It’s a holiday week, Thanksgiving in USA—a good excuse for a break from techie topics. And it’s a chance to call your attention to some changes to our blogs. The title of this week’s blog is a common expression in my lexicon but these changes are good. I just thought I could get you to read if I sounded a bit grumpy.  :)

Perhaps most important is the new “subscribe” link on the right. This allows you to subscribe to email notification to The Signal or other TI blogs. There’s also a new button to email the author. I had already been providing an email at the bottom, but now there’s a link in a consistent location for all our blogs. It opens a web form in your browser so you may prefer my email link below. We’ve also made it more obvious how to leave a comment for all to see. You need to register as an E2E community member to comment (a good reason to join us), but this was not so clear in the previous page layout.

The new page layout allows more flexibility and I’m assured that there are more cool things to come—“widgets.” So watch for new, helpful thingies over on the right. I may call your attention to them later.

Another useful addition is my own.  I’ve made a table of contents page for The Signal. Many blogs tend to be “newsy” with content that eventually becomes dated. The Signal deals mostly with timeless technical issues. You may be interested in a topic that was covered six months ago but The Signal’s home page with its reverse-chronological listing gets pretty deep in multiple pages. The listings on this new page are grouped by topic on a single page—much easier to find something of interest. Check it out to find a useful topic you missed. I’ll include this link at the bottom of this and future blogs.

And what about the new graphic!?   (Thanks for the design, Pattie.)

Here’s the old one, below. I liked it, too, but I’m wondering why nobody gave me grief for the reversed “+” and “-“ on the op amp. Did you not notice or were you just too polite to comment?

I discovered this error very early but chose not to correct it, awaiting someone’s comment. To my surprise, nobody did. My colleague, John, was the only one, chiding me in a private email. I had my excuse ready—it’s actually a valid circuit. So, friends, here’s a question… what is it? As usual… please no TI peeps allowed.

I’m very thankful for many things, including your readership. Happy Thanksgiving!

Bruce       email:  thesignal@list.ti.com (Email for direct communications. Comments for all, below.)

     Table of Contents for all The Signal blogs.

Anonymous
  • Amalinda-- TI's blog site is not public and all its blogs are written by TI employees (or perhaps occasionally by invited guests). You might consider whether your comments are better suited to our E2E forums, directed to a specific product area.

  • how do we start writing blogs on Ti.com?

  • I was going to say that it was a comparator with hysteresis, but I guess I arrived too late (I took last Weds off!).  Anyways, you might want to note that the new buttons (Subscribe, etc) don't show up unless you are logged in.  A 'guest' would not see them.  It might be an inducement to get someone to register if they try to subscribe without being already registered.

  • I reonsidered my idea about the PWM generation and I was wrong: you need to feed it a non-symmetrical signal, e.g. a sawtooth. With a sine or triangle signal, you will always get 50% duty cycle, but the adjustment voltage will shift the output signal phase.

    Well, also an interesting application :)

  • I have been remiss in checking out some of these blogs and community 'thingies' - slap my hand!  Enjoyed your blog and, indeed, as others have commented, your first circuit is a Schmidt trigger or comparator.  Use(d) them a lot back in the day (i.e. before retirement several years ago).  I'll have to check back more often to keep me sharp.