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Negative Voltage supply is very much necessary in Analog circuits and it is extremely necessary if  you are playing with dual polarity signals also called as bipolar signals. Although there are number of solutions available to generate negative supply. But Best and easy of them is the converting current positive supply in to the negative. This saves your design time and component cost. And I must say, I am impressed by such small-little IC named ICL7660 . I used the one from Intersil, CMOS Voltage Converter, apparently all the other Semiconductor Manuf. Produce them. Pinout- ICL7660 Background story goes like this We were involved in building data acquisition system to conduct the field survey  , required for the tidal energy generation program. We were supposed to measure all the critical environmental parameters in the area where tidal power plant is to be built. Parameters like Temperature, Humidity and Pressure in surrounding atmosphere, Wate...

I choose Arduino core to build this project for couple of reasons.  Ease-of-Use. String Community support. Easy to debug. Abundant of resources. Full of necessary libraries. According to last my last blog, I am going to start with Stage 1 of the development. Which is to use Woreless module(WiFi), On-board sensor coupled with Atmega-328P. I will carryout prototyping, firmware development, hardware design, PCB designing. Pretty much everything.  Node designed considering following conditions:           On-Board Sensor.           Internet connectivity - for Cloud data logging.           On-board Memory - For data-logging, in case internet connectivity fails.           Data to be logged in “.CSV” format, with new file on each day.           RTC for Date-Time stamp.           Mini/Micro USB Port - For Config...

Industrial Revolution 4.0 I believe industrial process monitoring & control should be smart, simple and efficient. Various manufacturing and processing industries demands constant monitoring of critical environmental parameters (Temperature, Humidity, Pressure, vibrations) to maintain product quality. Currently, most of the industry uses wired network of sensors & controllers. These networks have drawbacks such as –Costly to Maintain and complex to deploy, require timely calibration of system, susceptible to external noise, low reliability, high downtime, false triggering of Alarms and requires continuous mains power source. These systems are operated from local PC(RS-232/RS-485), using proprietary PC software. PC software which have complex UI and are irrelevant.  I wish to design the node, -real-time data log. -Simple plug-&-play interface. -Ease of use, installation and maintenance. -Simple to Configure and ability for Over-the-air-pr...

ESP-01 and ESP-12 are widely used WiFi modules in the hacker community, thanks to the esperssif for such a low cost WiFi chip. Esperssif is quit active with the SDK development, And releases new versions almost every month, with some updated AT Commands or other firmware related upgrades. It's quit a tedious to flash/burn the updated firmware into ESP. Many hackers have build simple and nice PCB tools to upgrade/flash ESP. I also thought to build one. So here it is !!! Those who want to know How-To Upgrading firmware of the ESP modules read this article . I use ESP-01 for my small projects. I thought, it will be nice if I build a simple PCB widget, which will allow me to easily flash the latest firmware into ESP8266. For this project, I simply integrated ESP-01 and ESP-12 footprint into single PCB [with RESET+FLASH buttons and GPIO options], in that way, one can add ESP module and flash the firmware with Zero errors. There are going to be two versions of the t...

Background Story: Recently, while helping my friend in building his Automatic Cleaning filter, I designed driver circuit for Solenoid Valves and DC Motor. You can easily find enormous amount of How-To, tutorials, circuits on google. But they are specific with those applications. Simply they referred other designs and decided to use them in theirs. Most of them do not discuss about calculation involved for designing driver circuit according to power rating of the solenoids/relay/DC Motor. Depending upon the power rating of your Relay,Solenoid and DC Motor; selection of driver circuit is done. This post to address those issues,    How to choose right driving element like Power Transistor, Power MOSFET etc. ? How to calculate sink or source current needed? How to safeguard your microcontroller from notorious back EMF of Relays and Solenoids? [Note: Principle involved in driving Solenoids and Relays are same, so covering Relays also]    So...