#Breaking-Taps #video about how he got silicon #electronics fabricated (through #WaferSpace #MPW, not a multi-project chip). He settled on a MOV machine (transport-triggered architecture) called BTTAP, designed it in the Spade #HDL, synthesized it with Yosys and ABC, and simulated it for SKY130. Includes animations of some analog simulations. He tested his RTL (?) in cocotb instead of Verilator and viewed his waveforms with Surfer instead of gtkwave. Then he used LibreLane, which wafer.space provides as a #Nix Flake, to get from a netlist to GDSII. Finally wafer.space got it fabbed through GlobalFoundries’ GF180 process, which I didn’t know had an open-source PDK, in only 3-4 months. Wafer.space got some of the chips packaged as COB with transparent epoxy. He got about 1000 chips. From looking at MPW pricing in the past, I’d estimated that this cost him about US$2500, but I think it was actually US$5000. wafer.space GF180MCU run 3 is in December, early-bird price for a quarter-size chip (1.94 × 2.53 mm) of only US$2000.
on 02026-09-22“The "Chipalooza" Challenge. Open source analog IP for the SoCs of tomorrow. Five shuttle challenges across three major open-source PDKs. Design an #analog IP block, get it fabricated, and win awards for your effort.
“The goal of Chipalooza Challenge is to provide open source libraries of high-quality analog components useful to designers of SoCs for all three major open source PDKs, enabling cross-platform porting of SoCs and a shared home for the IP that analog designers need. Challenge #1, run by Efabless in 2024, produced dozens of analog circuits for Sky130 across two test chips. The five challenges below continue that work: two more rounds each for Sky130, GF180MCU, and #IHP SG13CMOS5L.”
Similar to #Tiny-Tapeout, I think? Challenge #2, on IHP SG13CMOS5L via IHP, has 28 designs and has schematic review complete. Challenge #3, on GF180MCU via Wafer.Space (#WaferSpace), was only launched on August 17th, but is at “proposal review complete”, so I guess the window to submit a proposal is pretty narrow! Challenge #4, on Sky130 via Chip Foundry, is “expected to launch” in November, and #5, another one on GF180MCU via Wafer.Space, is expected in January, and #6, another one on SG13CMOS5L, is expected in June. #hardware #electronics #PDK
on 02026-09-15Apparently #Arduino ATMega328 #AVR #microcontrollers can sample at 38ksps if you set the ADC clock divider to 32 (16MHz ÷ 32 = 500kHz, and then you need 14 clocks per sample), and still have an ENOB of about 9.5. Not exactly high #precision #electronics but often adequate. And if you’re willing to accept more noise you can do 76ksps with an ENOB of about 8.7. Higher sample rates produce audible clicks when used for audio.
on 02026-09-09Bob Widlar’s 01969 paper about superbeta transistors (β > 2000) with low Vce breakdown voltages for IC applications. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-09-04#MikesElectricStuff explains that Shenzhen Fine Mad (or Fine Made) Electronics (FM) has a “74HC595A” that can’t run nearly as fast as a normal 74HC595, lacks the enable pin, and has open-drain outputs. Unfortunately lots of anti-Chinese racism & xenophobia in the comments from “bd139”, “jonpaul”, “SL4P”, “floobydust”, and a particularly repugnant specimen from “CaptDon”. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-09-03#MikesElectricStuff recommends some fast-turnaround #PCBA companies in the #UK: <https://hcd-electronics.co.uk/> which he used to use and <https://www.fringeelectronics.co.uk/> (not fast), plus <https://www.ablcircuits.co.uk> (which he hasn't tried) and <https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk/> (“nearest thing UK has to JLC, but at much higher prices”). Also a discussion thread about how to qualify suppliers and reduce BOM delays. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03#EEVBlog #video about PCB #manufacturing #toread. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-09-03#Usagi-Electric #video #toread discussing #JLCPCB #pricing having higher shipping costs now for #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03another Chinese #PCBA #electronics #hardware #manufacturing company, Longjiang Circuit.
on 02026-09-03a report from July that #JLCPCB and other #PCBA houses have raised their prices for 500-board runs 30% since “a couple of months ago” (≈April), presumably due to the #Iran war. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03#Video by #Eurocircuits about #manufacturing 4-layer PCBs. They do PCB manufacturing, specialized in small prototype runs, but I don’t think they do PCBA like Aisler, JLC, or PCBWay. They do “order pooling” like JLC: they put multiple customers’ designs into a single panel. #toread #electronics #hardware
on 02026-09-03People on the EEVblog forum in 02021 reported that, although #JLCPCB supports a MOQ of 5 boards for #PCBA, some of the parts they can assemble with it have a higher MOQ. “For that particular part, the minimum quantity is 15. You must pay for 15, even if they only need 5 or 10 to assemble your boards.” There’s also an “attrition” amount for some parts, which is the number of parts they lose off the tape when they cut it (and you pay for). #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03The #Pineapple-One’s instruction memory board design, unfortunately in EAGLE. #electronics #hardware #RISC-V
on 02026-09-03#Video from #Tr3bol Argentina about how in #electronics you often see badly-designed off-the-shelf step-up and step-down dc-dc converter modules built around LM2596 or XL4015 #hardware for buck converters, or the 1.2MHz ML3608 (which she doesn’t recommend using) for boost converters, and how you ought to really just build your own to make sure it works. She says they’re noisy (though I notice she didn’t bother to specify the volts per division on her oscilloscope still photo, but later she said it was 140mV ripple, while her own design got the ripple down to 60mV) and that you can accidentally set the voltage wrong, or vibrate or heat your potentiometer to the wrong voltage (in the schematic she shows, it isn’t ratiometric, so you have temperature drift). Also, humidity. Also, often, she says the commercial module PCBs are badly laid out, creating EMI problems and not respecting safety standards, use counterfeit chips, and are inadequately heatsinked. Most of the video is just still photos with lots of talking-head filler.
on 02026-09-03electric #flyswatter #electronics is normally limited to 45μC and 5mA for safety
on 02026-09-03"WaveDrom" is a JS library for visualizing digital waveform signals in #electronics, implementing a format called WaveJSON. You can render SVGs on the command line or embed them in your web page.
on 02026-08-31very nice Wikipedia article about #electronics #communications #history
on 02026-08-25#GreatScott #video on #FOC #control #electronics for #brushless #motors #toread
on 02026-08-25#Tutorial #video by #Excessive-Overkill about field-oriented #control (#FOC), promising “from the ground up.” #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-08-25#MrCarlson’s Lab #video about antiparallel diodes for front-end voltage limiting (in particular for radio receivers), mentioning that diode-connected transistors are less leaky. He also vividly illustrates diodes as temperature sensors by heating one with his finger while connected to an Agilent U2152A multimeter with a 4-digit diode-test function; the forward voltage drops from .6246V to .6214V, 100μV at a time, from the finger heating, then resurges to .6246V after he removes his finger. Basic #electronics introduction video.
on 02026-08-25good #electronics #introduction #tutorial #video #formina maybe
on 02026-08-24#Murray-Smith #video about making a position sensor from #hoarding a mouse. #electronics
on 02026-08-24#Dr-Volt #video #toread about #microscopy with a Blu-Ray laser. #hoarding #electronics
on 02026-08-24#EEVblog #video about jellybean #op-amps #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-08-20Says that type K #thermocouples (#sensors #hardware for use with #electronics), the common kind of thermocouples, work from a couple degrees above absolute zero up to 1260°C, with ±2.2°C or ±0.75% error, whichever is greater. Gives a data table for their output voltages, running from -6.458mV at -270° to 0 at 0° (by convention) to 29.129mV at 700° to 54.886mV at 1372°, which presumably is where they melt, which is about 40μV/°C, with predictable variations from linearity on the order of 3%. #metrology
on 02026-08-19#Concept-Crafted-Creations #video about #manufacturing the #solar-energy collector based on the James Webb Space Telescope with 18 mirrors costing US$5 each. Explains that the JWST uses gold so it can do better infrared imaging. He made some small concentrating mirrors by letting heated plexiglas discs sag into a mold made with #3D-printing, which seems like an interesting technique for #optics in its own right, though possibly not imaging optics. Rather than for the final solar concentrator, this was used for a goofy invalid experiment to compare “silver” and “gold” which were represented by colored spray paint, and the “#energy” gathered was measured by some unknown kind of light sensor #electronics. For his big collector, he used not just 3-D printing but also #laser-cutting on wood and assembly with screws. He also used a laser-cut alt-azimuth wood base with a giant gear for #solar tracking. He explains the three-point screw-and-compression-spring mounting that makes each of the 18 mirrors alignable, using TPU accordions for the compression springs; the mirrors themselves are laser-cut plexiglas with reflective window film stuck to it. He was hoping to sag these plexiglas hexagons into a mold in the same way as for the small test mirrors, but his microwave oven (which must be what he used for the others) damaged the window film, so he ended up heating them to only 100° or 120° and clamping them into a mold (with a laser-cut custom clamp) instead of just letting them sag under their own weight. His aluminum collector plate with coolant grooves running through it cost him US$171 for #PCBWay to custom-machine, making this a very expensive solar collector, though he thinks it’s cheap. Also he’s in the Netherlands, where it’s cloudy a lot, especially in winter. Comments mention that blackening copper with liver of sulfur makes a good solar-collector material.
