Collaborate Disseminate
At some point, the 3.6 V of a single lithium ion battery just won’t do, and you’ll absolutely want to stack LiIon cells in series. When you need high power, …read more Continue reading Ultimate Power: Lithium-Ion Batteries In Series
[Trent M. Wyatt]’s CPUVolt library provides a fast way to measure voltage using no external components, and no I/O pin. It only applies to certain microcontrollers, but he provides example …read more Continue reading Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin
For one-off projects or prototyping, it’s not too hard to find a wall wart or power supply to send a few joules of energy from the wall outlet to your …read more Continue reading Power Supplies Without Transformers
As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a lock that can’t be picked. However, it seems like there are plenty of examples of car manufacturers that refuse …read more Continue reading Car Security System Monitors Tiny Voltage Fluctuations
Battery technology is the talk of the town right now, as it’s the main bottleneck holding up progress on many facets of renewable energy. There are other technologies available for energy storage, though, and while they might seem like drop-in replacements for batteries they can have some peculiar behaviors. Supercapacitors, …read more
When you measure a voltage, how do you know that your measurement is correct? Because your multimeter says so, of course! But how can you trust your multimeter to give the right reading? Calibration of instruments is something we often trust blindly without really thinking about, but it’s not always …read more
Continue reading The Best Voltage And Current Reference This Side Of A Test Lab
During my recent trip to Europe, I found out that converters were not as commonly sold as adapters, and for a good reason. The majority of the world receives 220-240 V single phase voltage at 50-60 Hz with the surprisingly small number of exceptions being Canada, Colombia, Japan, Taiwan, the …read more
[Darlan Johnson] was working on a wearable project and needed a way to measure the change in voltage and current over time.
Most measurement tools are designed to take snapshots of a system’s state in a very small window of time, but there are few common ones designed to observe …read more
Continue reading If You Need a Measurement Tool Just Build A Measurement Tool
While those of us stuck sailing desks might not be able to truly appreciate the problem, [Timo Birnschein] was tired of finding that some of the batteries aboard his boat had gone flat. He wanted some way to check the voltage on all of the the batteries in the system …read more
Continue reading Five Channel Monitor Keeps Boat Batteries Shipshape
Even if you don’t work in a nuclear power plant, you might still want to use a Geiger counter simply out of curiosity. It turns out that there are a lot of things around which emit ionizing radiation naturally, for example granite, the sun, or bananas. If you’ve ever wondered …read more
Continue reading You Didn’t See Graphite Around This Geiger Counter