Power Supply | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Power Supply

AVR: self-monitoring its own power supply

Posted on January 17, 2011 by R-B Leave a comment

How would a microcontroller know how it’s own supply voltage is changing? Well, most microcontrollers have built in analog-to-digital converters that can read an input analog voltage and convert it to a digital number. So, it might be suggestive to use a similar technique. But the problem is, any ADC operation requires a reference voltage, which in most cases, is either the source voltage or one derived from it. So, how would you monitor the source voltage through ADC that uses the same source voltage as reference? The following article describes a way to do this without using any additional

Regulated power supply for embedded systems

Posted on December 21, 2010 by R-B 4 comments

Power is an important aspect of all embedded systems. Nothing works without electric power. Depending upon the type of applications, several options for power are available. For example, if the system doesn’t need to be portable, it can be powered directly from the wall source using AC adaptors. AC adaptors are cheap and easily available at any electronics store. They are used to power a bunch of electronics gadgets at home, like radios, answering machines, wireless routers, etc. They also come with mobile phones as chargers. They convert the high voltage AC in the wall socket to low voltage DC

A simple idea of making a digitally controlled variable power supply.

Posted on October 27, 2010 by R-B Leave a comment

A variable power supply is a very useful tool for designing and testing electronics circuit. There are varieties of adjustable regulator IC’s available to generate a variable DC power supply. They normally use a two-resistor feedback network at the output to control the output voltage. If one of the resistor is replaced by a potentiometer, the output voltage can be easily adjusted as required. LM350 is one of such adjustable regulators that is capable of supplying in excess of 3A over a 1.2V to 33V output range, and is very easy to use. It requires only 2 external resistors to