on 02026-08-15#Video by Artem Kositsyn extracting enough energy from a pyroelectric ceramic disc capacitor to light an LED visibly in the dark when the capacitor is heated with a cigarette lighter. #electronics
on 02026-08-12#Video #toread on triggering xenon flashbulbs with #electronics
on 02026-08-11#Bigclive #electronics #video on an old sound-detecting dusk switch, which turns on a light when you speak near it, but only after dark. In order to be able to switch AC current with a low trigger current, it uses a unidirectional SCR thyristor across a bridge rectifier, which can be triggered with 200μA. He says it’s old, but the main diode is an A7, the microcontroller looks like a SOT23-6, and everything is SMD. But it probably predates RoHS because it has a CdS photoresistor. There’s a 6.2MΩ SMD resistor involved (“625” label on maybe an 0603) which I don’t think I’ve seen before; at first Clive thinks it’s a collector resistor, used to get a high gain out of a grounded-emitter microphone amplifier, but later he thinks it’s being used to supply almost a microamp to the transistor base to just barely bias it into conduction, which would mean that the collector resistor was just the MCU’s internal GPIO pullup. The power supply for the microcontroller is even simpler than a cap dropper: D -- 100kΩ -- (~Z(5.1V) || 100μF || 0.1μF), with a half-wave rectifying diode and only a 100kΩ resistor to limit the bias current for the 5.1V zener, so the peak current is probably (339V - .7V - 5.1V)/100kΩ ≈ 3mA. Which is a very toasty 1 watt peak on the largish (1206? which is ¼W) series resistor, but that’s only some of the time; the RMS voltage across the resistor is only half of that, which would indeed give a quarter watt.
on 02026-08-11#Witchcraft-and-Alchemy #video about #bootstrapping thinner aluminum #foil material for a ribbon microphone, noting that the usual stuff is about 10μm, testing with a micrometer, while ribbon-microphone #sensors are ideally 1.5–3μm. He reduces the thickness of household foil by etching the foil with NaOH #materials, 4g dissolved in 200mℓ of water (½ molar, he says), which evidently thins the foil fairly evenly. He glued foil to some plastic roundrects to hold it in place during the process. There’s a point where the foil becomes a very fine mesh, some time before being ripped apart by the hydrogen bubbles after about half an hour. He did a 4-liter test to try to hold temperature more constant. I suspect you could get smoother dissolution with the proper regime of #electrolysis, reducing asperities, but he didn’t try that. For thickness measurement, he did the same repeated-folding-in-half thing that I did, but with a micrometer instead of calipers or a ruler to measure the result. He says some of the foil had “the structural integrity of a wet paper towel,” making the process more difficult. The thinnest acts like gold leaf, sticking to his tweezers. The data shows a linear decline in thickness from 10μm at 5 minutes to 0 at 40 minutes, with a 35-minute sample being 2.2μm thick.
So he made some more samples; he tried to etch them for 32 minutes (before a citric-acid stop bath and water rinse) but they fell apart at 25 minutes.
In order to compensate for unknown temperature and agitation variations, he decided to measure the foil’s resistance during the etch process with a constant current. For #metrology, he amplifies the voltage drop across the foil with a differential-to-single-ended converter based on a LM833 dual op-amp #electronics, with an LM317 set up as a 100mA constant-current source, and a couple of relays set up to reverse the current direction through the foil to eliminate any offset errors, including from any unintended galvanic cells. Also he used an angle grinder to cut some blank PCB into a four-wire Kelvin probe so he’s only measuring the resistance of the foil itself, not the resistance of the copper leading down to the foil. The copper is painted black, presumably to protect it from the NaOH. And he’s using something like a Black Pill to record the data.
The 10μm foil is about 70mΩ (=7mV) at first, decreasing roughly linearly with less than 10nm of noise, enabling thinning the foil down to under a micron before it broke.
If you were doing this electrolytically, you could presumably stop the etch directly from the microcontroller with a transistor or even directly from a GPIO.
Then he repeats the etching with a large sample in the same bath with the thin foil strip whose resistance he’s measuring. And then he corrugates his foil ribbon microphone ribbons before etching them to thin them, which answers a burning question I had, and then he recorded the video with the resulting microphone!
An amusing editing trick is that he recorded himself erasing a whiteboard drawing line by line with his finger, then played the video backwards with a voiceover to make it look like he’s drawing with his finger.
on 02026-08-11metal oxide semiconductor (#MOX) gas #sensors #electronics #hardware #tutorial
on 02026-08-11#Video of building some basic circuits with the Radio Shack 200-in-1 #electronics kit, hacking around a bit with Morse code
on 02026-08-10#video of #manufacturing a small PCB transformer for #electronics
on 02026-08-10#video #toread about Gunn diodes #electronics #hardware
on 02026-08-07#video #toread about Esaki diodes #electronics #hardware
on 02026-08-07#video #toread about how magnetrons work. The dude has also made videos about Esaki and Gunn diodes. #electronics #hardware #radio
on 02026-08-07Home page for pcb (#PCB-program) which is no longer actively developed, but was an alternative to KiCad and EAGLE for designing #PCBs for #electronics #hardware.
#EAGLE #manual #PDF for designing #PCBs for #electronics #hardware.
on 02026-08-06#Blondihacks re-explains her approach to etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware more recently (02012 instead of 02011). She recommends using pre-sensitized PCBs from Jameco.
on 02026-08-06#Blondihacks explains her approach to etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware with Stephen Hobley’s recipe with vinegar and peroxide. #tutorial #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-08-06Stephen Hobley’s recipe for etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware with 3% H₂O₂, 5%-acidity white vinegar from Meijer, and some salt; this might form peracetic acid #materials. #bootstrapping
on 02026-08-06#Autodesk announcement about pulling #EAGLE for #electronics PCB design, urging users to migrate to a Autodesk Fusion subscription
on 02026-08-06#video on “most cursed flyback driver ever” #electronics #toread
on 02026-07-21#ebook of a dissertation on some experiments on diodes, showing that in 01959 Fairchild had silicon diode manufacturing sort of working. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-06-26RCA’s transistor and diode catalog from 01957. #electronics #hardware #history #ebook
on 02026-06-26#PDF from Guttag’s VCF talk about the TMS9918 and the invention of sprites, with schematics of “ratioless” dynamic NMOS gates, which used a #four-phase set of clocks similar to but different from the scheme used by Four-Phase Systems. Includes a scan of Guttag’s firebreathing memo to Wally Rhines about the problems. #electronics #history
on 02026-06-25More about how #TI’s delays in introducing the TMS9940, and increases in price from the initially promised US$38, led Bang & Olufsen to abandon it for the Intel 8048 in late 01977 for their Beocenter 7000. #electronics #history
on 02026-06-25#PDF scan of an 01980 ad for #TI’s TMS9900 CPU family, touting it as “TI’s 16-bit 9900 Family. For price. For performance.” Not. From the January 01980 IEEE Spectrum. Also has an ad for the Bellmac MAC-4, touting “its assembler language, C, also developed at Bell Labs.” #history #humor #electronics
on 02026-06-25this guy built an #ECL flip-flop on some copper-clad board with some 2N3904s (well, MMBT3904s). It only hit 40MHz; I wonder why he didn’t use like some 2SC3356es or something? #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-25#video #toread about #CH32V003 #microcontrollers. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-22#GateMate #FPGA #electronics #hardware #PDF #datasheet
on 02026-06-22Hannah Ravensloft’s #PDF schematics of the #GateMate #FPGA #hardware design. #electronics
on 02026-06-22new #LiDAR #electronics #hardware sensor
on 02026-06-22"GateMate", a new (well, since 02020) #FPGA that supports #Yosys etc., made in 28nm at GlobalFoundries Dresden. They’re using 2-LUTs but have a 2×2-bit multiplier in each 8-input logic block. #hardware #electronics
on 02026-06-22#video on Anisha Patel’s #TENS #neurostimulation #electronics #hardware for muscle stimulation. No explanation.
