Challenge: Square a Voltage
Your design task, should you decide to accept it: given an input voltage, square it. Ok, that’s too hard since squaring 8 volts would give you 64 volts, so let’s …read more Continue reading Challenge: Square a Voltage
Author Archives: Al Williams
Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered
Who knows what you’ll find in a second-hand shop? [Zeal] found some old keyboards made to fit early Alcatel phones from the year 2000 or so. They looked good but, …read more Continue reading Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered
Pi Networks the Smith Chart Way
[Ralph] is excited about impedance matching, and why not? It is important to match the source and load impedance to get the most power out of a circuit. He’s got …read more Continue reading Pi Networks the Smith Chart Way
Rust Drives a Linux USB Device
In theory, writing a Linux device driver shouldn’t be that hard, but it is harder than it looks. However, using libusb, you can easily deal with USB devices from user …read more Continue reading Rust Drives a Linux USB Device
Ceramic Printing Techniques for Plastic
[Claywoven] mostly prints with ceramics, although he does produce plastic inserts for functional parts in his designs. The ceramic parts have an interesting texture, and he wondered if the same …read more Continue reading Ceramic Printing Techniques for Plastic
The Tao of Bespoke Electronics
If you ever look at projects in an old magazine and compare them to today’s electronic projects, there’s at least one thing that will stand out. Most projects in “the …read more Continue reading The Tao of Bespoke Electronics
Do You Need a Bench Meter?
If you do anything with electronics or electricity, it is a good bet you have a multimeter. Even the cheapest meter today would have been an incredible piece of lab …read more Continue reading Do You Need a Bench Meter?
Add TouchTone Typing to Your Next Project
The Blackberry made phones with real keyboards popular, and smartphones with touch keyboards made that input method the default. However, the old flip phone crowd had just a few telephone …read more Continue reading Add TouchTone Typing to Your Next Project
Eulogy for the Satellite Phone
We take it for granted that we almost always have cell service, no matter where you go around town. But there are places — the desert, the forest, or the …read more Continue reading Eulogy for the Satellite Phone
Retrotechtacular: 1970s Radio
Before YouTube, you had to watch your educational videos on film. In the 1970s, if you studied radio, you might have seen the video from Universal Education and Visual Arts, …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: 1970s Radio