From FB post One important thing that people forget to do is consider what might happen with a circuit that has anything that draws power from the protoboard. If you’re working with a few low power devices such as small LEDs and switches, then there is usually not a problem. But if you have a
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From FB post about Arduino driving a ‘HC595 chip. You don’t need an oscilloscope to see digital signals. If you slow down the speed, you can see what’s happening by looking at LEDs. Everything is digital, just on or off. Plug two red LEDs, transistors, and current limiting resistors for LEDs (330 ohms), and for
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A detector or discriminator in an electronic device might need to be adjusted to a very few points on a scale of a hundred or more points. A digital indicator typically indicates only a fraction of that, possibly 16 points. This is why the analog meter is still useful: it can indicate a small change
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Paul is experimenting with a Joule Thief using some germanium transistors I sent him. I thought about a few quirks of germanium transistors that I may not have (or may have) blogged earlier. The vintage germanium transistors were made at a time when the solid state manufacturing technology was much less advanced than it is
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Something like a year ago I just took a cheap universal remote control that I often use and opened it up and unsoldered the IR LED. I soldered a few feet of speaker wire into its holes on the circuit board and then soldered the LED onto the other end of the wire. I mounted
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Here’s a pic of a TP3051J telephone interface chip (CODEC and Filter). Yes, a picture of the actual chip inside of the IC, after I popped the top off of it. I have a lot of them so I figured that checking one out to see what was in it would be fun. The pic
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This is from the 1980s, it’s all red LED segments or dots. I tried to find an angle where the ceiling light would not show, but because it’s a bubble lens, just about any angle had that white reflection. The specifications are available on the ‘net. The box outlined in red is one of the
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QS sent me a link to a series of Youtube videos of xmas LED light reviews. This review is on my mind right now. It’s a review and teardown of a 15 RGB LED light string from Brite Star. This is in my opinion an excessively long video at 55 minutes. I think it would
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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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