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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It has been a long time since I designed Blue Blinky; I just wanted to update it. I have used a 1 uF electrolytic capacitor for the timing capacitor, and it works just fine with the two 680k resistors to give about 1 per second flash rate. I got a bag of hundreds of multilayer
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I designed my Blue Blinky with a daylight shutoff, using a LED as the light sensor and an additional transistor to amplify the minuscule current that the LED puts out. This worked just great because there is the point across the timing capacitor where the current is very low, and it takes very little current
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After the 2015-10-26 blog, I searched for some other websites selling small flashlights and ended up at dxsoul.com, which is a part of Deal Extreme, DX.com. I also found some reviews of other, cheaper flashlights, two of which were the Brinyte and the Tank007. On dx.com I found and ordered the the package called ‘Mini
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I found these at a Walmart store. They’re named Great Value and came in a package of four nightlights. As usual, curiosity made me open it up to see the circuit inside. I traced the circuit and drew a schematic of it. I was disappointed, but not surprised. The way the CdS photocell works is
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It’s been awhile since I blogged this, so I may be saying what I’ve already said before. But I get comments from others about how to make measurements of the LED brightness. A recent one is in the comments of an older blog. Many Joule Thief builders don’t have the minimum tools needed for some
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I went to Home Depot this weekend to buy some stuff to fix the leaky toilet, and I walked past the display for the new GE Bright Stik LED light bulbs. I was attracted to their shape and small size. They come packaged 3 to a box, and there were two types: bright white and
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I talked to a club member about LED lights and how much money they saved in electricity. But he said he stocked up on incandescent lights before they were banned so he could have them for his radio room. He has had problems with LED lights causing RF interference with his radios, so he went
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Quantsuff emailed us a link about a new material summarized at Newscientist.com. I have a few thoughts that I’d like to add. The stuff should be great for illumination. But I have doubts about its use for display purposes. Displays have millions of very small pixels. If one or a few get contaminated with dust
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