Collaborate Disseminate
Of digital electronics, a wise man once said that “Every idiot can count to one.” Truer words have rarely been spoken, because at the end of the day, every digital …read more Continue reading Op-Amp Challenge: A Logic-Free BCD
A fan to remove fumes is a handy thing to have when soldering, even better is a fan furnished with a filter. Better still is a fan that activates only …read more Continue reading Tiny PCB Banishes Soldering Fumes, Automatically
It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long …read more Continue reading A Cassette Interface for a 6502 Breadboard Computer, Kansas City-Style
The default for any control project here in 2019 was to reach for a microcontroller. Such are their low cost and ubiquity that they can be used to replicate what …read more Continue reading The No-MCU Fan Controller
When it comes to getting signals from an analog world into our computers, most of us don’t give much thought to how the hardware that does the job works. But …read more Continue reading Homebrew Circuit Explores the Mysteries of Analog-to-Digital Conversion
It’s no secret that the work of [Ken Sherriff] graces the front pages of Hackaday quite frequently. He’s back again, this time reverse engineering a comparator chip from a photo …read more Continue reading [Ken Sherriff] Picks Apart Mystery Chip from Twitter Photo
“You should have used a 555” has become a bit of a meme around these parts lately, and for good reason. There seems to be little that these ubiquitous chips …read more Continue reading Should Have Used a Vacuum Tube 555
When you need a continuity tester at the bench, what do you reach for? Probably your multimeter, right? It may surprise you to know that the continuity tester in the meter isn’t all that sensitive, even if it’s the yellow expensive kind. [Leo]’s will beep even if there is 50Ω …read more
LEDs weren’t always an easy solution to displays and indicators. The fine folks at [Industrial Alchemy] shared pictures of a device that shows what kind of effort and cost went into making a high brightness bar graph display in the 70s, back when LEDs were both expensive and not particularly bright. There are no strange materials or methods involved in making the display daylight-readable, but it’s a peek at how solving problems we take for granted today sometimes took a lot of expense and effort.
The display is a row of 28 small incandescent bulbs, mounted in a PCB and …read more
Continue reading A Daylight-Readable Bar Graph Display in the 70s Wasn’t Cheap
Regular readers may recall we recently covered a neat Arduino trick that allowed you to “blow out” an LED as if it was a candle. The idea was that the LED itself could be used as a rudimentary temperature sensor, and the Arduino code would turn the LED on and off when a change was detected in its forward voltage drop. You need to oversample the Arduino’s ADC to detect the few millivolt change reliably, but overall it’s pretty simple once you understand the principle.
But [Andrzej Laczewski], like many of our beloved readers, feels the Arduino and other microcontrollers …read more