EnrgTech

The L293D motor driver IC A  motor driver  IC is an IC chip used to control motors simultaneously and in a bi-directional manner. In a robot, it acts as an interface between microprocessors and the motors. The L293D is one of the most commonly used motor drive IC’s. It is composed of 2 H-bridges. An H-bridge is the most basic circuit for controlling low current motors. The L293D has 16 pins as listed below; Ground pins-4 Input pins-4 Output pins-4 Enable pins-2 Voltage pins-2 Motor Driver IC’s are mostly used to control motors of autonomous robots. After trial and error, I managed to come up with a simple but efficient way to control two small motors using the L293D and Arduino. Items required L293D Motor Driver IC Arduino UNO Two DC motors Breadboard Connector cables Circuit Connect the components as shown above. The connection is pretty easy and fast. You can power L293D using an external power source with up to 36V. However, ensure you do...

What are low voltage circuit breakers? The answer to this question is unwittingly simple. Low voltage  circuit breakers  are circuit breakers whose voltage threshold are 1000V. All circuit breakers that operate at voltages below 1000V are known as low voltage circuit breakers. The opposite is true for high voltage circuit breakers. Low voltage circuit breakers come in different types and are manufactured by numerous manufacturers. Types of low voltage circuit breakers Low voltage can be classified based on numerous characteristics. There is no standardized way to classify circuit breakers. To give you an insight into their various characteristics, we will classify them based on three of them: Sensing circuit Construction Medium used to extinguish the arc Sensing circuit There are two ways low voltage circuit breakers sense voltage, thermal and magnetic sensing. In thermal sensing, the circuit breaker uses a heating element to sense the heat produced by circui...

What is a sensor? You see that phone you are holding in your hand? It has built-in sensors. Your PC, laptop, refrigerator, and outdoor security lights also incorporate sensors in their operations.  Sensors  have become an integral part of our everyday life from the devices we use at home to industrial equipment. In fact, sensors have shaped life as we know it today. So, what exactly is a sensor? A sensor is an electronic component that produces an output through detecting the changes in events or environment. It produces an electronic or optical signal corresponding to the changes detected. Types and application of sensors All sensors are primarily classified into analog and digital sensors. However, they can be further classified according to the stimulus they respond to. Below are several types classified based on this criterion; Temperature sensor Temperature sensors are some of the most common of sensors. As the name suggests, they are used to measure t...

IoT architecture With approximately 20.35 billion things connected to the internet as at 2017, IoT is certainly changing the way we interact with the world. They slowly taking over our homes, factories and even labs. There are numerous architectural approaches to  IoT  systems however, a basic design has three basic layers End node -This is responsible for gathering information from sensors. The information could be the temperature, speed, pressure, audio, physiological metric, images and lot more other things. Once it has gathered the information, it sends it to the gateway (via a wire or wireless link). Gateway – It gathers information from numerous end nodes and then send the information upstream The cloud – It processes data streams that control operations of various functions and as well gathers data for analytics. Fog computing Unfortunately sending all the data to the cloud for processing posses many challenges major ones being latency issues and slowed r...