Intro

You have all had to implement a moving average algorithm from time-to-time.  Moving averages make life easier, especially for mixed-signal applications in which you have a few extra A/D cycles available.

This article is intended for a fixed-point audience; however, the techniques shown can apply to floating point …

Intro

There have been several times that I have had to sense current in an application for one reason or another.  I was working on just such an application recently when I thought to myself, "Hey, why don't I just make a quick solderable module and just always use that …

You may also be interested in our article regarding fixed-point math!

Intro

Division and modulo operations should be avoided on 8- and 16-bit hardware.  We would like to present you with a few techniques that can help you avoid the cycle-heavy division operations by replacing your modulo operators with bit …

Boards are on the way from OSH Park, along with parts from Digikey!

We should be able to start coding sometime next week - I always take the free shipping.

I will likely have them soldered up the day they get here since they have so few parts.

As mentioned in …

For a quick primer on libmathq15, check out How Fixed-Point Math Works.

Intro

Recently, I have been curious as to the accuracy of libmathq15 over
the entire sine range, which is 0 to 65535 for trigonometric functions and -32768 to 32767 for the standard Q1.15 functions.  Realizing quickly that …

If you haven't read the project documentation up to this point, you may want to go back to the beginning.

If you are ready to dive into the layout, then lets get started!

This will probably be a short post.  The layout process was fairly straightforward and resulted in a …

In the last post, we talked about the component selection.  In this post, we will make all connections of the schematic and fill in the details that we skipped.

High-Level Design

I believe that it is often instructive to make a high-level block diagram:

There is obviously going to be …

You may want to go back to Project Curve Tracer - Requirements in order to gain some background on this project.

Shield or Custom?

After thinking about this for a bit, I decided to go against making this a shield for the MSP430 launchpad or Arduino.  This decision is primarily based …

Intro

My first job out of school was as an engineering technician repairing medium to large UPS systems.  I only worked there for 6 months, but I learned a lot about the 'real world' and about how to troubleshoot circuits.  In my time there, I encountered a piece of equipment …

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci

Intro

There was a time sometime long ago when I was looking for an RTOS or something similar which would help me easily schedule multiple tasks to execute deterministically, but not require a lot of overhead.  Of course, I came across all …