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January 2007
Cable TV Reception
Wednesday, 31 January 2007 10:15 P GMT-06
The cable TV reception in my house is not very good. A block diagram of how I have it set up now is shown as follows.
The amplifier that I have now is a unidirectional amplifier (10 dB amplification, 50-900 MHz frequency range). One
Category: Home Projects
PCI-Express Hardware
Thursday, 25 January 2007 9:14 P GMT-06
PCI-Express is rapidly gaining momentum in the PC and embedded systems industries. The architecture provides a very high data bandwidth with fewer signals than PCI-X and a switch fabric architecture to reduce bottlenecks that a shared bus archi
Category: Digital System Architecture
Class CTL Breaker Boxes
Wednesday, 17 January 2007 10:51 P GMT-06
Home electrical wiring is a little outside my area of electrical engineering expertise, but I think I have a good understanding of electricity in general. Recently the city inspector brought up an issue with the electrical wiring done by the el
Category: Home Projects
Novel Approach to Reducing Signal Loss by Banpil
Thursday, 11 January 2007 6:47 A GMT-06
I came across this article in EE Times that describes a technique developed by a company named Banpil to send 10 Gbps digital signals long distances in standard FR4. Banpil has little information on their posted on their web site. However
Category: High Speed Digital Design
Fluorescent Light Bulb Experiment Part 7
Wednesday, 10 January 2007 6:26 P GMT-06
I replaced the 60 W light bulb in my garage door opener with the following:
MaxLite MicroMax Spiral
25 W of power
1500 lumens of light output
10000 hours of expected life
Reliable operating temperature range of 0 F to 100 F.
The current exp
Category: Home Projects Energy
Water Sensors for a Laundry Room
Wednesday, 10 January 2007 7:42 A GMT-06
We recently had an addition put on over our garage so that we could move our laundry room to upstairs. Bedrooms, are upstairs, clothes are upstairs, and it doesn't make sense to carry clothes all the way downstairs to wash them just to carry th
Category: Home Projects
Interconnects Archive Blog
Tuesday, 9 January 2007 7:52 A GMT-06
Here is a link to a signal integrity blog that I came across. It is a fairly frequently updated blog that discusses new advances in digital interconnect design. The blog is written by Rick Merritt, the editor for EE Times magazine, one of
Category: High Speed Digital Design
Why Choose 50 Ohms?
Monday, 8 January 2007 10:42 P GMT-06
Many digital engineers, myself included often wonder why 50 Ohms is such a common characteristic impedance in printed circuit board routing. Howard Johnson answered that question a few years ago in an article in EDN magazine [1]. He has r
Crystal Design Reference
Monday, 8 January 2007 10:24 P GMT-06
Quartz crystals are used throughout digital engineering to provide clock signals. The crystals vibrate when an AC electrical signal is applied at the frequency of the signal and this is known as the piezoelectric effect. This behavior cau
Category: Digital System Architecture
Dirt Dog Performance in my Workshop
Monday, 8 January 2007 9:35 P GMT-06
I let the Dirt Dog loose in my workshop this past weekend to clean up after some sawing with my table saw and miter saw. He picked up all the saw dust on the floor and did a great job of manuevering around all my clutter. I picked up a co
Category: Robotics
DDR 2 Bus Statistics
Monday, 8 January 2007 9:31 P GMT-06
The following table contains some statistics about a DDR 2 SDRAM design that I recently worked on.
Communication Standard
Signaling Type
Communicaiton Architecture
Fixed Garage Door Opener
Thursday, 4 January 2007 9:44 P GMT-06
We decided to just take a new garage door opener. The old one was a Genie which I did like, except for the outside access panel which opened by sliding up. There was a button that had to be touched by the sliding panel in order for it to
Category: Home Projects