The Analog Discovery 3 is a great debugging tool, but as I discovered here in a note on using it with 10x scope probes, the input capacitance was too high for the probes to be compensated correctly. Custom LNA design To combat this, I decided to design an amplifier that would have a low input capacitance so that we fall within the 5-35pF compensation which is typical of these 10x scope probes....

One of the (many) weird quirks of studying in the University of Cambridge is that our terms only last 8 weeks. Yes, the number of days we are officially “studying” is less than the number of days we are ostensibly on “holiday”. Of course, it never works that way, and Cambridge is probably one of the only places where going to uni feels exactly like going to secondary school. Over these long break, we are told that our rooms are going to be used for conference purposes, and that we would have to move all our stuff out to a tiny, cramped storage container....

As part of the Winter Logger project, I got myself some DIP EEPROMs from eBay which were ostensibly AT24C256’s, mostly because I didn’t feel like buying yet more stuff that I probably would never use just to pad out Mouser’s £33 for free shipping minimum order. This is what I got: Suspicious… With all the counterfeit semiconductors floating out there, I wanted to verify if I at least had functional EEPROM that wasn’t literally just plastic with some legs tacked onto it - I wanted to test if all the memory cells actually worked....

As makers, random serendipity is very precious to us, as it represents an excellent opportunity to broaden our horizons by trying stuff that otherwise would not have crossed our minds. This project was spawned by a chance encounter with an art museum curator during my stint in Edinburgh. The idea was to create a tool to generate Secret Portraits , also known as Anamorphosis , to make some cool merch that would support the operations of the museum....

This is a tool I developed to assist us at the Cambridge University Spaceflight Club to design a patch antenna for telemetry. It is intended only as a very crude estimate, as I have absolutely no idea how accurately I selected the underlying formulae. Input Parameters: Dielectric Constant: Dielectric Thickness: mm Target Frequency: Hz kHz MHz GHz Target Impedance: Ω Conductor Thickness: μm Velocity Factor: % Results: Patch Width: Patch Length: Feed Methods: Inset Fed: Inset Length: width length qwt_ Probe Fed: Probe Distance from Center: width length dpf Edge Fed: Edge Impedance: Impedance Required for Quarter Wave Transform: Required Trace Width for Quarter Wave Transform: Required Trace Length for Quarter Wave Transform: 50Ω Impedance Microstrip Transmission Line Width: References Patch Antennas for the impedance formulae Quarter Wave Transformer Microstrip Width Calculator for microstrip formulae DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A CONFORMAL OMNIDIRECTIONAL MICROSTRIP ANTENNA ARRAY ON CYLINDRICAL SURFACE Study of a conformal UWB antenna designed on various non-planar surfaces Design and Studies on Non-planar Conformal Patch Antennas for Air-borne Vehicles

To Do: Look into Average vs RMS also Plot some graphs yay

Why I bought it in the first place The Analog Discovery 3 seemed like a band-aid solution to an ongoing problem I have been facing here at Cambridge: how do I get my own oscilloscope so that I can get back in to doing electronics without having to rely on the few shared scopes at the Dyson Center (the Dyson Center is sort of like a makerspace for engineering students, it isn’t great though…)...