Collaborate Disseminate
If you’ve ever been concerned about privacy in a rental space or hotel room, you might have considered trying one of the many “spy camera detectors” sold online. In the …read more Continue reading The Simple Tech Behind Hidden Camera Detectors
Today you can buy flashing LEDs; a simple two-lead component that requires only a power supply to produce even flashes of light. They look for all the world like any other LED, though embedded in the plastic dome is an integrated circuit to do all that flashing work.
There was a time though when a flashing LED was something of a big deal, so much so that National Semiconductor produced a dedicated chip for the task. The LM3909 boasted the ability to flash an LED for over a year using a single C battery. That part is now long out …read more
Continue reading There Once Was an IC Dedicated to Blinking an LED
Hardly a week goes by that some Hackaday post doesn’t elicit one of the following comments:
That’s stupid! Why use an Arduino when you could do the same thing with a 555?
And:
That’s stupid! Why use a bunch of parts when you can use an Arduino?
However, we rarely see those two comments on the same post. Until now. [ZHut] managed to bring these two worlds together by presenting how to make an Arduino blink an LED in conjunction with a 555 timer. We know, we know. It is hard to decide how to comment about this. You can …read more
Continue reading The Best of Both Worlds: Arduino + 555 Should Confuse Commenters