I was reading this web page about the history of mystery clocks and I got some ideas. One of them I got from my experience with a very old automated voltmeter. I don’t remember much about this voltmeter other than it used many relays and made a lot of noise and the display consisted of
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I have heard people call the turns of a coil “wraps”, as if it’s a tamale or fast food or something. Well, it’s not, even though that may sound delicious. Each time the wire passes through the center of the toroid core, it is called a turn, even if the wire just goes through and
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This weekend I did something I thought I really would never do – I already knew that this circuit was a loser. The guy has a web page with “the simplest LED flasher”, which uses an NPN transistor with the base disconnected and the emitter positive which is supposed to break down at less than
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What is the fastest Joule Thief in the world? I have had one operating at 13 MHz, believe it or not. What is the slowest Joule Thief? I built one with a large coil, and the high inductance caused it to operate at 1200 Hz, well within the audio frequency range. I think that that
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There are many other uses for common household items, or even stuff that would otherwise go to the trash or recycling. In this case, I built a two transistor “Joule Thief” V Booster on a small perf board, put it inside of a soda bottle cap along with two screws and encapsulated it in epoxy
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I was reading an article in the ASME “mechanical engineering” magazine called “Nuclear’s Model T”, which talked about building small nuclear power plants in a factory and shipping them to their operational sites. This issue was Vol.131/No.7 July 2009. The article was published a few years before the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. First off, I will
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I received a Google Alert which linked to this Youtube video which consisted of about a minute of nothing else but a schematic of a circuit, with a lot of background noise. The circuit consisted of a single transistor with a coil, capacitor and 68 ohm resistor, and of course the LED. I tack soldered
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I bought a Philips 5.5W LED MR16 spot light (.PDF) for about $20.00. It puts out 300 lumens of warm white light. The light needs 12VAC, and the base has two pins spaced about 0.3 inches apart, which fit perfectly into a screw terminal. I’m using it above my workbench for illuminating the circuit boards
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Well, my website and blog is back up, to Oct 28. I can’t remember if I blogged after that, so I’m guessing that I may have had one or two, or even none, but I can’t remember what they were. If anyone has seen one between Oct 28 and Nov 3 and remembers, let me
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I got this paperback book on Amazon used for a very reasonable price. Unlike the book “Bit By Bit:…” by Augarten which covers ancient history, this book starts off with the 1945 to 1956 era and because it’s the second edition, ends in 2002. It is not a technical book, but delves into the people
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