About: Ibrar Ayyub

In 1971, Signetics—later Philips—introduced the NE555 timer, and manufacturers are still producing more than 1 billion of them a year. By adding a few components to the NE555, you can build a simple voltage-to-frequency converter for less than 50 cents. The circuit contains a Miller integrator based on a TL071 along with an NE555 timer […]

When TEST botton is pressed, RA3 pin is set to “1”. R2 and R3 are divide the voltage to 1/2 Vra3 which is connected to RA2 pin to be a Vref for comparator. The C undertest is charging and the timer is start. When the voltage of C undertest is more than 1/2 or above […]

Being an active outdoor guy, I have a few different types of 12V lights and a variety of battery types. – For flying RC planes and quadcopters at night, we use sealed lead acid batteries to power our club tables. – For fishing, I have a few 12V 2W led lights, powered by 2200mA, 3 […]

Why make your own printed circuit boards when you can get them commercially made for low cost? For one, it can take one to four weeks to receive the boards. For prototyping, this can be a major hurdle. Each design iteration will then take a month or more, and a project may need many months […]

I received the Boozhound Labs JFET Moving Coil (MC) Pre-Preamp Kit a while back and I promptly assembled the small circuit board. I’m a sucker for a simple kit and a hot iron. That is where it all stopped. The circuit board remained complete and laying about for a few years. Recently I required another […]

Description This project combines a PIC and three constant current ‘buck’ converters to produce an RGB LED controller that will operate with the the high power 350mA LEDs using PWM to control the LED brightness.  By driving the red, green and blue LEDs with varying pulse widths the controller can generate up to 16 million colours using […]

Yet another voice controlled home automation system! As shown in the picture, the system can control any electrical appliance, by turning ON or OFF, that is connected into the electrical socket. The system does this using bespoke voice commands. The system uses a micro-controller board (PIC or Arduino) and a PC/Laptop with the Microsoft Windows […]

HRL Laboratories, based in Malibu, CA, recently tested a prototype neuromorphic chip with 576 silicon neurons aboard a tiny drone measuring 6×6×1.5 inches and weighing 93 grams. The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The drone, custom built for the test by AeroVironment of Monrovia, CA, flew between three separate […]

It was a few years ago that I first heard of a free site where you could draw and simulate designs. “What’s the point?” I thought. But, the idea is taking off. Was I wrong? I questioned the usefulness of this cloud concept because there had already long existed good, free circuit simulators. A quick […]

Abstract: The Atmega8 microcontroller from Atmel has plenty of digital and analog input/output lines. It is the ideal device to develop any kind of measurement equipment. In this article we see how to interconnect the microcontroller to a linux PC over a physical RS232 interface without the extra MAX232 chip. Introduction A pre-requisite for this […]