The war of the currents was fairly decisively won by AC. After all, whether you’ve got 110 V or 230 V coming out of your wall sockets, 50 Hz or 60 Hz, the whole world agrees that the frequency of ...

As the story goes, the rock band AC/DC took its name from a label on an old sewing machine in the Young brothers’ home. It must have meant that the machine could run on either alternating-current or ...

When picking a switch to use in electrical design, many people believe they can use any switch, provided its current rating is more than the maximum load in the circuit. This, of course, isn’t true.

A general method for measuring AC high voltages is to use a voltage divider, with two resistors in series. The resistors are selected so across one of the elements is some arbitrary fraction (like ...

If you have ever read advanced textbooks or papers about electronics, you may have been surprised to see the use of complex numbers used in the analysis of AC circuits. A complex number has two parts: ...

Generators with built-in inverters are some of the best ways to protect your backup power. Smaller devices like universal ...

Editor's Note: Here's another take on the transformerless AC line power supply, which finds use in some well-insulated, low-power devices. Our technical reviewer pointed out that C ac should be an ...