Fresh hacks every day
When you get down to it, solar cells aren’t much different from the diodes and transistors in your parts drawers or inside your beloved electronics. They’re both made of silicon or some other semiconductor, and surprisingly can produce electricity in the presence of light. Here’s two semiconductors-as-solar panel projects that rolled into the tip line over the past few days.… Read the rest
Controlling LEDs is really quite simple. As you know, they need to be current limited which is as easy as applying Ohm’s law to your given set of values. To make things even more even there’s a slew of constant current LED driver chips out there that can be had for a song. But do you have any idea how … Read the rest
[Justin] didn’t want to keep checking if the ‘oven heating’ indicator light had gone off before popping his unbaked edibles into the oven. Many models offer a buzzer to let you know when the chosen temp is reached, but for folks who own a basic oven model there’s just a light that tells when the heating element is getting juice. … Read the rest
We must admit that we’ve been guilty of using a microcontroller to make two LEDs blink alternately in the past. It’s not the worst transgression, but it stems from our discomfort with analog circuits. Luckily, [Ray] published an illustrated guide on building multivibrator circuits. This is a simple method of assembling a two-output oscillator. All it takes is a … Read the rest
Hacker [Dino Segovis] is back with yet another installment of his Hack a Week series, and it’s looking like he isn’t too worse for wear after hunkering down to face hurricane Irene.
This week, it seems that [Dino] is having some problems separating his PNP transistors from his NPNs. After Albert Einstein proves to be less than useful when … Read the rest
You know them, you love them, you take them for granted – they are single push button on/off switches. As [Dino] explains in the most recent episode of his Hack a Week series, they are typically implemented in the form of IC logic switches nowadays, but it wasn’t always that way. When they first came on to the scene … Read the rest
[Dino Segovis] wrote in to tell us about his “hack”, making an AB Audio Amplifier. The advantage of this particular amp is that the transistors never turn off, which would cause distortion. A full schematic is given in the article as well as a parts list. A complete “bill of materials” makes any circuit building project easier, especially for … Read the rest
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