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 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 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 BJT circuit design mistakes including incorrect base resistors, insufficient base drive, hFE assumptions, saturation errors, thermal problems, bias instability, and pinout mistakes.
Avoid common LED design mistakes including missing current control, incorrect resistor values, excessive current, forward-voltage assumptions, resistor power errors, thermal problems, brightness comparison errors, and improper LED driving.
Avoid the most common diode selection mistakes involving diode type, reverse voltage, forward current, forward voltage, reverse recovery, package, thermal design, datasheets, and design margin.
Avoid common inductor selection mistakes involving inductance, saturation current, DCR, core material, SRF, rated current, package, EMI, price, and datasheet review.
Compare ferrite and powdered iron inductor cores by frequency response, saturation behavior, core loss, DC bias, EMI behavior, cost, and practical applications.
Compare ceramic and electrolytic capacitors, understand their strengths, weaknesses, ESR, voltage behavior, lifetime, and learn how to select the right capacitor for real engineering designs.
Learn the most common capacitor selection mistakes involving dielectric type, voltage derating, ESR, temperature, polarity, and capacitance stability.
Learn how to choose the right resistor E-Series by balancing tolerance, precision, cost, availability, and circuit requirements.
