Category Archives: Curated

Retro Teardown: Inside An 8-Track Stereo Player

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If you are a connoisseur of analogue audio, it’s probable you might have a turntable and a stack of records at home somewhere. If you are of a certain age you may even have a cassette deck, though you’re more likely to have abandoned that format some time in the 1990s. If you are old enough to have been around in the 1960s or 1970s though, you may have owned another analogue audio format. One of several that you might have found in a well-equipped home of that period was the 8-track stereo cartridge, a self-contained tape cassette format that …read more

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Lights Out in Québec: The 1989 Geomagnetic Storm

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I found myself staring up at the sky on the night of March 13, 1989, with my girlfriend and her parents in the backyard of their house. The sky was on fire, almost literally. Red and pink sheets of plasma streamed out in a circle from directly overhead, with blue-white streaks like xenon flashes occasionally strobing across the sky. We could actually hear a sizzling, crackling sound around us. The four of us stood there, awestruck by the aurora borealis we were lucky enough to witness.

At the same time, lights were winking out a couple of hundred miles north …read more

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Tracking Index Test

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In an earlier article, I covered Fire Hazard Tests that form an important part of safety testing for electronic/electrical products. We looked at the standards and equipment used for abnormal heat, glowing wire and flame tests. A typical compliance test report for an appliance, such as a toaster, will be a fairly long document reporting the results for a large number of tests. Among these, the section for “Heat and Fire” will usually have the results of a third test – Tracking. It’s a phenomena most of us have observed, but needs some explanation to understand what it means. …read more

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An Introduction to Differential I²C

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A few weeks back, we talked about the no-nos of running I²C over long wires. For prototyping? Yes! But for a bulletproof production environment, this practice just won’t make the cut. This month I plucked my favorite solution from the bunch and gave it a spin. Specifically, I have put together a differential I²C (DI²C) setup with the PCA9615 to talk to a string of Bosch IMUs. Behold: an IMU Noodle is born! Grab yourself a cup of coffee and join me as I arm you with the nuts and bolts of DI²C so that you too can run I²C …read more

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An Introduction to Differential I²C

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A few weeks back, we talked about the no-nos of running I²C over long wires. For prototyping? Yes! But for a bulletproof production environment, this practice just won’t make the cut. This month I plucked my favorite solution from the bunch and gave it a spin. Specifically, I have put together a differential I²C (DI²C) setup with the PCA9615 to talk to a string of Bosch IMUs. Behold: an IMU Noodle is born! Grab yourself a cup of coffee and join me as I arm you with the nuts and bolts of DI²C so that you too can run I²C …read more

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How Does a Voltage Multiplier Work?

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If you need a high voltage, a voltage multiplier is one of the easiest ways to obtain it. A voltage multiplier is a specialized type of rectifier circuit that converts an AC voltage to a higher DC voltage. Invented by Heinrich Greinacher in 1919, they were used in the design of a particle accelerator that performed the first artificial nuclear disintegration, so you know they mean business.

Theoretically the output of the multiplier is an integer times the AC peak input voltage, and while they can work with any input voltage, the principal use for voltage multipliers is when very …read more

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Paramotoring for the Paranoid: Google’s AI and Relationship Mining

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My son approached me the other day with his best 17-year-old sales pitch: “Dad, I need a bucket of cash!” Given that I was elbow deep in suds doing the dishes he neglected to do the night before, I mentioned that it was a singularly bad time for him to ask for anything.

Never one to be dissuaded, he plunged ahead with the reason for the funding request. He had stumbled upon a series of YouTube videos about paramotoring, and it was love at first sight for him. He waxed eloquent about how cool it would be to strap a …read more

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Ask Hackaday: How Should Hackers Handle IP Agreements?

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My buddy Harold recently landed a new job at a great technology company. It came at a perfect time for him, having just been laid off from the corporate behemoth where he’d toiled away as an anonymous cog for 19 years. But the day before he was to start, the new company’s HR folks sent him some last-minute documents to sign. One was a broad and vaguely worded non-compete agreement which essentially said he was barred from working in any related industry for a year after leaving the company.

Harold was tempted not to sign, but eventually relented because one …read more

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Electrical Grid Demystified: How Energy Gets Where Its Needed

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Even if you’re reading this on a piece of paper that was hand-delivered to you in the Siberian wilderness, somewhere someone had to use energy to run a printer and also had to somehow get all of this information from the energy-consuming information superhighway. While we rely on the electric grid for a lot of our daily energy needs like these, it’s often unclear exactly how the energy from nuclear fuel rods, fossil fuels, or wind and solar gets turned into electrons that somehow get into the things that need those electrons. We covered a little bit about the history …read more

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More Power: Powel Crosley and the Cincinnati Flamethrower

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We tend to think that there was a time in America when invention was a solo game. The picture of the lone entrepreneur struggling against the odds to invent the next big thing is an enduring theme, if a bit inaccurate and romanticized. Certainly many great inventions came from independent inventors, but the truth is that corporate R&D has been responsible for most of the innovations from the late nineteenth century onward. But sometimes these outfits are not soulless corporate giants. Some are founded by one inventive soul who drives the business to greatness by the power of imagination and …read more

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