WBahn's Blog

In this blog entry we'll be looking at consensus terms in Boolean logic. What they are, what they tell us, why they are useful, and how to work with them. Although some of these concepts lend themselves very nicely to dipictions using Karnaugh Maps, we will work in strictly algebraic terms, if...

A thread was started in the Off-Topic forum the day before I was to undergo gastric bypass surgery and the following was my response to it. I'm putting this an subsequent follow-ups in a blog since that just seem a reasonable thing to do. My response to the thread: It's interesting that...

The recommended first step in starting out on this project is to make sure that you will be able to successfully compile and run your program once you've written it. This has proven to be a bit of a challenge for some because of a few of subtle points regarding the tools. So hopefully this...

Nand2Tetris is the name of a project that is the focus of the text The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (2008 MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-64068-8). The book is extremely affordable -- when I last looked it was $28...

Introduction and Scope Diodes, specifically p-n junction diodes, are a commonly used device in all manner of electronic circuits. These range from being used as very high power rectifiers dealing with hundreds (or thousands) of volts and/or amps to detecting the information signal in an AM...

There is a widespread -- and not too unreasonable -- misconception that a battery is basically a charged capacitor that has a reservior of net positive charge on one side and a reservior of net negative charge on the other side. Somewhat related to this misconception is a difficulty in...

Introduction Let's set the stage for this discussion by defining a function with the following truth table. #||A|B|C||F 0||0|0|0||0 1||0|0|1||1 2||0|1|0||0 3||0|1|1||1 4||1|0|0||1 5||1|0|1||0 6||1|1|0||1 7||1|1|1||1 Table 1 - Arbitrary function defined via Truth Table The first column is...

The complex power of a circuit in sinusoidal steady state is defined as (1) \ \overline{S} \, = \, P \, + \, jQ where P is the real power and Q is the reactive power given by (2) \ P \, = \, V_{eff} \cdot I_{eff} \, \cos(\Theta_{vi}) \ (3) \ Q \, = \, V_{eff} \cdot I_{eff} \...

This circuit was prompted by the following thread http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/showthread.php?t=88409 in which the OP wanted to know how to choose the resistor values by design instead of by happening (i.e., trial and error). I figured it might be useful as a general example, and so put...

Let's use the following circuit. Ideal Opamp Approximations We will use the following three assertions based on the assumption that we are working with an ideal opamp: 1) No current flows into either input. 2) The output is an ideal voltage source. 3) The configuration is consistent with...

This blog entry was inspired by the following thread: Forward Error Correction Identification The basic gist is that the Original Poster (OP) had a cheap data module for an RF system that, for some reason, he couldn't disclose the make or model of and he didn't have the documentation on...