Bill ‘Botronics‘ Sherman said he was reading a sample page from “Unscrewed” on Google Play Books. There was a note about the Phillips screw. Long ago, a guy once told me that it would be torture to change the screws and screwdrivers on their assembly line from Phillips back to blade screws. But every telephone and
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I made this and I used an old HP 721 power supply set at 31 volts to power the LEDs. The 8 LEDs on each side of the middle are in series and add up to about 25 volts. The two sides are then connected in parallel. The 721 PS is set for 30 mA
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Quantsuff sent me a pic of an Aztec PC. I don’t see any CD/DVD slot or button, leading me to believe that this was just a drawing from someone’s imagination. But it looks cool in a Steampunk kind of way. Speaking of Mayan Calendars, isn’t this year, according to their calendar, supposed to be the
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Andy asked me about Peltier junction TEGs (thermoelectric generators) in the Yahoo group Joulethief. The only thermoelectric generators I’ve experimented with are the thermocouples used in natural gas appliances to shut them off if the pilot light goes out. Nowadays these may be getting rarer because the energy efficiency is seriously reduced by a pilot
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I get these Google Alerts for Joule Thief, and almost all of them are for the circuits that are discussed here. But lately some alerts have been for other totally unrelated Joule Thief stuff. A few recent ones have been for some musical group, which has picked up on the Joule Thief name. But this
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I received a Google Alert with a link for this Youtube video of a JT powering a LED night light. I have some thoughts that I’d like to share. A LED or three in a night light may take only a quarter watt or less, if run from a battery. But when run from the
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I was checking out the book Mondo Magnets… by Fred Jeffers on Amazon. This book can be purchased used for a very reasonable price – I bought a different book for $.01, that’s one cent U.S. I clicked on the “Search Inside” and read about an easy way to separate iron powder from garden
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I recently read that Peltier TEGs (thermoelectric generators) are less efficient than conventional electromechanical systems such as turbines/generators. Mayak pointed out that TEGs could be used to generate power by using the difference in temperature between the surface and deep water of the ocean. I found the Wikipedia entry on this, called OTEC, which apparently
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I received the following comment from Mayank and this is the reply to his comment. Hi Watson, I have a 1V, 3A solar panel that I want to use to charge 6V SLA battery. I checked some other circuits on the web and they use big torriod cores with 2N3055 transistors. Can I use a
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On occasion I see others refer to the Joule Thief and flashlight (torch) page of talkingelectronics.com. He has many comments, some good, some not so good, and some that miss the mark. Someone recently mentioned the Circuit B, which is shown in one of the pictures. He talked about increasing the efficiency a lot by
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