[Fran] & [Bil]’s Dinosaur Den

July 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

I suppose I can take credit for introducing the super awesome [Fran Blanche] to Hackaday’s very own crotchety old man and Commodore refugee [Bil Herd]. I therefore take complete responsibility for [Fran] and [Bil]’s Dinosaur Den, the new YouTube series they’re working on.

The highlight of this week’s episode is a very vintage Rubicon mirror galvanometer. This was one of the first ways to accurately measure voltage, and works kind of like a normal panel meter on steroids. In your bone stock panel meter, a small coil moves a needle to display whatever you’re measuring. In a mirror galvanometer, a coil twists a wire that is connected to a mirror. By shining a light on this mirror and having the reflected beam bounce around several other mirrors, the angle of the mirror controlled by the coil is greatly exaggerated, making for a very, very accurate measurement. It’s so sensitive the output of a lemon battery is off the scale, all from a time earlier than the two dinosaurs showing this tech off. Neat stuff.

One last thing. Because [Bil] and [Fran] are far too proud to sink to the level of so many YouTube channels, here’s the requisite, “like comment and subscribe” pitch you won’t hear them say. Oh, [Bil] knows the audio is screwed up in places. Be sure to comment on that.

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Deadbugged LED Strobe

June 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

89201403972533359 [Steel 9] was looking around for a LED strobe light for reasons unknown. He couldn’t find any that he liked, and when that happened, he did what any normal person would do – make one himself.

[Steel] based this build around a Harbor Freight 27 LED flashlight. This flashlight is just that – a simple switch to turn the LEDs on and off, a button, and from the looks of things, not even a single current limiting resistor. A masterstroke of engineering, surely,

The added circuitry consists only of a pair of transistors, a few resistors, a capacitor, and a pot. Yes, [Steel] is too cool for a 555 chip, It’s just a simple multivibrator circuit and none of the component values are very sensitive.

[Steel] got exactly what he wanted without even having to break out a breadboard. Since he just deadbugged all the circuitry, he’s also reusing the plastic enclosure of the flashlight. That’s a win in any book.

[Tymkrs] Tombstone Guitar Amplifier

June 30, 2014 by Adam Fabio 16 Comments

tymkrsTombstone

[Atdiy and Whisker], the team behind [The Tymkrs] YouTube channel, are at it again with a tombstone guitar amp project.(YouTube playlist link) Their amp began life as a Philco Tombstone radio which had seen better days. By the time [Tymkrs] got their hands on it, it was just a shell of its former self, as someone had already stripped all the electronics.

The amplifier itself is a disused Leslie tube amp [Tymkrs] had on hand. An LM386 serves as the pre-amp, making this a hybrid solid and vacuum state machine.

The tombstone speaker is especially interesting. [Tymkrs] went with an electrodynamic field coil speaker. Field coil speakers have no magnets, instead using a high voltage (approx 90V DC) coil to create a magnetic field for the voice coil to push against. This sort of speaker was commonplace in the 1930’s, as large magnets couldn’t be made lightweight enough to be used in a speaker. As magnet technology improved, permanent magnets became a staple in speakers.

[Tymkrs] paid special attention to the finish of the amplifier. They brought the tired old radio back to a high shine, then added a Metropolis inspired overlay from aged copper-clad board. The result is an amp that looks great and sounds great!

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Automatic Audio Leveling Circuit Makes Scanning More Fun

June 29, 2014 by Adam Fabio 17 Comments

alan-scope1

[Alan’s] friend came to him with a problem. He loved listening to his scanner, but hated the volume differences between stations. Some transmitters would be very low volume, others would nearly blow his speakers. To solve the problem, [Alan] built up a quick automatic leveling circuit (YouTube link) from parts he had around the lab.

[Alan’s] c alan-scope2 ircuit isn’t new, he states right in the video that various audio limiting, compressing, and automatic gain control circuits have been passed around the internet for years. What he’s brought to the table is his usual flair for explaining the circuits’ operation, with plenty of examples using the oscilloscope. (For those that don’t know, when [Alan] isn’t building circuits for fun, he’s an RF applications engineer at Tektronix).

