs to the $99.99 TV Streamer 4K, the company’s high-end replacement for the popular prior Chromecast with Google TV 4K and HD series: Memory-drive evolutions Part of the motivation for Google’s product-succession move, we belatedly learned, was a requirement unveiled…
If you made it through the schtick, Google’s latest products were pretty fantastic
Until last year, Google historically held its mobile device launch events in October, ceding the yearly first-mover advantage to primary competitor Apple with its September comparable-device announcements. In 2024, however, Google “flipped the script”, jumping ahead to August. The same thing seems to have happened this year…assuming Apple does a late summer or early fall…
MLCCs: Driving Innovation in Power Electronics Engineering
– Advertisement – How can you design smaller and smaller electronics while managing the challenges of power electronics? The answer: MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Capacitors). What are they? Why are they important? How to select the right ones? To shed light on these questions, we spoke to MLCC experts at Taiyo Yuden, and here’s what we…
What initiates lightning? There’s a new and likely better answer.
Engineers across many disciplines are aware of and concerned with lightning—and for good reasons. A lightning strike can cause significant structural damage, house and forest fires, and severe electrical surges (Figure 1). Figure 1 The intensity of a lightning strike is always awe-inspiring and represents a millisecond-level transient of hundreds of kiloamps. Source: Science Daily…
Hands-on with hobby-grade arc generator modules
Arc generator modules may be small in scale, but they offer big opportunities for hands-on exploration in electronics. Whether you are experimenting with arc simulation, testing circuit behavior under fault conditions, or simply curious about high-voltage phenomena, these minuscule modules provide a safe and accessible way to dive into the fundamentals. This blog will present…
Increasing bit resolution with oversampling
Increasing ADC resolution Many electronic designs contain an ADC, or more than one, to read various signals and voltages. Often, these ADCs are included as part of the microcontroller (MCU) being used. This means, once you pick your MCU, you have chosen the maximum resolution (calculated from the number of bits in the ADC and…
Broke MoCA II: This time, the wall wart got zapped, too
Back in 2016, I did a teardown of Actiontec’s ECB2200 MoCA adapter, which had fried in response to an EMP generated by a close-proximity lightning bolt cloud-to-cloud spark (Or was it an arc? Or are they the same thing?). As regular readers may recall, this was the second time in as many years that electronics…
Vibration motors: The key to compact haptic solutions
Vibration motors are the silent workhorses behind tactile feedback in wearables and handheld devices. These compact actuators convert electrical signals into physical cues, enriching user interaction. Whether you are prototyping or troubleshooting, understanding their behavior and integration is key to designing responsive, reliable hardware. Let’s start with the basics: How they generate vibration, and what…
Audio amplifiers: How much power (and at what tradeoffs) is really required?
My first proper audio setup, discounting the GE Wildcat record player I had as a kid: was a JVC PC-11 portable stereo system (thank goodness for Google Image Search to refresh my memory!), an example of which my (Catholic) high school chaplain owned, played (George Winston tapes, to be precise) in the background during weekly…
Inside India’s Big Push To Join Global Chip Race
– Advertisement – From powering smartphones to enabling AI, semiconductors drive the modern economy, and India is racing to build a resilient chip ecosystem to join the global leaders. What lies ahead despite challenges? Semiconductors, or chips, are tiny electronic devices with millions or billions of transistors that process data and manage electric currents. Key…