Collaborate Disseminate
LEDs are a wonderful technology. You put in a little bit of power, and you get out a wonderful amount of light. They’re efficient, cheap, and plentiful. We use them …read more Continue reading You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too
Like many of us [AnotherMaker] is a fan of the classic Forrest Mims electronics books, specifically, the Engineer’s Mini-Notebook series. They were great sources of inspiration, but at the time, …read more Continue reading Bringing the 555 Mini-Notebook to Video
There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist. In the back of each store, past the displays of Realistic 8-track players, Minimus-7 speakers, Patrolman scanners, and just beyond the battery bin where you could cash in your “Battery of the Month Club” card for a fresh, free 9-volt battery, lay the holy of holies — the parts. Perfboard panels on hinges held pegs with cards of resistors for 49 cents, blister packs of 2N2222 transistors and electrolytic capacitors, and everything else you needed to get your project going. It was a …read more
Continue reading Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, and the Notebooks that Launched a Thousand Careers
There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist. In the back of each store, past the displays of Realistic 8-track players, Minimus-7 speakers, Patrolman scanners, and just beyond the battery bin where you could cash in your “Battery of the Month Club” card for a fresh, free 9-volt battery, lay the holy of holies — the parts. Perfboard panels on hinges held pegs with cards of resistors for 49 cents, blister packs of 2N2222 transistors and electrolytic capacitors, and everything else you needed to get your project going. It was a …read more
Continue reading Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, and the Notebooks that Launched a Thousand Careers
If you’re a long-time Hackaday reader like we are, you’ll certainly remember a rash of projects from around ten years ago that all (mis-)used an LED as a light sensor. The idea wasn’t new, but somehow it made the rounds and insinuated itself into our collective minds. Around the same time, a cryptographic cipher with an exceptionally small memory footprint was also showing up in hacker projects: TEA (Tiny Encryption Algorithm).
This old project by [Marcin Bojanczyk], [Chris Danis], and [Brian Rogan] combines both the LED-as-light-sensor meme and TEA to make a door-entry keyfob that works over visible light. And …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday: Whatever Happened to LED Light Sensors?