About: Ibrar Ayyub

Redux (London UK) has followed earlier announcements of its surface-wave-based haptics technology with a version specifically targeted at the smartphone, with which it aspires to “kill off smartphone micro-speakers”. The company’s surface audio tech from Redux transforms a smartphone screen into a loudspeaker, and also provides haptic feedback. This will, Redux believes, open new design […]

What’s inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip.1 Inside I found several types of gates, implemented with interesting circuitry and unusual transistors. The 74181 was a popular chip in the 1970s used to perform calculations in the arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) of […]

If you want to take a timelapse with your camera, it may be helpful to use an intervalometer. It is an attachment or facility on a camera that operates the shutter regularly at set intervals over a period, in order to take timelapse series or take pictures after a set delay. Daniel Knezevic had developed a custom made intervalometer […]

4 Channel Opto isolated board has been designed around 6N137 Opto-coupler, the 6N137 optocoupler is designed for use in high-speed digital interfacing applications that require high-voltage isolation between the input and output. Applications include line receivers, microprocessors or computer interface, digital programming of floating power supplies, motors, and other control systems. The 6N137 high-speed optocoupler […]

A Programmable Optical Slave Flash Trigger for Digital Cameras with Processor PIC 12F675 The synchronizer ensures a contact-free, optical synchronization of external photographic flashguns. The triggering of the external flash is derived from embedded flashes of a camera. It can be used for both digital and “analogous” cameras or for a remote synchronization of the […]

The electronics industry is evolving at a fast pace, with IoT and wearable devices driving the trend. This calls for smaller PCB that packs more features than before. In these devices, the PCB must be designed for SMT assembly and they should adhere to best design practices to minimize defects in final products. Best Design Practices […]

As the electronics industry gets increasingly competitive, electronics design companies are constantly on the search for low cost PCB manufacturers. Yet, getting the right fit in a PCB supplier takes more than blindly selecting the cheapest alternatives you found online. Making a wrong decision, especially when it comes to low cost PCB manufacturers can means costly consequences […]

Now this post will be for some serious stuff involving video compression. Early this year I decided to make a lossless compression IP core for my camera in case one day I make it for video. And because it’s for video, the compression has to be stream operable and real time. That means, you cannot […]

Designing a simple and cheap temperature logger. Part 4: The junk in the trunk. Posted on February 3, 2012 I somehow managed to solve the problem of the serial flash memory write block size vs. the erase block size. I just had to write a custom FAT12 filesystem.. As seen before, the Temperature Logger will act like […]

Today I stumble across a neat/new feature in Eagle I haven’t seen before. Prolly in there since early versions 7, but at least it is present in version 7.5.0 (current version at writing is 7.7). Some PCB manufacturers will accept panelized PCB and you can save a few bucks by combining a few small designs into a larger design. This […]