on 02026-06-14#video on the "ElectroHelix" #TENS #neurostimulation #electronics #hardware for play parties from e-stim.co.uk. It uses 2mm pin connectors on the ends for medical sticky-pad electrodes. Their knobs (“level”, “feel”, “speed”) are not calibrated at all. 84000 views! #sex
on 02026-06-14Dmitry Grinberg designed an SBC with an #STM32 (STM32G030) that can run Linux at an interactively usable speed with just three 8-pin chips: the μC, an SPI PSRAM, and a USB-to-serial chip. Also some resistors and caps. #hardware #electronics #microcontrollers
on 02026-06-12#Tom-Jennings on why the TIP120 is obsolete #electronics #hardware and more generally on how you should use newer parts and not a 2N2222 or LM386
on 02026-06-07#paper #toread about snubber #electronics #hardware design for PWM inverters
on 02026-06-04#n2’s #opamp oscillator shootout. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-03Emily #Velasco on #Mastodon firing clay into #ceramics for printed-circuit-board #electronics, successfully building an astable-multivibrator circuit. #DIY #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-06-03#CNLohr’s program #dyngraph using #rawdraw for visualizing real-time waveforms reported by #microcontrollers. #electronics
on 02026-06-02#CNLohr has new #CH32V006 porn on his channel, featuring its supposedly 1.7Msps ADC in a TDR use case. Apparently its DMA can schedule future I/Os, apparently even to memory-mapped I/O addresses, and you can control the timing of ADC samples to within a single 48MHz CPU clock cycle, although you can’t sample at 48Msps. The ADC is astonishingly clear, especially when he uses an external quartz crystal to get more precise sample times; the code works on the #CH32V003 ADC but has worse precision, but the ’006 has a problem lacking on the ’003 — a discontinuity in the count at multiples of 512 (large DNL?). Oh and apparently UIAPduino SBCs powered by a CH32V006 are available for ¥290 in Tokyo vending machines? Which also sell Raspberry Pi Pico 2s for ¥1060‽ And, holy shit, he can actually very clearly visualize the reflections back and forth from a roll of coax cable with the opposite end open-circuited. He plots it with debug printfs and his "dyngraph" program. #video #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02026-06-02“With a 40 megohm resistor the sensor will start to respond 12-24 inches away (dependent on the foil size). Common resistor sizes usually end at 10 megohm so you may have to solder four 10 megohm resistors end to end.” #electronics #touch #Arduino #hardware #sensors
on 02026-05-30#EEVblog #electronics #video #toread about bypass capacitors (overview)
on 02026-05-29#EEVblog #electronics #video #toread about bypass capacitors and whether you can remove them
on 02026-05-29#EEVblog #electronics #video from 8 years ago visualizing the effects of bypass capacitors, including 1GHz low-inductance oscilloscope probing and making transmission lines out of copper tape. Some aspects of this video feel like they're from 30 years ago. 5-volt logic, film bypass capacitors, through-hole components. Finally at 17'27" he solders in a 2.2nF 1206 bypass cap, which does a great job. He’s using a 1MHz quartz crystal oscillator (5 divisions per cycle at 200ns per division) with an HCMOS line driver built in; a lot of the ground-bounce action is like 240MHz (4.8 cycles of ringing in 5 divisions at 4ns/div at 11'26", for example.) He gets the high-frequency return paths wrong, though.
on 02026-05-29“The resulting [barium titanate (BTO)] parts are polarized using a poling field of 10 kV/cm, a poling time of 50 min, and a poling temperature of 60 °C, which yields a piezoelectric device with a high #piezoelectric constant of 211 pC/N.” #manufacturing #paper #toread #electronics
on 02026-05-27National Semiconductor LM0901A1411090451C Polish operational amplifier #datasheet #PDF #electronics #humor
on 02026-05-27#history of #Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory #electronics #humor
on 02026-05-27#PDF #datasheet of #Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory #electronics #humor
on 02026-05-27#CHM #PDF of oral #history #interview with Napoleone Cavlan and Ronald Cline about the #Signetics field programmable logic family. #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-05-27#Signetics brought out the 82S100 (later PLS100) programmable logic array in 01975. Decapped die photos. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-05-27#PDF of the #datasheet for #Signetics’s 82S100 and 82S101 fuse-programmable logic array. Looks like a PLD: and/or/invert matrix with 16 inputs, 48 product terms, and 8 outputs. This version of the dadashit is from 01987 with parts from 01990, but I think the chip is from the 01970s. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-05-27actually #Signetics also brought out an unrelated microprocessor in 01975. #history #retrocomputing #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-27#Signetics brought out a microprocessor in 01976. #history #retrocomputing #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-27#video on #speech-synthesis from an 8-pin #CH32V003, driving a speaker through a transistor, using 2-bit ADPCM and the Talkie #LPC speech synthesis library. #electronics #microcontrollers #hardware
on 02026-05-24#video on using LEDs as light sensors with the #CH32V003 opamp for visible-light over-the-air updates for his badge. #electronics #hardware #communications
on 02026-05-24#EEVblog #video on #CH32V003 #microcontrollers, documenting his half-hour to get the thing up and running, in January 02023, when it only cost 10¢. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-24#electronics #video #toread about an Uher 4000 Report Monitor repair
on 02026-05-22#Aisler #pricing for #electronics #manufacturing is a €14.00 job fee plus €0.13 per cm² (times the number of boards, MOQ 3) for “4 Layer 1.6mm ENIG Budget”. So three 100mm × 100mm boards would be €53. 2 Layer 1.6mm HASL Budget is the cheapest, €12.00 + €0.067 per cm². But that’s just for the PCBs; they offer assembly services but don’t publish any pricing information.
on 02026-05-20"Aisler" is a German (and Dutch?) equivalent to JLCPCB or PCBWay, doing #PCBA, one of the ones available from Kitspace. #electronics #manufacturing
on 02026-05-20apparently #Flea86 is Valentin Angelovski; fleasystems.com redirects here now. #electronics
on 02026-05-20#Hands-on-Katie #video: #electronics workshop in one meter. #toread
on 02026-05-17#PDF datasheet for IRF IRLB3034 MOSFET #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-17#JSK-koubou #video of #jugaad spot welder #electronics using a 555, a bunch of IRLB3034 MOSFETs, some copper cables, and an old car battery (#hoarding). Someone should tell him about transformers, though, and about MOSFET TO-220 tab electrodes. And I don’t agree that burning the wooden backing board at 10ms means that too much heat went into the 200μm nickel strips he’s trying to spot-weld together. He’s still able to peel the "weld" apart with pliers, which to me means that he got inadequate penetration. He has an ingenious and amusing solder-free zip-tie technique to connect the electrodes.
on 02026-05-17#Dmitry Grinberg reverse-engineered the Fisher-Price Pixter and found that its game cartridges were full of code for a Forth-like 16-bit stack machine. Apparently the Pixter Color he started with was an ARM, but the Pixter Classic was a 6502, probably from the Chinese 6502 vendor Sunplus/Generalplus. “Fair, there are some old cores commonly used today in cheap places, like the i-wish-it-would-already-die-but-it-will-outlive-me shitshow that is the 8051, but this is the first I’ve seen of a modern tapeout of a 6502.” This writeup also has a good explanation of how resistive touchscreen #hardware works. #microcontrollers #electronics #reverse-engineering #archival
on 02026-05-14#PDF #datasheet for TI’s obsolete 7404 TTL inverter #hardware. #electronics #history
on 02026-05-11Bonnie Baker explains how to get op-amp #electronics #hardware to produce a much wider output voltage range than normal by “bootstrapping” their power rails with a couple of MOSFETs.
