The whole "datasheet a day" thing got slightly derailed this month. I
have been reading datasheets for projects, but my "datasheet a day"
reading has been spent on Op Amps For
Everyone,
which is 464 pages of opampy goodness from Ron Mancini at TI.
I certainly didn't understand it all, and some sections I just
skimmed, but I definitely have a better understanding of some things
to do with opamp design. I was treating it mostly as a warm-up for
Chapter 4 of The Art of Electronics, which I hope to start on this
week or next.
Next week, back to normal.
I just this week finished a project that has been hanging around for a
while, mostly because it turned out to be much more work than I
estimated. Earlier this year, I did some work using Nordic
Semiconductor's nRF52840 ARM chip. Although the chip is nice, I didn't
enjoy the software development experience using the tools that Nordic
recommends, so I decided to do a "little" project to review some of
the alternatives.
Turned out not to be so little, after all.
In any case, you can read the results on the project
page. The highlights of the work
were definitely learning about the Zephyr project and CircuitPython.
I'm going to try to do some Rust stuff on the nRF52840 later to get an
idea of how practical that is too, but I need a break from this stuff
for a while first!
Slightly fewer datasheets this week, because I'm reading "Op Amps For
Everyone", which is a 464-page thing about op amps from TI. That's a
bit too long to manage one of them in a day!
I tried one new thing this week with the datasheets. I took a number
of datasheets for "standard" diodes, and just looked through them to
get a sense of the kinds of parameters that are usually quoted for
these things. It was a useful exercise, and I'll do the same for some
transistors next week. Otherwise, I continued with ploughing through
the Analog Devices "mini-tutorials" series. They're of varying
difficulty and relevance, but they all feel like things it would be
good to know about.
I've had some time to work on my Teensy Load
project recently. I got the boards a couple of
weeks ago, assembled one, found that it didn't really work, and
tracked that problem down to a wrong-way-round diode (due to a weird
symbol definition I'd used from the wrong KiCad library).
And yesterday I did some end-to-end testing using the tl-meter
software
that I wrote. And it (partially) worked!