Collaborate Disseminate
Crystal oscillators are incredibly useful components, but they come with one little snag: their oscillation is temperature-dependent. For many applications the relatively small deviation is not a problem, but especially …read more Continue reading Inside a Vintage Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator
In the quest for an accurate frequency standard there are many options depending on your budget, but one of the most affordable is an oven controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO). [RF …read more Continue reading Is a Cheap Frequency Standard Worth It?
If there’s anything more viscerally pleasing than seeing an eight-digit instrument showing a measurement with all zeroes after the decimal point, we’re not sure what it could. Maybe rolling the …read more Continue reading Upgrade Puts a Lot of Zeroes on Kit-Built Frequency Counter
Do high voltages affect the resonant frequency of a crystal? Honestly, we never thought about it, but [Joe] did and decided to risk his analyzer to find out. He started …read more Continue reading The Crystal (High Voltage) Method
Like many people who repair stuff, [Learn Electronics Repair] has an oscilloscope. But after using it to test a motherboard crystal oscillator, he started thinking about how people who don’t …read more Continue reading Clock Testing Sans Oscilloscope?
Somewhere between the onset of annoying hand pain and the feeling of worn-out, mushy switches, [sinbeard]’s keyboard dissatisfaction came to a head. He decided it was time to slip into something bit more ergonomic and settled on building an Iris — a small split keeb with an ortholinear (non-staggered) key …read more
Continue reading Ergo Keyboard Build Issue Becomes Crystal Clear
Somewhere between the onset of annoying hand pain and the feeling of worn-out, mushy switches, [sinbeard]’s keyboard dissatisfaction came to a head. He decided it was time to slip into something bit more ergonomic and settled on building an Iris — a small split keeb with an ortholinear (non-staggered) key …read more
Continue reading Ergo Keyboard Build Issue Becomes Crystal Clear
A crystal radio is a common enough science fair project, but the problem is, there isn’t much on anymore. The answer is, of course, obvious: build your own AM transmitter, too. AM modulation isn’t that hard to do and [Science Buddies] has plans for how to build one with a …read more
“Never Twice the Same Color” may be an apt pejorative, but supporting analog color TV in the 1950s without abandoning a huge installed base of black-and-white receivers was not an option, and at the end of the day the National Television Standards Committee did an admirable job working within the …read more
Continue reading A PIC And A Few Passives Support Breakout In Glorious NTSC Color
Accurate timing is one of the most basic requirements for so much of the technology we take for granted, yet how many of us pause to consider the component that enables us to have it? The quartz crystal is our go-to standard when we need an affordable, known, and stable clock frequency for our microprocessors and other digital circuits. Perhaps it’s time we took a closer look at it.
The first electronic oscillators at radio frequencies relied on the electrical properties of tuned circuits featuring inductors and capacitors to keep them on-frequency. Tuned circuits are cheap and easy to produce, …read more
