The Word Clock You Can Feel
By this point, pretty much everyone has come across a word clock project, if not built one themselves. There’s just an appeal to looking at a clock and seeing the …read more Continue reading The Word Clock You Can Feel
Category Archives: custom PCB
30-Year-Old Macintosh SE/30 Gets a Brand New Logic Board
Some time ago, [Bolle] got the idea to redraw the Macintosh SE/30 schematics in Eagle. Progress was initially slow, but over the past month (and with some prodding and assistance …read more Continue reading 30-Year-Old Macintosh SE/30 Gets a Brand New Logic Board
Tether Tames Temperamental Typing
[chadaustin] has a favorite keyboard with a great ergonomic shape, key travel distance, and size, but after switching to Windows 10, the wireless connection introduced a terrible delay. Worse yet, …read more Continue reading Tether Tames Temperamental Typing
A Breadboard Block for 8-Bit CPU’s
Breadboard CPU’s are a fantastic learning experience and require serious dedication and patience. Occasionally, CPU builders eschew their breadboards and fab their design onto a PCB. But this takes aways the flexibility and some of the opportunity for learning that breadboard CPUs offer. [c0pperdragon] was doing the same sort of …read more
Casio Computer Rebuild Puts New Wine in an Old Bottle
With a glut of vintage consumer electronics available from eBay it should be easy to relive your glory days, right? Unfortunately the march of time means that finding gear is easy but finding gear that works is not. So was the case when [Amen] acquired not one, but two used …read more
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Transform Kicad Design To Patchwork For Isolation Routing
Tuning a desktop router and your board designs for isolation routing can be a bit tricky, with thin traces usually being the first victim. For simple prototype boards you usually don’t need tightly packed traces, you just want to isolate the nets. To do this with a minimum amount of …read more
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A Commmand Center for Children with Sensory Needs
Toys for children are meant to be fun and interactive, but they’re even better if they’re educational as well. For [carrola1], a parent of a 4-year-old suffering from from medical disabilities, sensory needs, and autism, a more personalized approach seemed best. The electrical engineer built a wall-mounted command center with …read more
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A Scratch Built VFD Clock with Inner Beauty
Vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) are one of those beautiful pieces of bygone technology that you just don’t see much of anymore. At one time they were a mainstay of consumer electronics, but today they’ve largely been replaced with cheaper and more energy efficient displays such as LEDs and LCDs. While …read more
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Making PCBs With A Cutting Plotter
[LudwigLabs] is creating PCBs using copper foil and a cutting plotter (vinyl cutter). In this approach, it’s an additive process where instead of removing copper from a copper-clad board, the traces are cut out of copper foil and transferred to a solid backing surface (cardboard, fiberglass, etc.).
While similar to the use of copper tape laid out by hand, as covered by us last year, the big advantage of using a cutting plotter is that it allows one to create much more complicated traces similar to those you would expect to see on a factory-made PCB. Since cutting plotters translate …read more
DIY Scientific Calculator Powered By Pi Zero
It’s the eternal question hackers face: do you built it, or do you buy it? The low cost and high availability of electronic gadgets means we increasingly take the latter option. Especially since it often ends up that building your own version will cost more than just buying a commercial product; and that’s before you factor in the time you’ll spend working on it.
But such concerns clearly don’t phase [Andrea Cavalli]. Sure he could just buy a scientific calculator, but it wouldn’t really be his scientific calculator. Instead, he’s taking the scenic route and building his own scientific calculator …read more
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