on 02026-05-10#PDF #ebook scan of TI’s 01976 TTL databook showing the various TTL NAND and NOT circuits. #electronics
on 02026-05-10"Ringdove" is “a free/open source Electronic Design Automation suite that offers a schematics editor, a PCB editor , a gerber/excellon viewer; modular, toolkit approach with stand-alone tools; fits well in a UNIXy workflow; supports CLI and server applications” of which pcb-rnd is a part. #electronics
on 02026-05-01#PDF full manual #documentation for the #PCB-program for #electronics design
on 02026-05-01#PDF refcard #documentation for the #PCB-program for #electronics design
on 02026-05-01#SPICE model of #LM324 #opamp #hardware. #electronics
on 02026-05-01using gSchem from #gEDA and the #PCB-program to design PCBs in 01999, with photos. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-01#tutorial #documentation for “PCB”. For #electronics design there’s a 43-year-old package called “PCB” which includes a pcb program for PCB layout. #PCB-program
#PDF #appnote from #TI on the quirks of the #LM324 #opamp #hardware. #electronics
on 02026-04-29A site that purportedly compares the #pricing of PCB #manufacturing services from 17 contract manufacturers: AISLER, AIVON, ALLPCB, Bittele (7pcb), Elecrow, Eurocircuits, JLCPCB (EasyEDA), Lion Circuits, NextPCB, OSH Park, PCBCART, PCBgogo, PCBJOINT, PCBWay, ShenZhen2U, Smart Prototyping, U&I (quickturnpcb). 9 of these (AISLER, ALLPCB, Bittele (7pcb), Elecrow, NextPCB, PCBCART, PCBgogo, PCBWay, ShenZhen2U) do assembly too. #electronics
on 02026-04-29#cpldcpu decapped CH32V203 #hardware and found a separate NOR flash die in the package with the #microcontrollers. #reverse-engineering #electronics #toread
on 02026-04-29#cpldcpu got 99.5% MNIST accuracy with variable quantization and depthwise separable convolution on a CH32V002, a newer, smaller #RISC-V #CH32V003 with multiplier #hardware. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware #neural-networks #toread
on 02026-04-29By #cpldcpu. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a deep dive into the #WS2812 addressable LED #electronics #hardware before. The key finding is that the Lite-On LTST-G563 doesn’t do any signal regeneration and will thus work very poorly in long strings.
on 02026-04-29Dave Tweed’s index of all the issues of #Circuit-Cellar Ink up to 02010. But all the links go to an FTP site that’s down now and has been “excluded from the Wayback Machine”. #electronics
on 02026-04-28#EEVblog #video on using x10 oscilloscope probes containing piezoelectric capacitor #electronics as acoustic vibration sensors
on 02026-04-27Robert Baruch announced his #Project-54-74 #electronics #reverse-engineering project on the EEVblog forums.
on 02026-04-27@synx508@bsd.network (Philip Bragg) on #Mastodon. #electronics
on 02026-04-27Rob Baruch’s Project 54/74 was a #reverse-engineering project to analyze all the 7400 series (and 5400 series) ICs from die photos of decapped chips. Robert C. Baruch, according to his Gmail address. I wonder what happened? #history #electronics #hardware #Project-54-74
on 02026-04-27SMD resistor code calculator, e.g., 2212 is 22.1kΩ. #electronics
on 02026-04-26#USB cheat sheet, with signaling rates, connector pinouts, marketing names, etc. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-25An interesting #op-amp #electronics design, using the op-amp’s limitations to get a variable low-pass filter with no external capacitors or nonlinearity. 10k from Vin to inverting input, 100k from output to inverting input, grounded noninverting input, and a series combination from ground of a 100-ohm resistor and a 10k pot. Purportedly the pot changes the bandwidth but not the gain, which sounds plausible to me but isn’t obvious.
on 02026-04-24#RueMohr wrote some kind of JS app this week for annotating a raster image for something wire-related? #electronics
on 02026-04-24#tutorial on “MOSFET Output Solid State Relays” #electronics
on 02026-04-24a vacuum tube headphone amp design popular with hobbyists by Rogers Gomez, using a power MOSFET source follower and an LM317 current source as a second-stage power amplifier, kind of wanky. Nice page though. #electronics
on 02026-04-23another #electronics #synth site, this one belonging to a dead guy
on 02026-04-23some old #audio #synth #electronics design #toread
on 02026-04-23#image of #dead-bug technique with an STM32L053 BGA stuck to some perfboard. #soldering #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-23brass, solder-plated turret pins to solder to or clip your test clips to: “In this picture four electrolytic capacitors use the pins as mounting posts. The leads will be wrapped around the posts and then soldered. This provides a superior mounting for the capacitors with minimal bending of the leads coming from the caps. The alternate method used these days is to bend the leads and stick them thru the PCB, #soldering to the copper tracks. This method is a source of problems as solder has no strength in itself and the caps are heavy, meaning that vibration from use or moving the equipment often creates hairline cracks in the solder joint resulting in electrical faults. (...) Once upon a time this method was very common in electronics equipment and will still be found in high end gear designed to last.” #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-23Ferrite pot cores for #electronics #hardware.
on 02026-04-22The amorphous Panasonic solar cells that guy used for his pocket nuclear power plant cost US$2.4075 in quantity 40. #electronics #pricing
on 02026-04-20#electronics #PDF: “ECEN689: Special Topics in Optical Interconnects Circuits and Systems: Lecture 5: Transimpedance Amplifiers (TIAs)” with lots of rather astounding circuits
on 02026-04-16#PDF of #Epson real-time clock #electronics module RX8804CE #datasheet. 3.4ppm and 5.0ppm precision grades, with a “digitally temperature compensated crystal oscillator” (#DTCXO). #metrology #hardware. I²C. They’re like US$8 on Digi-Key.
on 02026-04-16IP65-rated card-sized (85 × 65 × 6.5mm, 32g) #Meshtastic #LoRa node #hardware for #RFID tracking with #GPS over kilometers, “SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E”. #Pricing of US$39.90. Rechargeable 700mAh battery. Uses “global ISM bands in the 863-928 MHz range”. #electronics #radio #communications
on 02026-04-16new LCR #metrology #hardware with Kelvin clips for measuring parasitics on components for US$48: “FNIRSI® LCR-ST2 100K LCR ESR Meter 2-in-1 Digital Tweezers Bridge” #electronics
on 02026-04-13#Starlink has a US$5/month “standby mode” plan: “Standby Mode debuted in August and is Starlink’s cheapest monthly plan, giving customers an affordable, albeit slow, way to use the satellite internet service. Speeds are capped at 500Kbps, but data is unlimited.” But you can no longer use it while in motion: “Starlink Disabled while moving”. The v2 antenna uses 35 watts, according to tpbsd on ##electronics. You can use it with the "mini dish", which the company has been loaning out for free but which costs US$600 if you buy it.
on 02026-04-13#Mecrisp puppeting #MSP430 #microcontrollers over #JTAG to test your #Forth with access to peripherals without installing Forth on them, then cross-compiling and installing firmware on it that doesn't include the interactive Forth REPL. #hardware #electronics
on 02026-04-12#Mecrisp Stellaris #Forth apparently has pretty good support for #STM32 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-12#video of pick-and-place #electronics #manufacturing machine depositing solder paste #toread
on 02026-04-12more about poling #piezoelectric ceramics in #electronics #manufacturing, this time from COMSOL, which is maybe a more disinterested source. But, unlike the American Piezo piece, it doesn’t actually explain what you do to pole them.
on 02026-04-10how #piezoelectric ceramics are “poled” in #electronics #manufacturing. “The poling process itself involves applying a high DC electric field to the components for a specific length of time while the part is held at a given temperature. Typical DC voltages are on the order of 2000 volts per mm of component thickness. The effect of elevated temperature, usually resulting from performing the poling process in a heated dielectric fluid bath, is to make it easier to “switch or align” the domains.”
on 02026-04-10secondary emission can give #vacuum-tubes negative resistance, so Albert Hull designed an oscillator using them called the "dynatron" in 01918. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-04-10“An attempt to recreate the #RP2040 PIO in an #FPGA” gateware similar to the #RP2350 #electronics #hardware. Bunnie recommends using it to debug your PIO code with Verilator.
on 02026-04-09You can preorder Dabao #Baochip evaluation boards for US$10. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-09#Bunnie helped design “the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC”, with an improved version of the #RP2350’s PIO peripheral. Instead of a special-purpose instruction set like PIO, you have BIO, four of Claire Xenia Wolf’s PicoRV32 #RISC-V processors each with 4KiB of RAM, running at 700MHz, modified with a trick from his PhD thesis ADAM to map the non-RV32E registers to FIFOs; also they can DMA to and from the main CPU’s RAM. But it’s slower than PIO, can’t bitbang DVI. #Baochip #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-04-09“It is a custom PCB designed to drop directly into the Z80 DIP-40 CPU socket of any legacy Z80-based computer. Rather than using a discrete #Z80 processor, the board hosts an RP2350B microcontroller — a dual-core 150MHz Cortex-M33 device capable of running at up to 300MHz — whose programmable I/O (PIO) state machines take full, cycle-accurate control of the Z80 address, data, and control buses.” Basically an ICE with Wi-Fi. #RP2350 #electronics #hardware #retrocomputing
on 02026-04-09#hardware #electronics explanation of “process corners”.
