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Counting the number of colour pages in a PDF
2 minute read
Published:
This is just a little aside from the audio focus of this blog. Recently I completed my thesis for my PhD, which involves a lot of costly printing. Many printers charge one rate for black & white pages, and a separate, much higher rate for colour pages. As a result I wanted to anticipate how much one printing of the thesis would cost and so needed to know:
Plotting the FFT of a voltage signal
4 minute read
Published:
Plotting a signal in the frequency domain is a fundamental analysis tool which can provide great insight into the signal’s behaviour. Something I have struggled with in the past is getting the units correct such that the amplitude response of the frequency-domain representation has physical significance. In this blog post I aim to outline how to properly find useful units with which to represent voltage signals.
Measurement Gotchas: systematic error when averaging
2 minute read
Published:
When trying to capture a clean signal from an electronic circuit, a popular strategy is to use averaging. The circuit is driven by the same signal repeatedly creating a set of output signals which can then be averaged, thus reducing noise. I’ve used this technique a lot in the measurement step of my work on training physical models on measured data (see my DAFx-16 paper for more information).
Component meters: DE-5000 and M328
2 minute read
Published:
Recently I’ve been in need of measuring linear component values to a high degree of accuracy, so decided to purchase a couple of component meters. The first of these is the M328 “transistor tester”, which is a favourite of the DIY community as it is cheap and has all of the plans available on the internet. I put transistor tester in quotes as the meter is designed to measure resistance, capacitance, inductance, transistor type and basic characteristics, and even some parasitic properties. This is quite an impressive boast for a product which I purchased for £6.32!