Nuclear Reactor Simulator Is The Project Of A Lifetime

Have you been watching Chernobyl? Well, so has everyone else. Right now it seems the whole Internet is comprised of armchair dosimetrists counting roentgens in their sleep, but [Mark Wright] doesn’t need a high-budget TV show to tell him about the challenges of wrangling the atom with 1980s technology. …read more

Continue reading Nuclear Reactor Simulator Is The Project Of A Lifetime

You’ll Flip for This 7404 IC Motherboard Fix

We often lament that the days of repairable electronics are long gone. It used to be you’d get schematics for a piece of gear, and you could just as easily crack it open and fix something as the local repairman — assuming you had the knowledge and tools. But today, everything is built to be thrown away when something goes wrong, and you might as well check at the end of a rainbow if you’re searching for a circuit diagram for a new piece of consumer electronics.

But [Robson] writes in with an interesting story that gives us hope that …read more

Continue reading You’ll Flip for This 7404 IC Motherboard Fix

Afroman Makes A UHF Oscillator From A Potato

If you have ever worked with simple logic gates, there is a good chance that at some point you will have built a ring oscillator from a chain of inverters. With the addition of a resistor and a capacitor, you can easily make a square wave oscillator up into the megahertz range with standard logic chips.

[Afroman] received some rather special logic chips, from an unexpectedly named company, Potato Semiconductor. They specialise in making versions of common 74 series logic that smash the usual 100+ MHz barrier of the faster conventional 74 series chips, and extend their bandwidth up to …read more

Continue reading Afroman Makes A UHF Oscillator From A Potato

Afroman Makes A UHF Oscillator From A Potato

If you have ever worked with simple logic gates, there is a good chance that at some point you will have built a ring oscillator from a chain of inverters. With the addition of a resistor and a capacitor, you can easily make a square wave oscillator up into the megahertz range with standard logic chips.

[Afroman] received some rather special logic chips, from an unexpectedly named company, Potato Semiconductor. They specialise in making versions of common 74 series logic that smash the usual 100+ MHz barrier of the faster conventional 74 series chips, and extend their bandwidth up to …read more

Continue reading Afroman Makes A UHF Oscillator From A Potato