Your first Digital to Analog Converter build

Have you ever built a Digital to Analog Converter before? This is a circuit that can take the 0 or 5V coming off of several digital logic pins, combine them together, and spit out one analog voltage that represents that value. If you’ve never made one, here’s your chance. [Collin Cunningham] over at Make put together another lab video about Read the rest

Halloween Props: Voice-changing Daft Punk costume

[Dr. West] shared his Halloween costume with us; a Daft Punk inspired voice-changing helmet. He stared with a motorcycle helmet, cutting out a hole in the back for a sub-woofer speaker. Inside there’s an old computer mic and the amp circuitry for a portable stereo system. An Arduino is used to pick up the wearer’s voice from the microphone … Read the rest

PIC programmable power supply

This programmable power supply is the perfect addition to your bench tools. [Debraj Deb], who previously built a whole house power monitor, designed this build around a PIC 18F4520 microcontroller. The desired voltage is set with an attached keypad, resulting in a digital output on the 8-bits of port D. The port connects to another protoboard with an R-2R … Read the rest

Atari 2600 recreated in an FPGA

Behold [Retromaster's] field programmable gate array implementation of an Atari 2600. The processor and video chip have both been built in the 100,000 gate Spartan-3E FPGA, with connectors for audio, video, and a Sega controller. The output signals are generated using two DACs made from R-2R resistor ladders, much like the project we saw in August. [Retromaster] included … Read the rest

Building a discrete digital-analog-converter

Want to take back control of how your digital audio files become sound? One thing you can do is to build your own digital to analog converter. This one is made from discrete components, centered around a resistive ladder. Yes, there are a couple of integrated circuits in there which are used for demultiplexing the incoming signal but the … Read the rest