Collaborate Disseminate
A newly licensed amateur radio operator’s first foray into radios is likely to be a VHF or UHF radio with a manageable antenna designed for the high frequencies in these …read more Continue reading DIY Loading Coil Shortens Antenna Lengths
We’ve all experienced power outages of some kind, be it a breaker tripping at an inconvenient time to a storm causing a lack of separation between a tree and a …read more Continue reading Cascade Failures, Computer Problems, and Ohms Law: Understanding the Northeast Blackout of 2003
Younger readers may not recall the days when every mall had a music store — not the kind where tapes and LPs were sold, but the kind where you could buy instruments. These places inevitably had an employee belting out …read more
Continue reading Tonewheels Warble in This Organ-Inspired Musical Instrument
The simplest ideas can be the ones that change the world. For Otis Boykin, it was a new way to make wirewound precision resistors. Just like that, he altered the course of electronics with his ideas about what a resistor could be. Now his inventions are in everything from household …read more
Continue reading Otis Boykin’s Precision Passives Propelled the Pacemaker
Grounding problems and unwanted noise in electrical systems can often lead to insanity. It can seem like there’s no method to the madness when an electrical “gremlin” caused by one of these things pops its head out. When looking more closely, however, these issues have a way of becoming more …read more
Continue reading Solving The Mysteries Of Grounding While Improving A Power Supply
When current flows through a conductor it becomes an inductor, when there is an inductor there is an electromagnetic field (EM). This can cause a variety of issues during PCB layout if you don’t plan properly, and sometimes we get burned even when we think we have planned for unwanted inductance and the effects that come with them.
When doing high speed logic we need to be able to deliver sudden changes in current to the devices if we want to have proper switching times and logic levels. Unfortunately inductance is usually not a friend in these circumstances as it …read more
Continue reading Inductance in PCB Layout: The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly
The new hotness for DIY electronics is mechanical keyboards, and over the past few years we’ve seen some amazing innovations. This one is something different. It adds an analog sensor to nearly any mechanical key switch, does it with a minimal number of parts, and doesn’t require any modification of the switch itself. It’s a reddit thread and imgur post, but the idea is just so good we can overlook the documentation on this one.
The key development behind this type of sensor is realizing that nearly every mechanical keyswitch (Cherry MX, Kalth, Gateron) has a spring in the bottom. …read more
Continue reading Adding Analog Touch To (Nearly) Any Mechanical Keyboard
Line-following robots are a great intro to robotics in general, since the materials and skills needed to build a good one aren’t too advanced. It turns out that line-following robots are more than just a learning tool, too. They’re pretty useful in industry, but most of them don’t follow visible marked lines. Some, like this inductive guided robot from [Randall] make use of wires to determine their paths.
Some of the benefits of inductive guidance over physical lines are that the wires can be hidden in floors, so if something like an automated forklift is using them at a warehouse …read more
If anything about electronics approaches the level of black magic, it’s antenna theory. Entire books dedicated to the subject often merely scratch the surface, and unless you’re a pro with all the expensive test gear needed to visualize what’s happening, the chances are pretty good that your antenna game is more practical than theoretical. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — hams and other RF enthusiasts have been getting by with antennas that work without really understanding why for generations.
But we’re living in the future, and the tools to properly analyze antenna designs are actually now within the …read more
Continue reading Putting a Poor Man’s Vector Analyzer Through Its Paces
YouTuber [RimstarOrg] shows how to make a DIY inductor for a specific inductance. This is obviously a great skill to learn as sometimes your design may call for a very accurate inductance that may be hard to find otherwise.
It may seem daunting when it comes to making your own inductor you may have a few questions such as: What type of core will I use?, How many turns does my coil need? or How do I calculate these parameters to create the specific inductance I desire? [RimstarOrg] goes through all of This, he even has a handy Inductance calculator …read more
