A circuit that makes sure a voltage stays only positive or negative. In power supplies, it is used to remove the negative component of AC voltage, or to protect you from plugging in module’s power connector backwards. As a module, a half-wave rectifier passes only positive voltages and replaces anything negative with 0v; a full-wave rectifier takes any negative voltages and inverts them so they become positive. This effectively doubles the frequency of many simple waveforms, like the triangle and sine.
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