Collaborate Disseminate
Over the last few years, LED candles have become increasingly common; and for good reason. From a distance a decent LED candle is a pretty convincing facsimile for the real thing, providing a low flickering glow without that annoying risk of burning your house down. But there’s something to be …read more
Continue reading This Super Realistic LED Candle is Smoking Hot
We often think of 3D printing as a way to create specific components in our builds, everything from some hard-to-find little sprocket to a custom enclosure. More and more of the projects that grace the pages of Hackaday utilize at least a few 3D printed parts, even if the overall …read more
Chris Gammell wants to know: What’s in your circuit toolbox?
Personally, mine is somewhat understocked. I do know that in one of my journals, probably from back in the 1980s, I scribbled down a schematic of a voltage multiplier I had just built, with the classic diode and capacitor ladder topology. I probably fed it from a small bell transformer, and I might have gotten a hundred volts or so out of it. I was so proud at the time that I wrote it down for posterity with the note, “I made this today!”
I think the whole point of …read more
Beyond pride, the biggest issue keeping adults off small motorized scooters is the fact that their tiny motors usually don’t have the power to move anything heavier than your average eighth grader. That didn’t stop [The_Didlyest] from snapping up this $7 thrift store find, but it did mean the hot pink scooter would need to be beefed up if it had any hope of moving 170 lbs of hacker.
Logically, the first step was fitting a more capable motor. [The_Didlyest] used an electric wheelchair motor which had a similar enough diameter that mounting it was fairly straightforward. The original sprocket …read more
We’ve all seen a movie or TV show that got our imagination going, and the more studious of us might get fired up over a good book (one without pictures, even). You never know were inspiration might come from, which is why it’s so hard to track down in the first place. But one place we don’t often hear about providing many hackers with project ideas is the grocery store. But of course the more we learn about [Michael Kohn], the more we realize he’s got a very unique vision.
On a recent trip to the grocery store, [Michael] saw …read more
Continue reading The Crustacean Battle Bot of your Nightmares
Regular readers may recall we recently covered a neat Arduino trick that allowed you to “blow out” an LED as if it was a candle. The idea was that the LED itself could be used as a rudimentary temperature sensor, and the Arduino code would turn the LED on and off when a change was detected in its forward voltage drop. You need to oversample the Arduino’s ADC to detect the few millivolt change reliably, but overall it’s pretty simple once you understand the principle.
But [Andrzej Laczewski], like many of our beloved readers, feels the Arduino and other microcontrollers …read more
When we were in school, every description of how transistors work was pretty dry and had a lot of math involved. We suppose you might have had a great instructor who was able to explain things more intuitively, but that was luck of the draw and statistically unlikely. These days, there are so many great videos on the Internet that explain things that even if you know the subject matter, it is fun to watch and see some of the great animations. For example [Sabin] has this beautifully animated explanation of how MOSFETs work that you can see below.
It …read more
Every year, we demand our computers to be ever faster, capable of delivering progressively more eye-watering graphics and doing it all as reliably as ever. Unfortunately, sometimes, new designs miss the mark. [Cloakedbug] was having issues with voltage regulator temperatures on an ASUS Strix VEGA 64 — one of the latest RADEON graphics cards on the market — and decided to investigate.
Right away, issues were apparent; one of the main thermal pads was making poor contact with the FETs it was intended to carry heat for, and was poorly sized to boot. In a show of poor quality, the …read more
Continue reading Gamers Rejoice: Here’s a Fix for ASUS Strix Vega 64 Thermal Issues
While doing research for our articles about inventing the integrated circuit, the calculator, and the microprocessor, one name kept popping which was new to me, Federico Faggin. Yet this was a name I should have known just as well as his famous contemporaries Kilby, Noyce, and Moore.
Faggin seems to have been at the heart of many of the early advances in microprocessors. He played a big part in the development of MOS processors during the transition from TTL to CMOS. He was co-creator of the first commercially available processor, the 4004, as well as the 8080. And he was …read more
A mixer takes two signals and mixes them together. The resulting output is usually both frequencies, plus their sum and their difference. For example, if you feed a 5 MHz signal and a 20 MHz signal, you’d get outputs at 5 MHz, 15 MHz, 20 MHz, and 25 MHz. In a balanced mixer, the original frequencies cancel out, although not all mixers do that or, at least, don’t do it perfectly. [W1GV] has a video that explains the design of a mixer with a dual gate MOSFET, that you can see below.
The dual gate MOSFET is nearly ideal for …read more