We’ve seen our share of blinking light projects around here; most are fairly straightforward small projects, but this entry to the 2025 One Hertz Challenge is the polar opposite of that approach.

Ladder logic uses switch or relay contacts to implement Boolean expressions. In years past, ladder logic was made possible with discrete relays and was sometimes termed “relay logic.” Today most ...

There are a few words in the electrical engineering lexicon that will perk any hardware hacker’s ears. The first of course is “Nixie tubes” with their warm cold war era ambiance and nostalgia inducing ...

Safety is a major concern in a good many motor-driven applications. This is true in industrial applications where motion starts when power is applied and especially true when power is restored after ...

Differential protection is best understood as a fault control philosophy rather than a component category. The relay itself is secondary to the scheme it enforces. Once a zone is defined, the system ...

Protective relay testing verifies that installed relays will trip correctly under real fault conditions, confirming settings, timing, and logic so protection schemes operate as intended during ...

Relays usually are driven using optocouplers, which offer isolation between analog and digital grounds to ensure that switching currents in the relay coils do not affect the noise margin of the ...

This mini-series of articles describes how to build a computer’s CPU (central processing unit) out of relays. “Y” in English sounds like “guay” in Spanish (my mother tongue), a colloquial expression ...