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Georg Simon Ohm, a German physicist, demonstrated proportionality between current and voltage, thus defining resistance (this rule was named after him as Ohm's law).

When working in the embedded world there are some chances that you will come across an application requiring greater memory storage space than is available in most microcontrollers and even external EEPROMs. That's why SD or MMC cards are great.

Every thing you need (schematics, libraries, pcb) to built a USB to RS232 converter is available on SparkFun web site

Usually a traditional control system requires a regulated power supply (5V/3.3V), controlling the lighting loads via an opto-coupler. Another approach is interfacing the microcontroller directly to the main supply. Philips Semiconductors/NXP released several application notes for the latter approach, which was named as easytriac. It allows a low-end microcontroller to be embedded into the casing of each incandescent, CFL or LED lamps.

Resistors are the most used passive electronics components. Even if they are the most common and cheap components in the market, they are not known enough for their peculiarities and for their role in the electronic area.

This article is full of sources that can help you to design an ARM for your embedded application. You'll find all the software and hardware tools you need.

CE Marking (which includes EMC - Electromagnetic Compatibility) has been introduced in order to unify the products security features used in CEE countries. In this article you'll find some EU directive.

An analog-to-digital converter (ADC, A/D, A to D) is a device which converts continuous signals to discrete digital numbers. The reverse operation is performed by a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). [from Wikipedia]. ADCS7476 (datasheet), ADCS7477, and ADCS7478 are monolithic CMOS 12-, 10- and 8-bit analog-to-digital converters.

In the world we live today, the cost is considered one of the most important characteristics of a product. No wonder then, keeping production costs down is an important part of the manufacturing of a product. This concept has also been extended over the development costs. In many cases, especially for projects which pioneer a specific filed of electronics, the development costs represent a significant part of the final price of a product. Keeping them down would obviously make the managers happy and win a pat on the back for the engineers (stop hoping for a pay raise!)

A capacitor fails when it no longer meets the application requirements. A capacitor can fail for many causes... so let's have a look to the failures and to the parasitic effects too!

The NE555 (datasheet) is a stable controller which includes 23 transistors, 2 diodes and 16 resistors. LM555/NE555/SA555 was called The IC Time Machine.

The LED is probably one of the most spectacular effects of electronics, and at the same time, a most basic component, with a wide variety of applications. Many people know the joy of turning on their first LED and then turning it off, while the LED blinking application is like the “hello world” of electronics (and it has been for some decades now).

The real world, where we live day by day, is the realm of analogue signals. Read this overview about ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) and DAC (Digital to Analog Converter)

ARM is by now as God - it is in everything: in our mobile phones, in our GPS, PDA or in our laptops. Let's see a list with 50 products that use ARM Linux technology.