Collaborate Disseminate
‘Tis the season for holiday hacks, and [Ben Emmett] is here to remind us that we don’t necessarily need a fancy microcontroller in order to make flashy fun things happen. …read more Continue reading Flashy Paper Christmas Tree Does It With a 555
MIDI is normally baked into the chipset of a synthesizer, or something you use a microcontroller to handle. But that’s not the only way to speak the language! [Kevin] decided …read more Continue reading Doing MIDI With Discrete Logic Is Neat, If Not Particularly Useful
Electromagnetic fields are everywhere, all around us. Some are generated naturally, but in vast majority of cases, it’s we humans that are generating them with artificial, electronic means. Everything from …read more Continue reading A Simple EMF Detector and Electroscope You Can Make From Junk Box Parts
If you’ve ever handled a chip with a really strange or highly inconvenient pinout and suspected that the reason had something to do with the inner workings, you may be interested to see [electronupdate]’s analysis of why the 4017 Decade Counter IC has such a weirdly nonintuitive pinout. It peeks …read more
Thanks to microcontrollers, RTC modules, and a plethora of cheap and interesting display options, digital clock projects have become pretty easy. Choose to base a clock build around a chip sporting a date code from the late 70s, though, and your build is bound to be more than run-of-the-mill.
This is the boat that [Fran Blanche] finds herself in with one of her ongoing projects. The chip in question is a Mostek MK50250 digital alarm clock chip, and her first hurdle was find a way to run the clock on 50 Hertz with North American 60-Hertz power. The reason for …read more
Continue reading Tricking A Vintage Clock Chip Into Working On 50-Hz Power
[Andrea De Napoli] created a LED display consisting of a half-dozen LEDs connected to the inverted signals of a CD4017 decade counter, giving the effect that a dark LED is running back and forth. The CD4017 works by activating 10 outputs, one at a time, as controlled by a clock signal sent to pin 14.
The first and last LEDs are lit by outputs 0 and 5 with the help of a PNP transistor and a 12K resistor. The middle four LEDs are switched by two outputs each and go dark when one of them goes high. [Andrea] really delves …read more
