Collaborate Disseminate
Finding that his recently purchased LED Christmas lights defaulted to an annoying blinking pattern that took a ridiculous seven button presses to disable each time they were powered up, [Matthew …read more Continue reading Custom Christmas Light Controller Blocks Blinks
Transformers have an obvious use for increasing or decreasing the voltage in AC systems, but they have many other esoteric uses as well. Electric motors and generators are functionally similar …read more Continue reading Keep Coffee Warm Through Induction Heating
What kind of clever things could you do with a signal that had a period of 2 hours? Or 20? Any ideas? No seriously, tell us. Because [Joseph Eoff] has come up with a way to produce incredibly low frequency signals that stretch out for hours, and we’d love to …read more
Continue reading This Frequency Generator Knows How To Get Down
Over the years, readers have often commented that microcontrollers (or more specifically, the Arduino) are overkill for many of the projects they get used in. The admonition that the creator “Should have used a 555” has become something of a rallying cry for those who think modern electronic hobbyists are …read more
Continue reading Modeling The Classic 555 Timer On A Breadboard
To say that the RTL-SDR project was revolutionary might be something of an understatement. Taking a cheap little USB gadget and exploring the radio spectrum from the tens of megahertz up to into gigahertz frequencies with the addition of nothing more than some open source tools may go down as one of the greatest hacks of the decade. But even in the era of RTL-SDR, what [Ted Yapo] has manged to pull off is still pretty incredible.
With a Python script, a length of wire attached to the TX pin, and a mastery of the electron that we mere mortals …read more
To measure how fast something spins, most of us will reach for a tachometer without thinking much about how it works. Tachometers are often found in cars to measure engine RPM, but handheld units can be used for measuring the speed of rotation for other things as well. While some have mechanical shafts that must make physical contact with whatever you’re trying to measure, [electronoobs] has created a contactless tachometer that uses infrared light to take RPM measurements instead.
The tool uses an infrared emitter/detector pair along with an op amp to sense revolution speed. The signal from the IR …read more
When [::vtol::] wants to generate random numbers he doesn’t simply type rand() into his Arduino IDE, no, he builds a piece of art. It all starts with a knob, presumably connected to a potentiometer, which sets a frequency. An Arduino UNO takes the reading and generates a tone for an upward-facing speaker. A tiny ball bounces on that speaker where it occasionally collides with a piezoelectric element. The intervals between collisions become our sufficiently random number.
The generated number travels up the Rube Goldberg-esque machine to an LCD mounted at the top where a word, corresponding to our generated number, …read more