on 02026-04-09"Process corners" for integrated-circuit #electronics design and #manufacturing
on 02026-04-06Direct current microgrid standards, but only if you give them your personal information. #energy #futurism #electronics
on 02026-04-04notes on #low-power #electronics design (powered by #NFC)
on 02026-04-04#PDF manual for 40-year-old 15.4-kilowatt motor control servo from Indramat using thyristor #electronics #hardware rather than, as we would today, IGBTs or power MOSFETs.
on 02026-03-19#DesignCon 2026 expo exhibitors at Santa Clara Convention Center; the expo is tomorrow and Thursday, 11 AM to 6 PM. #tourism #electronics
on 02026-02-24#video on capacitor #electronics #hardware choice by #MrCarlson’s Lab #toread
on 02026-02-16#video on making #precision #actuators from cheap stepper #motors instead of US$1 hobby servos to position an array of mirrors to paint light on a wall. Actually he just bought 40¢ stepper-based linear actuators off AliExpress, apparently leftover parts from obsolete cellphones, which turned out to move about 3.2μm per step; he reflow-soldered their flat-flex cables onto custom breakout boards with solder paste and a heat gun. Lacking closed-loop control, he homes the actuators by overdriving them in one direction plus about 200 steps, which stalls the motor but not for long enough to damage it. #hardware #electronics
on 02026-01-13middle school drama with #Sparkfun and #Adafruit means Adafruit is going to design new "Freensy" hardware as a #Teensy replacement based on #RP2350 #electronics #hardware
on 02026-01-09#EEVblog #video reviewing an Alientek DM40C multimeter with trend chart and a 50MHz oscilloscope and stuff. It looks fucking amazing. #electronics #toread
on 02025-12-21#Great-Scott #video on soft-start #electronics design to eliminate inrush current spikes. He rigs up an impressive alumina-bodied-resistor current shunt of 200mΩ and 50W, which should be good up to 15 amps continuous duty. He finds a 10Ω green disc “ZNR1” NTC thermistor labeled “SCK 103” used in another power supply to solve this problem; it drops from 10Ω down to some 297mΩ when it warms up. But to solve the NTC thermistor cooldown problem he rigs up a relay circuit which shorts out a 3.3Ω series resistor when its IRFZ44N coil MOSFET is triggered by an RC time delay (τ = 50kΩ·10μF = 500ms). That might potentially have the same problem if the inrush-current capacitor’s discharge has a shorter time constant than the delay capacitor, but that seems unlikely.
on 02025-12-17#video #toread by Tim Hunkin on the Secret Life of the #Radio. #electronics #communications
on 02025-12-12public-domain #video from 01944 explaining FM #radio with a simple tank-circuit transmitter (Hartley oscillator?) with a capacitive microphone in parallel with the tuning cap. His example is 40MHz with a ±40kHz max deviation (80kHz swing), which he says is the Army’s maximum deviation, plus a 10kHz guard band on each size. But in reality they used “reactance tubes” and phase modulation rather than capacitive mics for their transmitters. He says the key difference for an FM receiver is amplitude limiting (a “limiter”), plus of course FM demodulation itself, with a “discriminator”. The limiter is a vacuum-tube device that might have a transistor analogue. The discriminator is a tank, a diode, and a (bypassed) load resistor, tuned so that the “rest frequency” is at the steepest part of the tank’s Gaussian response, so basically you’re just turning FM back into AM and demodulating the AM. #electronics #history #radio #RF #communications
on 02025-12-12#video explaining that dipped ceramic disc caps with a black paint hat on the tip are NP0/C0G #precision caps. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-12-09“RAM prices have skyrocketed globally in 2025, with industry officials pointing to explosive demand from AI data centers as the primary cause. Mainstream DDR5 memory modules now cost at least twice what they did in mid-2025, and overall #DRAM contract prices were a stunning 171.8% higher in the third quarter of 2025 compared to a year prior.” #electronics #hardware #pricing #news #toread
on 02025-11-26#MIT #OCW #lecture #video on introduction to power #electronics #toread
on 02025-11-25#lcamtuf on signal filtering in analog #electronics without the Laplace transform, starting from RC decay curves and moving on to RC high-pass and low-pass filters.
on 02025-11-25#EEVblog 1718 #video on high-speed probing of #electronics with #oscilloscope probes with a 1kΩ resistor soldered onto a BNC RG-174 cable as your probe tip (a so-called “Z0 probe”), thus putting 1kΩ between your circuit and the cable’s capacitance, with hopefully a much lower parasitic capacitance than a normal o-scope probe, maybe 1pF instead of 13pF. But your DC input impedance is still only 1kΩ rather than 1MΩ or 10MΩ, so you can, for example, load down tri-stated buses much more. And you need a 50Ω termination for your scope cable. But they tolerate longer ground leads than an active FET probe.
on 02025-11-24dvhx (Dušan Halický) wrote an ngspicejs script to search for single-transistor LC oscillator #electronics designs with #SPICE #simulation.
on 02025-11-21Pauli Ratakorpi is taking die shots of #electronics #hardware
on 02025-11-11using #CH32V003 #microcontrollers for debugging connections to #ARM #electronics #hardware (alternative to ST-Link or J-Link) obtained by #hoarding disposable vapes. The protocol is CoreSight DAP (Debug Access Probe) over SWD, also implemented by CMSIS-DAP, DAPLink, or free-dap.
on 02025-11-11#manufacturing front panels for #electronics with “water slide paper” and other options
on 02025-11-11#video on #electronics #hardware for solid-state relays, such as the MOC3020–MOC3023 100mA triac-output optocoupler chips. #toread
on 02025-11-11#Thisismax #video on sensorless #FOC #control of #hardware #motors, using the most hilarious Nerf launcher I’ve ever seen, using three Kv = 2200 drone motors (minimum 10krpm) as rollers to launch the balls in a curved trajectory by controlling their spin. He wanted to use STMicroelectronics’s “#STM32 MC Motor Profiler”, but that would have required using Microsoft Windows, so he used the Arduino #SimpleFOC library instead. He gets motor position feedback from the back EMF of the motor windings (I’m not sure if this is inherent to “FOC”). He says most small drone motors are Y-topology. #electronics
on 02025-11-11The #EU is banning non-removable batteries for most consumer #electronics. #politics
on 02025-11-11The #Nintendo Ricoh 2A03 #electronics #hardware had a “delta modulation channel” for #audio sound effects using an up/down counter.
