Collaborate Disseminate
Optoelectronics hold a range of possibilities for the hardware experimenter — indeed who among us hasn’t added LEDs aplenty to our work? What many of us may be unaware of …read more Continue reading The Photodiode You Never Knew You Had
A while back, [Chris Lu] was studying how analog circuits, specifically op-amps can be used to perform mathematical operations and wondered if they could be persuaded to solve differential equations, …read more Continue reading Op-Amp Challenge: Interactive Analog LED Wave Array
Those of use hailing from the UK may be quite familiar with the Royal Air Force’s Tornado fighter jet, which was designed to fight in a theoretical nuclear war, and …read more Continue reading Beautiful Engineering In This Laser Unit From a Tornado Jet Fighter
Universal remotes are a handy tool to have around if you have many devices that would all otherwise have their own remote controls. Merging them all into a single device …read more Continue reading IR Translator Makes Truly Universal Remote
The instinctive reaction when measuring nuclear radiation is to think of a Geiger counter, as the low-pressure gas tube detectors have entered our popular culture through the Cold War. A …read more Continue reading A Trio Of Photodiodes Make A Radiation Detector
The February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics had what was — at the time — an amazing project. The Cyclops, a digital camera with a 32 by 32 pixel resolution …read more Continue reading Image Sensors Demystified by [IMSAI Guy]
[jbumstead] wanted to demonstrate the idea of information-storing devices such as LPs, CDs, and old hard drives. What he came up with lies directly at the intersection of art and technology: an intricately-built machine that plays beautiful collaged wooden disks. Much like the media that inspired the Wooden Disk Player, …read more
Continue reading Wooden Disc Player Translates Binary Back Into Text
Against the backdrop of a global respiratory virus pandemic, it’s likely that more than a few readers have been thinking about pulse oximeters. You may even have looked at one closely and seen that it’s little more than a device which shines light through your finger, and wondered how they …read more
What do fitness trackers have to do with bacterial cultures in the lab? Absolutely nothing, unless and until someone turns a fitness band into a general-purpose optical densitometer for the lab.
This is one of those stories that shows that you never know from where inspiration is going to come. …read more
Continue reading Fitness Tracker Hacked Into Optical Density Meter
We will confess that the authors of the Applied Physics Letters article “Experimental Demonstration of Energy Harvesting from the Sky using the Negative Illumination Effect of a Semiconductor Photodiode” never used the acronym DAD or the phrase “dark absorbing diode.” But we thought it was too good to pass up. …read more