Collaborate Disseminate
[Julian] knows that real diodes you can buy don’t work exactly like we say they do. That’s actually pretty common. We routinely ignore things like wire resistance and source resistance …read more Continue reading Ideal Diodes and How to Build Them
The germanium point contact diode, and almost every semiconductor device using germanium, is now obsolete. There was a time when almost every television or radio would have contained one or …read more Continue reading How Do You Fill The 1N34 Void?
While we might all be quick to grab a microcontroller and an appropriate sensor to solve some problem, gather data about a system, or control another piece of technology, there …read more Continue reading MOSFET Heater Is Its Own Thermostat
[Robert Murray-Smith] presents for us an interesting electronic device from years gone by, before the advent of Silicon semiconductors, the humble metal oxide rectifier. After the electronic dust had settled …read more Continue reading Copper: Rectifying AC a Century Ago
It’s late at night. The solder smoke keeps getting in your tired eyes, but your project is nearly done. The main circuit is powered by your 13.8 V bench supply, …read more Continue reading Simple Electronic Hacks Inspire Doing More With Less
When we use an electronic component, we have some idea of what goes on inside it. We know that inside a transistor there’s a little piece of semiconductor with a …read more Continue reading What Goes Into a High Voltage Diode?
It’s best to admit upfront that vacuum tubes can be baffling to some of the younger generation of engineers. Yes, we get how electron flow from cathode to anode can be controlled with a grid, and how that can be used to amplify and control current. But there are still …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering a Module from a Vacuum Tube Computer
The influx of cheap laser cutters from China has been a boon to the maker movement, if at the cost of a lot of tinkering to just get the thing to work. So some people just prefer to roll their own, figuring that starting from scratch means you get exactly …read more
Continue reading Tiny Laser Cutter Puts Micro Steppers to Work
We didn’t think we needed a basic guide to diodes until we saw it was from [W2AEW], and then we knew we’d pick up some new things. Entitled “Diodes from Ideal to Real” the 18-minute video doesn’t disappoint with a mix of notes and time with a curve tracer to …read more
If we say that a hacker is somebody who looks at a “solved” problem and can still come up with multiple alternative solutions, then [Charles Ouweland] absolutely meets the grade. Not that we needed more evidence of his hacker cred given what we’ve seen from him before, but he recently wrote in to tell us about an interesting bit of problem solving which we think is a perfect example of the principle. He wanted to drive a salvaged seven segment LED display with an AVR microcontroller, but there was only one problem: the display needs 15V but the AVR is …read more