on 02025-11-11total unadjusted error in ADC #electronics #hardware
on 02025-11-11#electronics #hardware #video putting a disc ceramic capacitor across a junction diode to reduce problems with reverse recovery time, specifically 60-cycle power supply noise in your audio amplifier
on 02025-11-10#speech on #CH32V003 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware using #Talkie
on 02025-11-05"Talkie" is an #LPC #speech library for #Arduino #electronics #hardware
on 02025-11-05state of embedded #Linux #electronics #hardware
on 02025-11-05Elektor on #pioasm #bitbanging 100-megabit #Ethernet #electronics #hardware on the RP2350
on 02025-11-05discussion of #pioasm #bitbanging 100-megabit #Ethernet #electronics #hardware on the RP2350
on 02025-11-05High-speed data acquisition over #HDMI #electronics #hardware #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-11-05#DIY #vacuum tube #video for #bootstrapping #electronics #toread
on 02025-10-21#video #toread of “10¢” #electronics #hardware for making #music with #CH32V003 #microcontrollers
on 02025-10-21growing diamond on #electronics #hardware to spread heat more evenly. #toread
on 02025-10-21a newish #video #toread by Eirik Brandal about #free-form #electronics sculpture
on 02025-10-20#circuit-sculpture lamp made with LED filaments replacing the metal filaments in glass fuses. #toread #electronics #video
on 02025-10-18#video about controlling #motors with #FOC (field-oriented control) and using them as dials. Using SimpleFOCproject to do PWM microstepping of #brushless motors to get smooth motion down to zero velocity? Also steppers. The BLDCMotor constructor argument is the number of pole pairs, which he got wrong at first. But he’s cheating by using an AS5600 I²C magnetic encoder! This has the very interesting #UX idea of simulating mechanical detents by using the motor for haptic feedback on a knob. #electronics
on 02025-10-17#video #toread about a remote benchtop setup (??!) for #electronics
on 02025-10-15#bigclive #video on putting a 1N5187 Schottky diode in series with a TP4056 lithium-cell charger to keep it from charging the battery all the way to 4.2V, potentially significantly extending the battery’s lifetime. The diode drops 350mV at 250mA, over 400mV at 500mA, and 330mV at 110mA. The charger starts oscillating toward the end of the charging process, and in the end the battery charges to 3.89V, which is supposedly 80% capacity. #batteries #electronics
on 02025-10-15Currently cheapest #microcontrollers #pricing on LCSC: PMS150G-U06 (a SOT-23-6) for 2.02¢ in quantity 3000. #Padauk has broken the 3¢ barrier! One-time programmable. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-14#video #toread about common-base amplifier design in #electronics #hardware for #RF #communications
on 02025-10-14"Shineworld" may be the actual manufacturer of #Osptek and #good-display’s #LCD #displays. #electronics #hardware #low-power
on 02025-10-13other #low-power #Osptek #LCD #displays: “2.9 inch IPS SPI Interface 8 color TFT Display”, YDP290H003-V3, 210×480, 31×71mm, 2.8V, 14.3μA, but this one has 8 colors! #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-13#Osptek (Osprey Technology of Taiwan, Yuying #LCD) is a different manufacturer of #low-power #electronics #displays #hardware; this one, model YDP420H003-V3, is 300×400 pixels, 64×85mm, 2.8V, 30μA. “4.2 inch IPS SPI Interface R/B/W Reflective TFT Display.”
on 02025-10-13#good-display #low-power #electronics #displays #hardware #pricing: US$6.89 for 384×168 and ≈80μW active-matrix monochrome reflective TFT from #good-display.com
on 02025-10-13320×240 95×75mm #memory-LCD for US$75.22. #low-power #displays #hardware #electronics #pricing
on 02025-10-13#memory-LCD #low-power #displays #hardware, with a very nice faceted database query thing: the left margin is an accordion with a section for each field and a checkbox for each value of that field, while the main display area has a card with name-value pairs for each selected record. Apparently they currently have an “LS044Q7DH01” that’s 4.4" (95×75mm), 320×240 (“QVGA”), 100μW hold power, 600μW 1Hz update power. It costs US$75 at Digi-Key! #electronics
on 02025-10-13#EEVblog forum about the μTimer project, where he is going to use #low-power #LCD #displays from #good-display #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-13usage guidelines for #e-ink (“e-paper”) #electronics #hardware #displays: “• ePaper displays are suitable for update cycles ranging from tens of seconds to minutes. • Most black-and-white ePaper screens have a fast refresh rate of 1.5-2.5 seconds.” #good-display
on 02025-10-12#EEVblog #video about #low-power #LCD #displays (like 14.3μA at 3.3V, up to 25μA during updates, 2.9" diagonal and 384×168) and why he prefers them to #e-ink: e-ink takes tens or hundreds of milliamps for a second or two to update. And service life is only 5 years or 10 million switches. He’s going to try the nice high-resolution ST7305-based #good-display.com (Dalian Good Display Co., Ltd.) reflective active matrix TFT LCD, even though the MOQ is 1000, because they sent him a demo board. It’s a nice high-contrast black and white and a very wide viewing angle despite (I think?) not being #memory-LCD. @mikeselectricstuff says the ST7305 datasheet says it supports up to 30Mbps over SPI. @afreestone101 says that if you peel the polarizer layer off the memory LCDs, the black color becomes mirror shiny. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-12#PDF #documentation about the new 102.4Tbps #Broadcom #networking switch (2 page product brief, not a datasheet) #electronics #hardware
on 02025-10-09102.4 terabit per second (51.2 in, 51.2 out) 64-port optical (infrared) network switch with a “324B streaming frame size (SFS)” which I think means it can forward 16.7 billion frames per second #hardware #electronics #networking
on 02025-10-08#Bluepill #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware diagnostic guide for use with #Mecrisp #Forth.
on 02025-09-30Press release about Thierry Besson’s "Wildebeest" FPGA HDL synthesis tool for designing #electronics #hardware, released under an Apache 2.0 license. “Zero ASIC, a U.S. semiconductor startup on a mission to democratize silicon, today announced the release of WildebeestTM, the world’s highest performance FPGA synthesis tool.”
on 02025-09-29“Webinar - Analog schematic capture & simulation with Stefan Schippers”, who wrote Xschem. #Efabless #Tiny-tapeout #video #toread #electronics
on 02025-09-29#Marco-Reps #metrology #precision #toread #electronics video on an 0.1-ppb-resolution Guildline Model 9930 direct-current resistance comparator from the 01960s, specifically November 24, 01969, according to the light-beam galvanometer inspection card. At 2'21" there’s a very alarming CERN slide, “The availability of magnetic materials has been declining over the years.
As of 2024 the assembly can be produced, but there is no replacement yet for the obsolete radial shield material (Nanophylm).” #collapse
The key here is that numbers of transformer windings “don’t have temperature coefficients or long-term drifts”, so they’re accurately ratiometric in a way that’s stable until and unless you bend the wire.
Guildline gave him the service manual, SM9930-H-00.
Internally it has an ovenized Weston cell in a test tube, which is used with a second light-beam galvanometer for feedback control of a 50mA current through a critical precision resistor, which is wire wound around a several-kilogram cylinder of brass; the soldered connections to the manganin (?) wires are stuck into a hole deep inside the brass to reduce possible thermal EMFs.
The nanovolt amplifier is a pair of antiparallel photocells powered by a lightbulb whose light is deflected by a third mirror galvanometer, this one 3.6kΩ.
on 02025-09-28#bigclive #video explaining those little electromagnet-powered “perpetual motion” desk toys, showing the circuit consisting of a single npn transistor and the electromagnet, which is actually sort of an autotransformer. A high-resistance winding feeds some current from the emitter into the base, and then a low-resistance winding runs from the base to ground, while the collector is held at 6V. As he explains it, the approaching magnetic target starts switching the transistor into conduction, and then the transistor turns itself the rest of the way on? But then at some point the current stops rising, so the magnetic field stops rising, so the current into the base stops, and the transistor turns off, and the falling current snaps it even more thoroughly off. He reports that it still works if you add a flyback diode across the low-resistance winding, which is what you would normally want to do, but they don’t bother; I assume that drives the emitter-base junction into backwards (zener or avalanche) conduction during turnoff, and I don’t know what effect that has on the voltage. One of them has a duodecahedron I don’t recognize at its center, consisting of quadrilaterals that aren’t rhombuses; maybe it’s a distorted rhombic dodecahedron. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-09-18Cromemco used a 1-kilobit DRAM chip for their first digital camera sensor! #electronics #hardware #history #jugaad
on 02025-09-1525' #video #toread on how to use the NanoVNA vector network analyzer #electronics
on 02025-09-066' #video about an analog #electronics circuit for adding a dc bias to an (amplified) ac voltage using an opamp for a “validation engineer” test. The circuit was actually designed to power an op-amp with controlled ripple on its power supply to test its PSRR. He keeps using Laplace transforms without comment, I guess I need to level up!
on 02025-09-06#video #toread by #Bitluni on how he built a miniature data cassette tape drive #electronics
on 02025-09-03#video explaining oscilloscope probe compensation for #electronics with the Laplace transform. #hardware
on 02025-09-03#video on #Jupyter #simulation of #electronics with #LTSpice. He’s using a library called spice_invoker and using some canned functions that invoke maybe matplotlib to plot the characteristics curves of various hypothetical transistors. #hardware
TI technical article (#appnote, more or less) on #CANbus #electronics with a very short introduction
on 02025-09-02“What’s all this Teflon stuff, anyhow?” Bob #Pease’s war story from 01991 about picoamp bias current testing of #opamps back in the 70s. #electronics #history #precision #metrology
on 02025-09-02#PS2 keyboard #pinouts and protocol for #electronics.
