Collaborate Disseminate
Inductors are not the most common component these days and variable ones seem even less common. However, with a ferrite rod and some 3D printing, [drjaynes] shows how to make …read more Continue reading Make Your Own Variable Inductor
Whatever kind of clock you’re interested in building, you’re going to need to build an oscillator of some sort. Whether it be a pendulum, a balance wheel, or the atomic transitions of cesium or rubidium, something needs to go back …read more
Continue reading Tuning Fork Keeps This Throwback Digital Clock Ticking
For something that’s basically a coil of wire around some magnetic pole pieces, an electric guitar pickup is a complicated bit of tech. So much about the tone of the instrument is dictated by how the pickup is wound that controlling the winding process is something best accomplished with a …read more
Continue reading A Pair of Steppers are Put to Work in This Automatic Instrument Pickup Winder
Let’s say you’re stranded on a desert island and want to get the news from the outside world. You’ll have to build your own crystal radio, of course, but your parts bin is nowhere to be found and Digi-Key isn’t delivering. So you’ll need to MacGuyver some components. Capacitors are …read more
Continue reading Digging in the Dirt Yields Homebrew Inductors
If you have ever broken the ferrite core of an inductor, you’ll probably sympathize with [Oliver Mattos]. He accidentally stood on a ferrite-cored component, breaking it and rendering it useless. But utility is in the eye of the beholder, and instead of throwing it away he’s repurposed it as a …read more
Remember “Wordless Workshop” in Popular Science? [Roy Doty] illustrated a household problem and the solution for it cobbled up in the main character’s garage workshop. We wonder what [Roy] would have done with YouTube? Maybe something like the video from [VE2TAE] and [VE2AEV] showing their link coupling antenna tuning build. …read more
Continue reading Link Coupling Antenna Tuner Wordless Workshop
Remember “Wordless Workshop” in Popular Science? [Roy Doty] illustrated a household problem and the solution for it cobbled up in the main character’s garage workshop. We wonder what [Roy] would have done with YouTube? Maybe something like the video from [VE2TAE] and [VE2AEV] showing their link coupling antenna tuning build. …read more
Continue reading Link Coupling Antenna Tuner Wordless Workshop
We wish that all the beautiful animations that are available today to understand math and electronics had been around when we were in school. Nonetheless, they are there for today’s students and [Learn Engineering] has another gorgeous one covering LC oscillation. Check it out, below.
If you are thoroughly grounded …read more
We love a little outside-the-box thinking around here, and anytime we see robots that don’t use wheels and motors to do the moving, we take notice. So when a project touting robotic fish using soft-actuator fins crossed the tip line, we had to take a look.
It turns out that this robofish comes from the fertile mind of [Carl Bugeja], whose PCB motors and flexible actuators have been covered here before. The basic concept of these fish fins is derived from the latter project, which uses coils printed onto both sides of a flexible Kapton substrate. Positioned near a magnet, …read more
Continue reading Flexible PCBs Make The Fins Of This Robotic Fish
It’s a story we’ve told dozens of times already. The cost to manufacture a handful of circuit boards has fallen drastically over the last decade and a half, which has allowed some interesting experiments on what PCBs can do. We’ve seen this with artistic PCBs, we’ve seen it with enclosures built out of PCBs, and this year we’re seeing a few experiments that are putting coils and inductors on PCBs.
At the forefront of these experiments in PCB coil design is [bobricious], and already he’s made brushless and linear motors using only tiny copper traces on top of fiberglass. Now …read more