Alan’s circuit is essentially an attenuator. It takes speaker level audio in (exactly what you’d have in a desktop scanner) and outputs a limited signal at about 50mv peak to peak, which is enough to drive an auxiliary amplifier. The attenuator is made up of a resistor and a pair of 1N34A Germanium diodes. The more bias current applied to the diodes, the more they will attenuate the main audio signal. The diode bias current is created by a transistor-based peak detector circuit driven off the main audio signal.
But don’t just take our word for it, watch the video after the break.

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Beams Of Light: An Oscilloscope Demo

June 27, 2014 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

beamsoflight

The demoscene is alive and well, with new demos coming out on a multitude of platforms, including oscilloscopes. Beams of Light is a new demo released at @party in Boston by [TRSi]. Beams isn’t the usual .EXE file format for PC based demos. It’s distributed as a 4 channel wave file. The rear left and right channels are stereo audio. The front channels, however, are vector video to be displayed on an oscilloscope in XY mode.

Beams of Light isn’t the first demo to use an oscilloscope. Youscope and Oscillofun preceded it. Still, you can see [TRSi] pushed the envelope a bit with his creation. He used Processing and Audacity to create the vector video, and his own line tracing algorithm to reduce flyback lines.

[TRSi] included an updated copy of a python based oscilloscope emulator so you can play the demo even if you don’t have the necessary hardware. We wanted to run this the right way, so we powered up our trusty Tektronix 465 and hooked it up to a 1/8″ stereo plug.

Sure enough, the demo played, and it was glorious. We did see a few more retrace lines than the video shows. This could be due to our scope having a higher bandwidth than the 10MHz scope used in the YouTube video. XY demos are one of those rare cases where an analog scope works much better than a low-cost digital scope. Trying the demo on our Rigol ds1052e didn’t yield very good results to say the least. Sometimes good old phosphor just beats an analog to digital converter.

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Homebrew Programming With Diodes

June 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

diode

Diode matrices were one of the first methods of implementing some sort of read only memory for the very first electronic computers, and even today they can be found buried deep in the IPs of ASICs and other devices that need some form of write-once memory. For the longest time, [Rick] has wanted to build a ROM out of a few hundred diodes, and he’s finally accomplished his goal. Even better, his diode matrix circuit is actually functional: it’s a 64-byte ROM for an Atari 2600 containing an extremely simple demo program.

[Rick] connected a ton of 1N60 diodes along a grid, corresponding to the data and address lines to the 2600’s CPU. At each intersection, the data lines were either unconnected, or tied together with a diode. Pulling an address line high or low ([Rick] hasn’t posted a schematic) pulls the data line to the same voltage if a diode is connected. Repeat this eight times for each byte, and you have possibly the most primitive form of read only memory.

As for the demo [Rick] coded up with diodes? It displays a rainbow of colors with a black rectangle that can be moved across the screen with the joystick. Video below.

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The Basics Of Frequency Modulation

June 26, 2014 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

fm-modulation

[brmarcum] takes us back to analog building block basics with his Frequency Modulation and Demodulation tutorial. Frequency Modulation (FM) sounds simple at first, but understanding the electronics behind modulation and demodulation of an FM signal can be confusing. We’ve covered the basics before, but FM is so tightly associated with broadcast radio that searches often become muddled with references to RF, stereo, antennas, and transmitters.

[brmarcum] hopes to fill that gap with a simple circuit that modulates an audio signal to FM, then demodulates and amplifies it to be played on a small speaker. He used a Digilent Analog Discovery kit in his experiments, but an oscilloscope (an older analog scope would be perfect here) would work for output. Signal generation duties could easily be handled by a 555 circuit at the low end, and a computer sound card at the higher end.

[brmarcum] obviously put some time into his tutorial, but it’s not a tome of FM modulation. He’s broken down the modulation and demodulation circuits into their basic op-amp stages with examples of what the signal should look like on a scope after each stage. That’s the beauty here. By building and testing each section, anyone new to analog can learn how things work. In places where the theory behind what’s going on gets too in-depth for an Instructable, [brmarcum] gives links to Wikipedia.