Collaborate Disseminate
[Lixie Labs] are no strangers to creating many projects with LEDs or other displays. Now they’ve created a low latency music visualizer, called the Sensory Bridge, that creates gorgeous light …read more Continue reading The Sensory Bridge Is Your Path To A Desktop Rave
We all have that one project on our minds that we’d love to build if we could just find the right combination of time, energy, and knowledge to dive right …read more Continue reading Woodworking, Blinkenlites, and FFT’s Dance To The Music
As mildly exotic silicon has become cheaper and the ingenuity of hardware hackers has been unleashed upon it, it’s inevitable that some once-unattainably expensive instruments will appear as cheap modules from China. The LTDZ spectrum analyser on the bench today …read more
Continue reading What Can A $30 USB Spectrum Analyser Do For Me?
The must-have accessory on a modern all-singing, all-dancing amateur radio transceiver is a panadaptor. Inevitably driven by SDR technology, it’s a view of a band in the frequency domain, and it will usually be displayed as a “waterfall” giving a time dimension to see transmissions over a period.
[Bill Meara, …read more
The must-have accessory on a modern all-singing, all-dancing amateur radio transceiver is a panadaptor. Inevitably driven by SDR technology, it’s a view of a band in the frequency domain, and it will usually be displayed as a “waterfall” giving a time dimension to see transmissions over a period.
[Bill Meara, …read more
[Seb Holzapfel, VK2SEB] has a rather nice spectrum analyser, a Hewlett Packard 141T. It’s an entirely analogue instrument though, so it lacks some of the sophisticated features you might expect to see on its modern counterparts.
One feature the HP does have is a vertical deflection output that in effect allows the trace to be reproduced on an oscilloscope. [Seb] has taken that and applied it to an STM32F746 Discovery board with its associated LCD touchscreen to produce an interface for the HP that includes modern features such as trace normalisation and a waterfall view. Along the way he’s had …read more
Continue reading A Digital LCD Makeover For An Analogue CRT Spectrum Analyser
If you are interested in electronics or engineering, you’ll have noticed a host of useful-sounding apps to help you in your design and build work. There are calculators, design aids, and somewhat intriguingly, apps that claim to offer an entire instrument on your phone. A few of them are produced to support external third-party USB instrument peripherals, but most of them claim to offer the functionality using just the hardware within the phone. Why buy an expensive oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, or signal generator, when you can simply download one for free?
Those who celebrate Christmas somewhere with a British tradition …read more
Continue reading Smartphone Bench Instrument Apps: Disappointment or Delight?
If you are interested in electronics or engineering, you’ll have noticed a host of useful-sounding apps to help you in your design and build work. There are calculators, design aids, and somewhat intriguingly, apps that claim to offer an entire instrument on your phone. A few of them are produced to support external third-party USB instrument peripherals, but most of them claim to offer the functionality using just the hardware within the phone. Why buy an expensive oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, or signal generator, when you can simply download one for free?
Those who celebrate Christmas somewhere with a British tradition …read more
Continue reading Smartphone Bench Instrument Apps: Disappointment or Delight?
A spectrum analyzer is a pretty useful tool for working with signals where the size of the frequency components matter. Usually, the display is a screen. Sometimes, you see it done with LEDs. [Mag Laboratories] did it with ping pong balls.
The device uses a processor to calculate a Fourier transform, cutting an audio signal into 16 frequency bands. The processor converts each of these values to a PWM output that drives small fans. The fans blow the ping pong ball up the tube proportional to the fan speed. You can see the result in the video below.
Of course, …read more
