Electronics and Radio Control

"Do you want crunchy or smooth peanut butter on your sandwich" - Sweet Sue
"Smooth" - Son
"That's good, because I don't have any crunchy" - Sweet Sue
What can I say? - Life is a gamble.

Just a few oddments about electronics, including a working DC motor speed controller (not reversible) and some practical notes for UofA EEE provided for learning guidance to students. These provide some suitable circuits plus hints on design approaches and overcoming practical problems.

Any circuits provided here are not guaranteed to work for you, and are only fit for use in the particular application for which they have been developed. In many cases they are just experimental. To use this information you need to have a good understanding of how the circuit works, and be able to adapt it yourself to your own purposes. If you choose to use any information that you republish or use in any further development, then it is ethical to acknowledge the author. On that note, if you see that I have not acknowledged anything that others have published, and that is not in the public domain, then please let me know.

Solar Panel System	Solar Electric Power System Model: predict system efficiencies
Radio Control Projects	DC Motor Controller: suitable for flying models
	35MHz band FSK Radio Receiver: experimental and incomplete
AVR Tools	Bootloader and Programmer to upload firmware to AVR from serial port
	Scheduling Operating System - absolute minimum size
	Howto CDK4AVR Tools on Fedora 6
	Libraries: ADC, I2C master
Test Equipment Projects	Data Acquisition a unit for data capture
Switching Power Converters	MC34063 SPICE model and design aids.
	Energy Saving Fluorescent Globe repair.
UofA EEE Prac Notes	Audio System: a level II electronics practical project (Lab Resources)
	Radio Project: a level III practical project

Circuit simulation tools being made freely available are:

gEDA is a Linux based circuit simulation tool being developed in the opensource world. This was initially aimed at PCB development, but can be used with SPICE or other simulators for simulation work. Installation and use are not as straightforward as the commercial tools, but it is a package that is very capable, and hopefully will eventually evolve into a very user friendly end result.
For electronic circuit simulation on an inferior operating system, PSpice has proved to be an excellent tool since the mid 1990s. PSpice version 8 is best if you can get it, however Orcad (who bought out Microsim) provides a student version of their modified PSpice. I haven't used this version a great deal. It is a freely available, comprehensive and easy to use tool for student learning in circuit design.
Intusoft SPICE3-based Analogue and Mixed Simulation Software oriented towards power applications provides a limited circuit size freeware demonstration version.
5Spice is a GUI wrapper for SPICE, running in an inferior operating system and available free for non-commercial use.
LTSpice/SwitcherCAD III is an enhanced SPICE III simulator provided by Linear Technology, including schematic capture and waveform viewing. It is naturally oriented towards LT's products but includes other models.
SIMetrix provides a freeware version of their simulator.

An excellent mathematical package is SCILAB, also freely available for Linux. It can be used to study control systems, which are quite easy to setup to provide various views of pole-zero behaviour. It seems to be like a combination of Matlab and Mathcad, I'm gather.

All original work presented here is copyright to the author. Circuits and hardware documentation may be used according to the provided open hardware licence and software under the GPL version 2 or later licence.

Contact: My email address can be constructed from the username "ksarkies" and the ISP DNS address internode.on.net in the usual way.