Get to really know the fundamentals behind your test equipment. Not only do you reap the most out of your scopes, etc. as well as avoid debugging traps—it can also facilitate a “spec hack.” Everyone ...

The PIC16C5X has one 8-bit timer (Timer0), which can be used with an 8-bit prescaler. The prescaler runs asynchronously, hence it can count a very high frequency. The minimum rise and fall times of ...

In frequency counters, the gating time allotted for counting is often too short to resolve low frequencies. A phase-locked loop could be used to multiply the input frequency. But in some cases, the ...

Recently, for some reason, I have been seeing a lot of references to the good old MM5314/5/6 clock ICs from National Semiconductor. These were some of the first 40-pin LSI (large-scale integration) ...

Let’s say you want to build a Nixie clock. You could go out and find some tubes, source a good power supply design, start whipping up a PCB, and working on a custom enclosure. Or, you could skip all ...