on 02025-09-02#PS2 keyboard library for #Arduino #electronics
on 02025-09-02Digi-Key has 3402 of the SN74AUC2G53DCTR #74AUC2G53 analog switch IC in stock for 43.2¢. #electronics #pricing #hardware
on 02025-09-02#Polyimide #materials like Kapton as high-temperature capacitor dielectrics. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-09-02"CAM8" was #Norman-Margolus’s #cellular-automata #hardware from 01995. #electronics #history
on 02025-08-29#PDF #documentation for #HP "IBASIC", instrument #BASIC, to run on your 8712ET/ES or 8714ET/ES RF network analyzer. #electronics
on 02025-08-2760fps 6-bit/8-bit RAW QVGA (324×324) I²C camera #electronics for US$12
on 02025-08-26Apparently WDC had a 65C832 32-bit 6502 in the works, but never got it built, so Mike Kohn built one in an #FPGA from the datasheet. #electronics #Verilog
on 02025-08-25electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio
on 02025-08-24scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history
on 02025-08-24My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware
on 02025-08-24high #precision inclinometer #electronics that costs €32000
on 02025-08-12#video on pogo pins (50¢–100¢ each!) for programming a mass-production #electronics board without paying for a connector
on 02025-08-10#electronics #video by #Pocket-Concepts of an ATtiny45-based 2%-error ammeter board with an OLED display, showing how he fixed all the mistakes he made in the design, and how the I²C OLED display works. #hardware
on 02025-08-09#video on Nordic RF #communications #electronics that can feasibly run off some largish photodiodes used as solar cells. “Ultra low power energy harvester from BPW34. Super small and durable power supply for wireless nodes” on hackaday. Also “Solar-powered flashing LED heart pendant PCB coil” by bobricius in 02018. This guy, "Pocket Concepts", got 300mV out of his BPW34 photodiodes, and used it to transmit a temperature datum over #Bluetooth #BLE to his motherfucking phone. His #Nordic chip uses about 50μC of charge (over the 2.25V to 3.6V range) to run for the necessary 20ms, so he needed 37μF, which looks like maybe it’s a tantalum cap. It gets enough power from his fridge light to send a transmission every few seconds (so, say, 0.4% duty cycle, so he’s getting tens of microwatts). But a slightly larger amorphous cell is even better because it works even in a dimly lit room. #electronics #solar #photovoltaic #energy-harvesting
on 02025-08-09#video on Nordic RF #communications #electronics that can feasibly run off some largish photodiodes used as solar cells. “Ultra low power energy harvester from BPW34. Super small and durable power supply for wireless nodes” on hackaday. Also “Solar-powered flashing LED heart pendant PCB coil” by bobricius in 02018. This guy, "Pocket Concepts", got 300mV out of his BPW34 photodiodes, and used it to transmit a temperature datum over #Bluetooth #BLE to his motherfucking phone. His #Nordic chip uses about 50μC of charge (over the 2.25V to 3.6V range) to run for the necessary 20ms, so he needed 37μF, which looks like maybe it’s a tantalum cap. It gets enough power from his fridge light to send a transmission every few seconds (so, say, 0.4% duty cycle, so he’s getting tens of microwatts). But a slightly larger amorphous cell is even better because it works even in a dimly lit room. #electronics #solar #photovoltaic #energy-harvesting
on 02025-08-09Tim Hunkin gives a #video demonstration of how electrochemical fax machines using potassium ferricyanide worked. #history #electronics
on 02025-08-06#PDF #electronics spec of 4-wire PWM-controlled CPU fans from Intel
on 02025-08-05how to make #PWM #electronics signals without a microcontroller, using a 74AC14
on 02025-08-05#PDF of “Handbook of Operational Amplifier Applications” #electronics #opamps #toread
on 02025-08-04#PDF of “Op-Amps for Everyone” #electronics #opamps #toread
on 02025-08-04Philbrick’s “Applications Manual for Computing Amplifiers, for Modelling, Measuring, Manipulating, & Much Else” full of #opamp #electronics circuit designs. #PDF
on 02025-08-04Tips for creating a #FPGA ULPI #USB interface. #electronics #toread
on 02025-08-03review of a USB microscope for #electronics
on 02025-08-03oh apparently #LCD polarizers are made of #acetate and so they can get #vinegar-syndrome! So this Acer K385s from 01992 needed #repair. #archival #electronics #retrocomputing
on 02025-08-03#retrocomputing how the #Apple 1 shift-register video circuit #electronics worked
on 02025-08-03#pinouts of #PS2 ports, parallel ports, etc., #electronics #hardware, but focused on #USB C PD
on 02025-07-30transistors in #electronics can decay; certain models are known for this, like 2SA706, 2SA720, 2SA725, 2SA726, 2SA798, 2SA809, 2SC458, 2SC631, 2SC632, 2SC693G, 2SC871, 2SC1000, 2SC1124, 2SC1312, 2SC1313, 2SC1318, 2SC1344, 2SC1345, 2SC1400, and 2SC1451. (forum thread) #toread
on 02025-07-20Oscar #Toledo explains that he’s using 74LS00 #TTL #electronics #hardware in his latest #Transputer board design instead of CMOS because his local electronics parts stores stock it
on 02025-07-20a 50¢ 16-line I²C GPIO expander chip #electronics #hardware
on 02025-07-20Andrew #Zonenberg’s #reverse-engineering of errata in the VSC8512 SERDES from Microchip. #electronics #toread
on 02025-07-20using #Padauk PMS150C #microcontrollers to handle reset sequencing for Ethernet #electronics
on 02025-06-21getting 90.07% on downscaled MNIST on #Padauk PMS150C #microcontrollers, using 1696 2-bit weights decoded to {-2, -1, 1, 2}. #electronics #neural-networks
on 02025-06-21The open-source hardware programmer for #Padauk chips, with links to order from PCBWay and Aisler. Hosted on "Kitspace": “Kitspace is a place to share ready-to-order #electronics designs. We automate parts purchasing so you can focus on building.” For sharing open-source hardware I guess. But I think they might just be scraping GitHub? #manufacturing #PCBA
on 02025-06-21PCBShopper lets you compare #pricing from 16 PCB houses on one page. #hardware #electronics #manufacturing
on 02025-06-21#video #toread on Eirik Brandal’s wall-hanging #electronics sculpture "várhafsóll". Not quite #free-form electronics, because it’s all built on a transparent acrylic base, but does have lots of point-to-point wiring with brass rods. At one point you can see he’s soldering diodes to some pins of a CD4051. #circuit-sculpture
on 02025-06-17#video on #manufacturing #electronics without PCBs, using point-to-point wiring with thick copper wires in free air. Peter Vogel’s “#Free-form electronics”. An annoying amount of talking-head filler. Mentions Vbugs and other #BEAM-robots and shows Eirik Brandal’s audio and kinetic sculpture work and MohitBhoite’s work. He’s using 800μm brass rod mostly and 1500μm brass tubing. He likes to build his circuits on a piece of graph paper glued to a board rather than up in the air, sometimes holding things in place with modeling clay, or rather Blu-Tack. At one point he adds a structural small-value capacitor between some unrelated brass-rod nets to increase rigidity. Unfortunately he made the time for the talking-head filler at the beginning of the video by omitting most of the circuit build from the end. #circuit-sculpture
on 02025-06-17LP2178 three-terminal buck converter chip for direct conversion from rectified line voltage! No pricing given. #electronics
on 02025-05-28#electronics distributor in #India.
on 02025-05-28#EEVblog #video #toread on constant-current sources. #electronics
on 02025-05-28#PDF #datasheet for Analog Devices ADR1001 ovenized LTZ1000 high-precision voltage reference #electronics #hardware. “The on-chip heater, combined with Analog Devices buried Zener technology, allows the ADR1001 to achieve sub-ppm temperature coefficient performance and single-digit ppm long-term drift performance.”
