Category Archives: multiplexer

There are 10 Kinds of Computers in the World

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There’s an old joke that there are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary, those who don’t, and those who didn’t see a base three joke coming. Perhaps [Dmitry Sokolov] heard that joke because he’s built a ternary (base 3) computer. He claims it is the first one to be built in the last 50 years. You can see a video about the device below. There’s also a video of the device with a nixie tube output.

You may not think of it often, but bit is a contraction of binary digit, so a ternary computer …read more

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Why Only Use One Controller When You Can Use ALL Of Them?

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After booting up his RetroPie system, [jfrmilner] had the distinct feeling that something was off. Realizing that the modern Xbox 360 controller didn’t fit right when reliving the games of his youth, he rounded up all his old controllers to make sure he always had the right gamepad for the game.

Wanting to keep the controllers unmodified — so they could still be used on the original systems — he had to do a bit of reverse-engineering and source some controller sockets before building his controller hub. Using shift-in registers, shift-out registers, and some multiplexers, he designed a large circuit …read more

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A Few of Our Favorite Chips: 4051 Analog Mux

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Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens? They’re alright, I suppose. But when it comes down to it, I’d probably rather have a bunch of 4051, 4052, and 4053 analog multiplexers on the component shelf. Why? Because the ability to switch analog signals around, routing them at will, under control of a microcontroller is tremendously powerful.

Whether you want to read a capacitive-sensing keyboard or just switch among audio signals, nothing beats a mux! Read on and see if you agree.

The Basics

An ideal analog multiplexer routes a single common pin on one side through multiple switches to multiple …read more

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Neopixels Light the Way in Pressure-Sensitive Floor

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It’s got a little “Saturday Night Fever” vibe to it, but this pressure-sensitive LED floor was made for gaming, not for dancing.

Either way, [creed_bratton_]’s build looks pretty good. The floor is a 5×6 grid of thick HDPE cutting boards raised up on a 2×4 lumber frame. Each cell has a Neopixel ring and a single force-sensitive resistor to detect pressure on the pad. Two 16-channel multiplexers were needed to consolidate the inputs for the Arduino that’s running the show, and a whole bunch of wall warts power everything. The video below shows a little of the build and a …read more

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Hackaday Dictionary: Mux/Demux

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In this issue of Hackaday Dictionary, we cover the multiplexer and demultiplexer (also called mux and demux). They are essentially opposites but they work on the same principle. There are three parts: the input, the output, and the selector.

The Basics

With a mux, you have multiple inputs, and a selector chooses which one of those outputs to use, and pipes it to a single output. It’s as if a bunch of people want to say something to you at once, but you can only listen to one at a time.

With the demux, a single input is piped to …read more

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