Collaborate Disseminate
We’ve all experienced power outages of some kind, be it a breaker tripping at an inconvenient time to a storm causing a lack of separation between a tree and a …read more Continue reading Cascade Failures, Computer Problems, and Ohms Law: Understanding the Northeast Blackout of 2003
You’d be hard pressed to find a hacker or maker who doesn’t have a soft spot for the tantalizing buzz and snap of a high voltage spark gap, but it remains the sort of project that most of us don’t take on personally. There’s a perceived complexity in building a …read more
Grounding problems and unwanted noise in electrical systems can often lead to insanity. It can seem like there’s no method to the madness when an electrical “gremlin” caused by one of these things pops its head out. When looking more closely, however, these issues have a way of becoming more …read more
Continue reading Solving The Mysteries Of Grounding While Improving A Power Supply
Do you need a bias tee? If you want to put a DC voltage on top of an RF signal, chances are that you do. But what exactly are bias tees, and how do they work?
If that’s your question, [W2AEW] has an answer for you with this informative video on the basics of bias tees. A bias tee allows a DC bias to be laid over an RF signal, and while that sounds like a simple job, theory and practice often deviate in the RF world. The simplest bias tee would have a capacitor in series with the RF …read more
Continue reading Everything You Didn’t Know You Were Missing About Bias Tees
The odds are that many of you do not own a boat that you get to tinker around with. [Mavromatic] recently acquired one that had — much to his consternation — analog gauges. So in order to get his ship ship-shape, he built himself a custom digital gauge to monitor his vessel’s data.
Restricted to the two-inch hole in his boat’s helm, trawling the web for displays turned up a 1.38-inch LCD display from 4D Systems. Given the confined space, a Teensy 3.2 proved to be trim enough to fit inside the confined space alongside a custom circuit board — …read more
Continue reading Going Digital: Upgrading A Boat’s Analog Gauge
If you have a project in mind that requires some sort of gesture input or precise movements, it might become a nettlesome problem to tackle. Fear this obstacle no longer: a team from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard have designed a novel way to make wearable sensors that can stretch and contort with the body’s natural movements.
The way they work is ingenious. Layers of silicone are sandwiched between two lengths of silver-plated conductive fabric forming — by some approximation — a capacitance sensor. While the total surface area doesn’t change when the sensor is stretched …read more
A few years ago, there was a stir about a new fundamental component called a memristor. That wasn’t the first time a new component type was theorized though. In 1948 [Bernard Tellegen] postulated the gyrator. While you can’t buy one as a component, you can build one using other components. In fact, they are very necessary for some types of design. Put simply, a gyrator is a two-terminal device that inverts the current-voltage characteristic of an electrical component. Therefore, you can use a gyrator to convert a capacitor into an inductor or vice versa.
Keep in mind, the conversion is …read more
