In this week’s podcast, non-brothers Elliot Williams and Al Williams talk about our favorite hacks of the week. Elliot’s got analog on the brain, courtesy of the ongoing Op Amp Contest, and Al is all about the retrocomputers, from a thrift-store treasure to an old, but still incredibly serviceable, voice synthesizer. Both agree that they love clever uses of mechanical parts and that nobody should fear the FET.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
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Episode 216 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [Mr SDR] for guessing the sound of the week!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s
- Make Your ESP32 Talk Like It’s The 80s Again
- Very Slow Movie Player Avoids E-Ink Ghosting With Machine Learning
- The Shuttle Engine Needed 3D Printing, But…
- Op Amp Contest: A Slice Of The ’70s
- Mystery 1802 Computer Was A Homebrew Project
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Al’s Picks:
One caveat to the op-amp power supply rejection ratio: it’s frequency dependent. You’ll still want to add low-ESR decoupling capacitors close to the power input to the chip to eat up any fast transients.
Op-amps are inherently and deliberately slowed down to avoid instabilities. This means they will pass high frequencies through – which is why, when you’re designing filters, a passive low-pass stage in front of your active filter is not a bad idea. It makes the difference between clean output and hearing “pa pada pa pada…” from your hi-fi amp whenever a cellphone is near.
Hey! i won the prize for “craziest wrong answer”…
Nobody wants to miss a good book about FET’s! 😁 https://youtu.be/KH7gBi5xW7A
And wouldn’t it sound nice to say “Electro-Brothers Elliot and Al talk about our favorite hacks of the week”?