Books

Signal and Power Integrity – Simplified (2nd Edition)

Signal and Power Integrity Cover

Let me start by saying, this book is not for new comers, or (ugh) “newbies”, to electronics.  This book is intended for those who have a solid understanding of electrical engineering fundamentals, but want to expand to the next level.  Bogatin’s amount of detail is on-par with a textbook but writing style is more casual.

Understanding signal integrity use to be “Black Magic.”  It is taught in a language which resembles engineering speak, but sounds like randomly assembled terms purposefully meant to confuse people.  Personally, I remember hearing “signal integrity engineers talk” and wondered if they were speaking in code.

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Blog

How does a transistor work by Veritasium

One of the best ways to describe a transistor is as an “electronic switch.”  They are solid state devices that make up almost everything in our world.  This video by Veritasium, which is a bit older, covers how n and p-type transistors actually work.

This complements the Addohms videos on BJTs and MOSFETs, which are more about how to use them.

If you’ve never watched a Veritasium video, do yourself a favor and set aside a few minutes. He’s like the Alton Brown of science.

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BinBoo

An example of when comments would have helped

What was one of the first things you were taught, when learning to program?  “Comment Your Code!”  And of course, like all programming students, you ignored that advice.  Or, if you are like me, you made vague comments as the lines of “variable called var.”

Tonight I opened up some code I haven’t touched in two years.  Code that when I wrote it, made perfect sense to me… at the time.

The code was for my binary clock project, BinBoo.  So I need your help, check out the code below and see if you can help me remember what it does!

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Blog

Software Defined Radios are Awesome

Early in my engineering career, I worked for an oscilloscope company in the high performance product line. The last project I worked on was defining the features and requirements of a 33GHz (that’s giga-, not mega-) scope. This experience gave me a strong appreciation for processing digitized signals, especially those in the RF range. So when I picked up my first Software Defined Radio (SDR), you can imagine how much fun it was to use… with the help of some open source hardware.

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