Collaborate Disseminate
[Dale Cook] has cats, and as he readily admits, cats are jerks. We’d use stronger language than that, but either way it became a significant impediment to making progress with …read more Continue reading RFID From First Principles and Saving a Cat
The BBC Micro:bit, while not quite as popular in our community as other microcontroller development boards, has a few quirks that can make it a much more interesting piece of …read more Continue reading BBC Micro:Bit as Handheld Synthesizer
Audio synthesizers can range from vast racks of equipment with modules stitched together by a web of patch cords to a couple of 555s wired together in an Atari punk …read more Continue reading This Simple Light-Controlled Synth Has a Surprisingly Rich Sound
Frequenters of arcades back in the golden age of video games will likely recall the mix of sounds coming from a properly full arcade, the kind where you stacked your …read more Continue reading RCA Plug Plays Sixteen-Minute Chiptune Piece, All by Itself
No drummer? No problem! With a little ingenuity, you can stuff the essentials of a drum kit into a box, and automate your rhythm section.
Mind you, [Franco Molina]’s “DrumCube” doesn’t quite have the flash of a human drummer, but it does keep a steady beat and has a charm …read more
Continue reading Play to the Beat of this Robotic Drummer in a Box
If you are in any way connected with radio, you will have encountered the low pass filter as a means to remove unwanted harmonics from the output of your transmitters. It’s a network of capacitors and inductors usually referred to as a pi-network after the rough resemblance of the schematic to a capital Greek letter Pi, and getting them right has traditionally been something of a Black Art. There are tables and formulae, but even after impressive feats of calculation the result can often not match the expectation.
Happily as with so many other fields, in recent decades the advent …read more
Among its many tricks, the Raspberry Pi is capable of putting clock signals signal out on its GPIO pins, and that turns out to be just the thing for synthesizing RF signals in the amateur radio bands. What [Zoltan] realized, though, is that the resulting signals are pretty dirty, so he came up with a clever Pi shield for RF signal conditioning that turns a Pi into a quality low-power transmitter.
[Zoltan] stuffed a bandpass filter for broadband noise, a low-pass filter for harmonics, and a power amplifier to beef up the signal a bit into a tiny shield that is …read more
Continue reading Tiny Raspberry Pi Shield for High-Quality RF Signals