Collaborate Disseminate
You know how it is. You’ve got that new project running, and while it doesn’t consume much power, it also doesn’t give much indication of whether it’s functioning or just …read more Continue reading Need A Small, Cheap Ammeter? Blinkenlights To The Rescue!
It’s late at night. The solder smoke keeps getting in your tired eyes, but your project is nearly done. The main circuit is powered by your 13.8 V bench supply, …read more Continue reading Simple Electronic Hacks Inspire Doing More With Less
It seems all anyone is talking about right now is the virus scare that has most of us with a little extra time on our hands. [Paul Klinger] — a name we’ve seen before — built a blinking LED project to pass the time. So what? Well, the lights are …read more
Continue reading Another Blinky Light Project — with a COVID-19 Twist
This stunning piece of art is [Emily Velasco’s] take on the Atari Punk Console. It’s a freeform circuit that synthesizes sound using 555 timers. The circuit has been around for a long time, but her fabrication is completely new and simply incredible!
This isn’t [Emily’s] first rodeo. She previously built the mini CRT sculpture project seen to the left in the image above. Its centerpiece is a tiny CRT from an old video camera viewfinder, and it is fairly common for the driver circuit to understand composite video. And unlike CRTs, small video cameras with composite video output are easily …read more
With the size of electronic parts and batteries these days, very small items are obviously becoming more and more viable. [Yann Guidon] has made some awesome pieces of LED jewelry using a minimal number of surface mount parts and a small lithium-ion battery. To make the jewelry stand out a bit, other than just blinking on and off, these LEDs blink a short message in Morse code.
This is an update and open sourcing of some work that [Yann] did a few years ago, and the iterations have resulted in a smaller design. But the main part of the latest …read more
[Eric Wasatonic] had a box of SWB2433 transistors that he had very little information about. In order to discover their properties, he fired up his curve tracer to compare these transistors with more common ones. He noticed the SWB2433 exhibited negative resistance while the similar curves of a 2n3904 didn’t. Then he reverse-biased the two transistors: the negative resistance region on the 2n3904 was less than that of the SWB2433, but it was there, and a 2n2222 had a bigger region. Using this knowledge, he developed a relaxation oscillator circuit which uses a negatively biased transistor.
Using one transistor, one …read more
[Rick] knew that the blinking, beeping microcontroller kits that are commonly used for educational soldering workshops just would not cut it for a serious combat among SMD reworking professionals. The “Soldering Challenge” he created to fill this gap is a little PCB with eight difficulty levels from large through hole components to the smallest hand solderable SMDs. After assembly, the circuit assesses the skill level of the soldering aspirant based on a built-in scoring system.
The challenge is meant to be played on a time limit. There are no two same-sized components of different value, so contestants may focus on …read more
