• Added a new page on the uSiP Component Package.

• Added a new page on Light-Dependent Resistors (LDRs).

• Added data on the Early Voltage \(V_A\) and thermal voltage \(V_T\) to the Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs) page.

• Added schematics and a design procedure for a NPN BJT current-sink whose base is driven by a resistor divider.

• Added schematics and a design procedure for a BJT current mirror.

• New PlatformIO page.

• Updated the size codes on the SMD Electrolytic Capacitor Packages page.

• Added info on the hybrid-pi transistor model to the Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs) page.

• Added a new page on Reliability Engineering For Electronics

• Added a open-loop vs. closed-loop bode plot and generalized negative feedback block diagram (with equations) to the Op-Amps page.

• Added new page on the TO-99 Component Package.

• Added a new page on the Thermoelectric Effect.

• Added a new page on the TO-247 Component Package.

• Updated the img shortcode so that caption text is now rendered as markdown (done by calling the hugo function | markdownify on the passed in parameter). This allows things such as the ability to add URL links into the image caption, great when referencing the source of the image.

• Added a section to the Op-Amp page on Negative Impedance Converters (NICs).

• Merged the Passive Filters and Active Filters pages into a single new Analogue Filters page and re-organized the entire page.

• Added info on the Sallen-Key filter topology.

• Added info on four common analogue filter optimizations/tunings (Butterworth, Chebyshev, Bessel and Elliptic).

• Added info on overriding the standard library version of malloc() (and friends) with an application specific version:

  #include <stdlib.h>
  
  int main()
  {
      int* i = malloc(sizeof(int));
      free(i);   
  }
  
  void* malloc(size_t s)
  {
      printf("My custom malloc() called");
      return NULL;
  }
  
  void free(void* p)
  {
      printf("My custom free() called");
  }
  

• Added info on the MQTT broker Mosquitto and MQTT client Paho.

• Added a new Oscilloscopes page.

• Added a new Test Leads And Probes page.

• Added schematics, explanations and equations for a P-channel load switch which is turned on by a BJT current-sink.

• Updated the schematic symbols on the BJT Transistors page.

• Added an example of a common-base amplifier to the BJT Transistors page.

• Added more info on quiescent currents and slew rates to the op-amp page.

• Merged the Oscillators and Crystal pages (which were grouped under a section called Timing) into the single Oscillators page.

• Added information on MEMS Oscillators to the Oscillators page and Chip Package pages.

• Added a Components That Don't Like Ultrasonic Baths section to the Ultrasonic Cleaners page.

• Added a new page on Common-mode Chokes.

• Added a section on IDC Connectors to the Connector page.

• Add a new page (currently in notes form) on Small-Signal Analysis.

• Added more information about potentiometers to the Resistors page.

• Added a new page on Shunt Regulators

• Added a new page on Multiplexers And Demultiplexers.

• Added info on the KiCad Tips And Tricks page on how to create resistor and Zener simulation components.

2020 may be the year we all want to forget. The silver lining is that the lockdown period gave me some extra time to work on extra content and improvements for this blog.

Statistics for 2020

This is the third year in a row in which I have used Google Analytics for statistics.

Content

This year, I thought it would be interesting to also include the total number of content pages on the blog, as well as the number of lines, words and characters in these pages, as counted on Jan 1st of the given year. I am only counting human created “pages” and “posts” in this tally, and not the automatically generated large number of “tag” and “category” pages. To find the last commit made in a given calender year I used the git command:

git rev-list -1 --before="Jan 01 2020" master

This spits out the hash of the desired commit. After checking out that commit I wrote a small Python script for tallying the number of _index.md files in the content directory of this blog, as well as counting the number of lines, words and characters within these files.

For a given year, all data is counted at the beginning of that year (i.e. the 1st of Jan at 00:00:00). I hope to increase the word per page ratio for the 2021 year, as I’ve come to realize that I’ve been splitting content across too many sub-pages, which both makes user navigation harder and hurts search rankings. This data unfortunately only goes as far back as I’ve used git to manage to blog…before 2019 the blog was managed by Wordpress running on a server.

Usage Analytics Summary

As per standard Google nomenclature, a page view is a single view of a page (which can be a returning or new user). A user is a unique person who has visited this website at least once.

Most Popular Pages

The top 6 pages, ranked by number of page views:

Again, we see the Linux-related serial port and CAN bus pages that shifted to top position in 2019 remain there for 2020.

Acquisition

Most Popular Referrers

Goal Completion

Looking back at the Happy New Year 2020 page the goals were rather light, in fact, only the one! It would of looked really bad if I hadn’t completed this!

• Integrate more of the calculators at calc.mbedded.ninja into the pages of this blog (blog.mbedded.ninja). DONE: The SEO of the Vue-based SPA was not great. I ended up porting NinjaCalc to Next.js this year, in part because of easier server-side rendering. Many of the calculator pages of NinjaCalc have been integrated into relevant pages on this blog.

Plans For This Year

• More content! (this is never not a goal)
• More diagrams: I’m beginning to think that some of the content on this blog is getting too text heavy, and there are not enough images. I hope to pad out text with more images this year, using LibreOffice Draw for diagrams, screenshots from KiCAD for schematics, and photos for examples.
• Decrease the number of sub-pages, and increase the num. of words per page of content: As mentioned above, I believe in the past I have split content between too many hierarchical subpages, which both makes the contents harder to read/fine, as well as hurting search engine rankings.

• Started a new page (in notes form) on SiFive microcontrollers.

• Started a new page (in notes form) on Azure RTOS ThreadX.

• Added a diagram to the C Dynamic Memory Allocation page.

• Added a basic voltage-doubling charge pump schematic to the Charge Pumps page

• Added more SPICE simulation info to the A Beginners Intro To KiCad page.

• Added schematics and explanations around op-amp based current sinks to the Op-Amp page.