Category: reading

More datasheets and application notes: starting to learn about DACs in the Analog Mini-Tutorials series, another DC/DC converter (in a slightly less silly package), plus a couple of randoms.

An interesting application note about crystals (I know very little about them, and need to know more) and a paper about how best to solder QFN packages, plus some jellybeanish analogue ICs and a tiny tiny DC/DC converter.

Bit behind on this again, but I have some interesting ones for next week, so maybe that will make me stick with it better.

Got a bit distracted with reading microcontroller datasheets and reference manuals for some projects, mostly for the ST Micro STM32F767ZI and for the Silicon Labs "Universal Bee" series (I'm using the EFM8UB3 for a project at the moment). But here's some "normal" datasheet reading.

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…

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…

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.

More datasheets!

My regular Sunday datasheets round-up...

More datasheets/app notes/unclassifiable electronics things. I should get around to writing some blog articles about something else as well, eh?

The daily datasheet thing continues. It's been surprisingly easy to get in at least one a day, mostly because a lot of them are quite short. This week, one day was taken up with reading a big pile of datasheets for motor driver ICs, which was repetitive but educational.

Here's this week's datasheet-a-day reading...

I started a new thing this last week. I've been impressed by Adrian Colyer's the morning paper for a long time. It's a project where Colyer read and commented on a computer science paper every week day during term time, and wrote a summary of the paper. Some of the summaries are quite long. It was really useful, for those of us who were working in a similar field, because it meant that we could get a quick overview of papers without going to the trouble of reading them.

I have no intention of displaying the level of diligence that Colyer did, but it did make me think about a less ambitious "read a thing every day" project. I've been thinking of it as "datasheet a day", but I've been reading a mixture of datasheets and application notes.