The November issue of Circuit Cellar comes out next week, in both print and digital! Here’s a sneak preview inside. LEDs and IoT for Smart Lighting, timekeeping with MCUs, LC meter project, DC-DC converters, AI and IoT team up, Solar panel monitor project and more! This 84-page magazine lights up a busy street of top-notch embedded technology articles for your reading enjoyment.
Not a Circuit Cellar subscriber? Don’t be left out! Sign up today:
Here’s a sneak preview of November 2021 Circuit Cellar:
EMBEDDED SYSTEMS TECH IN ACTION
Embedded Technologies for Smart Lighting
By Jeff Child
Encompassing advances ranging LED technology to IoT-based intelligent city lamp posts, Smart Lighting has become both a consumer electronics phenomenon and a Smart City infrastructure challenge. System developers are considering energy savings, lighting controls, lighting sensors and IoT connectivity. Circuit Cellar Chief Editor Jeff Child looks at these technology trends.
Building an L-C Meter: Retro Design Reimagined
By Charles Kosina
After reading about a restoration project on an old Tektronix L-C meter, Charles realized that the device is a brilliant design given the limitations of the era. That inspired him to embark on a similar design but using modern techniques and technologies.
Datasheet: DC-DC Converters
By Jeff Child
It’s a mistake to make your power conversion electronics choices an afterthought in you embedded system designs. The DC-DC converter you choose can have a direct impact on the cooling and mobility of your system. This Datasheet section updates readers on these technology trends and provides a product gallery of representative DC-DC converters.
Designing Accelerators: Hardware vs Software
By Nishant Mittal
The choice of implementing speed optimizations in hardware versus software has always been a moving target. More recently, acceleration has tipped to the hardware side. In this article, Nishant looks at how accelerators are designed on FPGAs, focusing mostly on Xilinx-specific accelerator design techniques using high-level synthesis tools.
DESIGNING EMBEDDED SYSTEMS FOR THE IoT
AI and IoT Join Forces
By Jeff Child
We’re now entrenched in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is easily done at an embedded systems level. That means system developers can implement local AI decision-making right at the IoT edge using box-level systems. Circuit Cellar Chief Editor Jeff Child examines how today’s embedded solutions are enabling AI at the IoT edge.
Build an IoT-Based Solar Panel Monitor
By Pedro Bertoleti
In this project article, Pedro details how to make an end-to-end IoT device for monitoring electrical energy generated by solar panels, in order to monitor exactly how much electrical energy is being generated to recharge a battery. For wireless communication to send data to the cloud, the system uses SigFox LPWAN communication.
IoT Device Measures Key Health Stats
By Andrei Florian
Wouldn’t it be cool to build your own device that precisely tracks your heart rate and blood oxygen (SpO2) levels with the press of a button? Andrei did just that with MyPulse, an IoT application that’s directly integrated with Microsoft Azure IoT allowing the collected data to be securely streamed to the platform from where it is beautifully illustrated on a dashboard.
… AND MORE FROM OUR EXPERT COLUMNISTS
Time Keeping Using an MCU
By Jeff BachiochiThe technology and science of time keeping has an interesting history. Jeff gives an overview, and then shares the details of his project that uses a Microchip ATtiny45 microcontroller to replace the stepper drive circuitry that’s popular for quartz-based clock movements.
Cabinet Simulator “Stomp-Box” for Guitarists
By Brian Millier
Creating a really good real-time music speaker cabinet simulation generally requires an FIR filter with a large number of taps—more than was possible with the Teensy 3.6. In this project article, Brian builds one using the Teensy 4.1 module making use of its large memory, faster speed and added features.
Building the ChipWhisperer-Husky
By Colin O’Flynn
The ChipWhisperer-Lite is an open-source tool for power analysis and faultinjection. Here, he talks about some adjustments required for building a new version of the ChipWhisperer, using a more recent FPGA while addressing supply chain headaches that are affecting hardware builds in 2021 and beyond.
