Engineering Blog
Practical electronics engineering articles focused on component selection, circuit behavior, PCB design, power, troubleshooting, and design decisions.
25 published articles
Avoid common engineering unit conversion mistakes involving SI prefixes, milli vs mega, micro vs nano, frequency and period, watts vs watt-hours, PCB mils, temperature, significant figures, and calculator inputs.
Avoid common PCB power and trace design mistakes including undersized traces, voltage drop, via bottlenecks, RMS-current errors, thermal issues, poor copper pours, and high-current layout problems.
Avoid common power design mistakes involving watts versus watt-hours, unit prefixes, RMS current, power factor, efficiency, derating, thermal design, startup current, voltage drop, and undersized components.
Avoid common MOSFET design mistakes including using VGS(th) as turn-on voltage, weak gate drive, gate charge, RDS(on) heating, switching loss, SOA, body diode behavior, transients, and PCB layout.
Avoid transformer mistakes involving turns ratio, VA, flux density, regulation, copper loss, window fill, magnetizing current, reflected load, and winding connections.
Avoid digital design mistakes involving logic thresholds, noise margin, propagation delay, setup and hold time, metastability, bit width, signed arithmetic, and clock division.
Avoid electronics thermal mistakes involving resistance networks, heat sinks, interfaces, transient heating, convection, enclosure rise, derating, thermistors, RTDs, and measurement.
Avoid motor drive sizing mistakes involving stall current, back EMF, torque, copper loss, PWM, gearing, efficiency, encoder timing, step rate, and BLDC electrical frequency.
Diagnose op-amp failures caused by common-mode range, output swing, noise gain, gain-bandwidth, slew rate, bias current, capacitive loading, and stability limits.
Diagnose oscillator startup and frequency errors caused by loop gain, phase, loading, tolerance, parasitics, crystal drive, Q, comparator limits, delay, and control sensitivity.
Avoid sensor measurement mistakes involving excitation, sensitivity, bridge output, offset, calibration, ADC range, reference voltage, noise, drift, and uncertainty.
Avoid battery runtime and pack sizing mistakes involving Ah versus Wh, usable capacity, efficiency, C-rate, pulse loads, temperature, aging, cutoff voltage, and series-parallel design.
Avoid RF link budget and antenna design mistakes involving dB units, path loss, cable loss, impedance mismatch, polarization, noise, fade margin, and installation conditions.
Avoid UART, I2C, SPI, CAN, RS-232, RS-485, USB, and Ethernet mistakes involving timing, pull-ups, termination, topology, throughput, latency, and signal integrity.
Understand why real filter cutoff, Q, bandwidth, and attenuation differ from ideal calculations because of tolerance, loading, parasitics, source impedance, and active-device limits.
Avoid wire sizing mistakes involving loop length, hot resistance, voltage drop, I squared R loss, material, installation, parallel conductors, terminals, and protection.
