Today I want to speak about op-amps. These wonderful, but mysterious components, we have heavely often appearing
in circuit schematica of analog or analog / digital hybrid circuits. We want to demistify these components.
There are two basic thumb rules when handling ideal op-amp circuit. (Real-world op-amp circuits are a bit more complicated, but we will discuss this later).
1. The first thumb rule is that Vout is essentially the difference of the voltage values at the both inputs, multiplied with an arbitrary but high amplification factor A.
...September 24, 2023
Analog Computers
Today I want to speak about analog computers. In todays times analog computers are leading a shadowy existence,
compared to their digital counterparts. But they are wonderous little machines. And that machines I mean
wordly because there exists analog mechanical computers that are models from the world and used to
compute and predict tides in certain areas of the world .
Also the brain is an enourmous analog computer with a comparatively very small
enery budget. It only takes 12 Watt.
12 Watt; that is not even a quarter of the power supply budget of a laptop, which uses 65 Watt.
And you can do very heavy lifting with the brain, but back to topic.
I want to talk mainly about analog electronic computers, during the world war two those were used to compute
ballistic curves.
So analog computers can sum up, multiply, divide, integrate and differentiate like their digital
counterparts.
June 10, 2023
When you fire up your browser to visit a website, you most probably did not noticed a very
important mechanism underlying the browser and working in the background. Caching.
Caches are used everywhere to optimize and improve access times and such in consequence
the overall performance (of a site). Caching in the browser for example means, that
ideally only the portions of the website that changed are loaded from the www. All else
was already loaded before and did not change, thus needs no reload. Portions that are no longer
up-to-date become invalidated (also known as cache-invalidation) and are loaded anew from the source.
There are two types of very different caches in the computer
May 21, 2023
This is a small, incomplete list of topics I’d like to write about in the mid- to far future.
May 18, 2023
What I have learned about religions and spirituality over the last years and decades boils down to one
simple statement: Religion is about right and wrong and old, outdated dogmas, while spirituality
simply says "It is how it is". For spirituality, there is no right or wrong, only the single moment in the present
in which we dwell. I find this viewpoint quite amazing. From what I found, it leads to a more awakened state.
May 18, 2023
USB, SPI, I²C, Sata - all these interfaces is common that they are serial interfaces. Serial interfaces are todays common.
But why is that the case, especially for high-speed communication? it sounds simply counterintuitive: Parallel wires
can theoretically send more bits per time than on singular wire can.
The answer to that question is complex and multilayered. There are multiple different reasons why
serial interfaces are preferred over parallel interfaces. Lets start with the obvious ones:
The PCB routing of busses of 8, 16, 32 or even 64 bit width gets increasingly complex to route on printed circuits
boards (PCBs).The second problem, related to this, is that signal slope need to get transmitted at the same time
for all parallel lines (wires), which results in a more complex routing since edges in the strip conductor needs to be compensated.
Simply put the additional logic implemented in chips to convert the serial signal to parallel ones again (deserializer) and vice versa
(serializer) is much cheaper than the costs of complex routings.
April 22, 2023
Today I want to introduce a solution for a usability-problem I had in Odoo recently.
In Odoo 12 there is a lock button next to the edit / save button, and you have to click
both to (1) unlock the page and (2) make it editable. This should be done in one
step, effectively removing the locking mechanism used in the Delivery Orders (class StockPicking)
and Manufacturing Orders (class MrpProduction). The solution requires an xml and a javascript-file
as well as a dedicated web-controller. The soliution is presented below.
