Collaborate Disseminate
While vacuum electronic devices have largely been superseded over much of consumer electronics, there’s one place where they can still be found for now. The cavity magnetron is a power …read more Continue reading Powering A Cavity Magnetron, From A Battery
[rafii6312]’s Corsair HS80 wireless headset had a big problem: short range. The sound quality was great, but the wireless range wasn’t winning any friends. Fortunately, the solution was just to …read more Continue reading Headset’s Poor Range Fixed By Replacing Antenna
Yagi-Uda antennas, or simply “Yagis”, are directional antennas that focus radio waves to increase gain, meaning that the radio waves can travel further in that direction for a given transmitter …read more Continue reading Printing Antennas on Circuit Boards
Thrift stores, antique shops, knick-knack stores- Whatever you might call them in your locale, they’re usually full of “another man’s treasure”. More often than not, we leave empty-handed, hoping another …read more Continue reading 80’s Omnibot Goes RC And Gets a Modern Refresh
Antenna design can be confusing, to say the least. There’s so much black magic that goes into antennas that newbies often look at designs and are left wondering exactly how the thing could ever work. Slight changes in length or the angle between two elements result in a vastly different …read more
Continue reading Lowering the Boom on Yagi Element Isolation
It’s a simple goal: build a waterproof box full of environmental sensors that can run continuously for the next century. OK, so maybe it’s not exactly “simple”. But whatever you want to call this epic quest to study and record the planet we call home, [sciencedude1990] has decided to make …read more
Continue reading A Solar-Powered Box of Sensors to Last 100 Years
Spoiler alert: No.
To come to that conclusion, which runs counter to the combined wisdom of several recent YouTube videos, [Andrew McNeil] ran a pretty neat little experiment. [Andrew] has a not inconsiderable amount of expertise in this area, as an RF engineer and prolific maker of many homebrew WiFi …read more
Want to explore the world of radar by feel daunted by the mysteries of radio frequency electronics? Be daunted no more and abstract the RF complexities away with this tutorial on software-defined radar.
Taking inspiration from our own [Gregory L. Charvat], whose many radar projects have graced our pages before, [Luigi Freitas]’ plunge into radar is spare on the budgetary side but rich in learning opportunities. The front end of the radar set is almost entirely contained in a LimeSDR Mini, a software-defined radio that can both transmit and receive. The only additional components are a pair of soup can …read more
Continue reading SDR Is At the Heart of This Soup-Can Doppler Radar Set
The old maxim is that if you pay peanuts, you get a monkey. That’s no longer true, though: devices like the Raspberry Pi W have shown that a $10 device can be remarkably powerful if it is well designed. You might not appreciate how clever this design is sometimes, but this great analysis of the antenna of the Pi W by [Carl Turner, Senior RF Engineer at Laird Technology] might help remind you.
[Carl] used some fancy toys in his analysis, such as the awesome-looking antenna test chamber that his employer uses to test designs. He used this to measure …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi W Antenna Analysis Reveals Clever Design
Hackday regular [Akiba] is working on a series of video tutorials guiding newbies into the world of the 802.15.4 wireless protocol stack — also known as ZigBee. So far, his tutorials include a “getting started with chibiArduino”, his own Arduino-based wireless library, as well as a more basic tutorial on how radio works.
[Akiba] already made a name for himself though a large number of wireless projects, including his Saboten sensor boards, which are ruggedized for long-term environmental monitoring. The Saboten boards use the same wireless stack as his Arduino-compatible wireless development boards, his Freakduino products. The latest version features …read more
Continue reading Zigbee-Based Wireless Arduinos, Demystified