Zero-ohm resistors A Zero-ohm resistors is simply a resistor with zero ohms. It’s a through-hole resistor that has been manufactured to have zero ohm of resistance and is marked with a single black band.  A surface-mount ceramic resistor has single or multiple numbers of zeros to represent the zero-ohm resistance. ...

Battery constraints amidst rising power demands Designers for the Internet of Things devices are facing a challenge meeting the conflicting requirements spurred by the customer demand and emerging wireless technologies. Customers are demanding longer battery life whereas emerging networks like Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi connectivity are constraining the power limits ...

Development kits for IoT Postscape estimates that by the end of this year, 2020, approximately 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet. A huge percentage of these devices are short-range wireless systems that use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to connect to the internet. This is evidence enough that IoT ...

Maintenance and Condition Monitoring Maintenance has for a long time been carried out based on a predetermined interval mostly following a predetermined criterion. Condition monitoring has also been based on periodic inspections. The emergence of smart factories is rapidly changing maintenance and condition monitoring practices. Smart factories embrace predictive maintenance ...

5G Network Can you imagine a cellular technology capable of delivering up to 100 times faster data rates compared to the current 4G network? Well, that is 5G for you. 5G is promising to deliver speeds in the order of Gb/s which is much greater than 4G is capable of. ...

Power supply design Power supply design is an otherwise very demanding exercise. The design engineer is first required to define the power supply’s specifications. He will then be required to decide the topology. One the topology is complete; the engineer would then have to look for an appropriate IC that ...

Current sensing Current sensing is very critical in electronic or electrical equipment. There are numerous methods of sensing current which include the Rogowski coil, fluxgate, hall sensors, shunt resistor, and current transformer sensing. Shunt resistor sensing is the most commonly used method of current sensing. This is because it is ...

Low power IoT applications Most IoT devices are battery-driven making optimizing for power the top design challenge. This challenge is even growing harder with AI inferencing moving from the data centre to the edge. Sensors are increasingly being required to pre-process data to extract valuable data before sending it to ...

What is RISC-V? RISC-V has in the recent past attracted the attention of major corporations across the globe like Google, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm among others. It has thrown developers into a frenzy. What exactly is RISC-V though? RISC-V is an instruction set architecture (ISA) that is open source and based ...

Industrial IoT and PLCs Industrial IoT is growing rapidly. However, traditional PLCs don’t offer sufficient flexibility and connectivity as required by engineers. Customizing solutions to achieve the required flexibility and connectivity is costly and time-consuming. More so, very few engineers have the experience required to develop a functional microcontroller-based embedded solution. ...