on 02025-05-2295¢ #8051 #microcontrollers with 800ksps 10-bit ADC (or 12-bit at 200ksps), plus two analog comparators, USB, 700pJ/insn, 8K flash, 2.3K SRAM, 13 5V-tolerant GPIOs. #electronics #hardware #pricing
on 02025-05-22#video by #NurdRage on the keychain-based radioisotope photovoltaic generator, extracting tritium vials from plastic keychains and using a Soxhlet extractor to remove the plastic encapsulation with dichloromethane, then removing the silicone from the ends with concentrated sulfuric acid. He put 14 of the glass vials side by side, totaling about 100mm with maybe 60mm length, sandwiching them between two amorphous silicon solar panels of that size with clear plastic tape. Open-circuit voltage 1.9 volts per panel, but only on the order of a microamp (per panel) short-circuit current. He put it in series with a 1MΩ current-sense resistor to measure the current more exactly, reduced to 893kΩ by the parallel impedance of his voltmeter, so he could measure the current accurately; short-circuit current was about 900nA, and the maximum power point was about 1.65 volts and 600nA, thus almost 1000nW, 1μW. With the second PV cell this increases to 1.23μW. The more sensitive circuit increased the measured open-circuit voltage to about 2.02V. Results with a monocrystalline cell peaked at 71nW at 70mV (when scaled up to the size of the amorphous panel) due to the cell’s poor suitability for low-light generation. #electronics #hardware #energy
on 02025-05-22how to use #sigrok PulseView to analyze #USB power delivery negotiation. #electronics
on 02025-05-20#PDF slide deck about how Flash memory works. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-04-30#video on tips for hand-assembling surface-mount #electronics #hardware with a DIY vacuum pump, blu-tack, doublestick tape to keep component tape from moving around, polyester stencil for solder paste, etc.
on 02025-04-23Nina Kalinina on #ghettobotics #electronics #hoarding: “Adventures of a chip scavenger”
on 02025-03-28Nina Kalinina reports that you can probably use pewter as a solder for #electronics.
on 02025-03-28archive page on comparison of the Apollo Guidance Computer with an Anker charger whose CPU has 563 times the #performance of the #AGC #microcontrollers #electronics
on 02025-03-28"Erratum 9" for #Raspberry-Pi #RP2350 #electronics results in 120μA of persistent leakage current under certain circumstances. #microcontrollers #facepalm
on 02025-03-28#video by #Bugeja on getting piezo buzzers to provide useful haptic feedback by overvolting them to 200V with a TI DRV8662. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-03-26#video of soldering wires on a perfboard for #electronics in inconvenient packages
on 02025-03-26#video dead-bug soldering an SMD package (a relatively fine pitch LGA) on a prototyping area with superglue. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-03-26#Hyperspace-Pirate #video about wireless power transmission #electronics using tuned coils, blocking oscillators, ZVS drivers, gate drive transformers for MOSFETs, etc.
on 02025-03-18#video from #Wuerth on aluminum polymer capacitor #electronics #hardware. Suggests estimating the lifetime of an aluminum electrolytic as L_0 \cdot 2^{\frac{T_0 - T_x}{10°}} and an aluminum polymer capacitor as L_0 \cdot 10^{\frac{T_0 - T_x}{20°}}. So every 20° drop in temperature from the max operating temperature T_0 extends the lifetime of the aluminum electrolytic 4× and the aluminum-polymer cap 10×, though warning, “All ratings over 10 years are very much theoretically [theoretical].” Suggests aluminum polymer caps are worse for low-energy applications and battery-powered applications (because of higher leakage), and high-vibration applications, than electrolytics, but better for low-temperature applications (because of freezing) and DC-DC converters, as well as high temperatures.
on 02025-03-18overview of #electronics for current sensing including shunt resistors, Hall-effect sensors, and inductive sensors, mostly oriented toward industrial line power applications (120, 240, 480 volts AC)
on 02025-03-16#LCSC #pricing for 16-pin #CH32V003 #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware: 14.21¢ in quantity 500. Not the cheapest, but it’s a RISC-V with IIRC an on-board op-amp, though the linked datasheet only covers the CPU really.
on 02025-03-16#LCSC #pricing for 14-pin #PY32 #ARM #microcontrollers #hardware, 9.01¢ in quantity 500. Not the cheapest, but it’s an ARM. #electronics
on 02025-03-16another #My-Engines #DIY #EDM #machining #video. Finally he got his pulse EDM working. He had blown the protection diodes and the pulse transistors in the #electronics. His numerous 25Ω power resistors were inadequately heatsinked. He found that long on-times were the key to low electrode wear, backwards from what I would have expected. Sadly he doesn’t say anything about his parameters (voltage, current, frequency, duty cycle) or circuit design. Looks like he’s at about 5kHz. He’s using a diesel fuel pump to circulate his lamp-oil electrolyte (kerosene) through water filters.
on 02025-03-12another #machining #video, by #My-Engines, on die-sink #EDM based on Ben Fleming’s book, using varying sizes of capacitors in an RC setup (16μF, 32μF, 192μF) with the lower capacitances giving a finer finish. He has some detergent (“wetting agent”) in his water electrolyte, presumably an nonionic surfactant (he says his tap water works better than deionized or distilled). However, though big electrodes worked fine, his thin copper and brass sheet electrodes eroded too rapidly, and he wasn’t able to get a stable “burn” out of either them or graphite. Lamp oil worked better than vegetable oil or water for him. #electronics #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#machining #video by #AndysMachines on his die-sink #EDM #machining #manufacturing setup. He’s using an aquariump pump to circulate his distilled-water electrolyte through a coffee filter, which needs changing often. He switched to a photo-flash 160μF capacitor for his IGBT-triggered 60V sparks (averaging around 50V). The #electronics use two DRV8825 stepper drivers, though they have trouble with the noise; the die advances when the current averages below an adjustable limit of 2.5 amps, and then there are periodic retractions to permit better flushing. He measures the capacitor voltage with a voltage divider to estimate the current. #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video by #AndysMachines on #EDM #machining, using an RC circuit to limit the energy of each spark and an IGBT to switch it, with 20μs on and 180μs off time (5kHz 10%), 60V, a 100μF electrolytic cap (which gets too hot), a heating element to limit the cap’s inrush current, a 3mm brass electrode cutting aluminum, and just distilled water for the dielectric. He makes it through 1mm of aluminum in 23 seconds, 18mm³/minute. #electronics #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video of #Bitluni making a laser vector display with some laser galvos driven from an #ESP32, burning out a lot of hardware in the process. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02025-03-04interview with xcircuit’s author Tim Edwards about open-source EDA tools for #electronics design, mentioning Ray Barrett’s "Silicon Renaissance" effort to revive the popularity of MPW.
on 02025-03-03The open-source #IHP #PDK middle of last year: “Designs already submitted for production include a delta-sigma modulator put together as part of Boris Murmann’s electronic engineering course at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, a 24GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) from Martin Sander at Ulm University, a different LNA targeting cellular devices from a team at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), and a simple RISC-V CPU designed by Daniel Schultz and Steffen Reith.” #hardware #electronics
on 02025-02-23#IHP Tiny Tapeout. Mostly just digital #electronics #hardware designs.
on 02025-02-23full listing of #GF180 #PDK devices. MIM capacitors are “1.0fF/um²” up to twice that. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-02-23#IHP 130nm BiCMOS Open Source #PDK for analog, mixed-signal and RF design. Work in progress, but they’re doing their first #Tiny-Tapeout already. “SG13G2 is a high performance BiCMOS technology with a 0.13 μm CMOS process. It contains bipolar devices based on SiGe:C npn-HBT’s with up to 350 GHz transition frequency (fT) and 450 GHz oscillation frequency (fmax).” #electronics #hardware
on 02025-02-23discussion of #electronics #hardware dimensions of physical transistors. “Contacted poly pitch”, the distance from one transistor’s gate to the next, is maybe 51nm in a 5nm process, but the actual gate length is about 6nm.
on 02025-02-23#hardware #electronics transmission electron micrographs of Intel’s 6nm process, showing gate widths of 1.7nm to 5.5nm and gate lengths of 6–7nm. The micrographs are taken aligned with the lattice so you can count the atoms.
on 02025-02-23#electronics “Fifty Nifty Variations of Two-Transistor Circuits, Harald Pretl” #toread #PDF
on 02025-02-16#video #toread by Pat Deegan on #electronics #hardware #analog #ASIC design with Tiny Tapeout. Demonstrates how to use xschem.
on 02025-02-16#video of 240kV power #electronics driving a 30kA Lorentz-force-confined plasma 10 meters starting with a wire. Originally an SRL device. By #LightningOnDemand. Reuploaded to #Odysee after being removed from YouTube.
on 02025-02-12#video on #electronics comparing XY mode on analog and digital #oscilloscope instruments with a circuit that uses the scope as a vector display
on 02025-02-11#video on a very ingenious discrete-only transistor curve tracer with 21 discrete components. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-02-10#Applied-Science had to replace the image sensor chip on his camera PCB many times in order to use an oil-immersion microscope objective backwards as an f/0.38 lens (f=4mm). #electronics #hardware #optics #video #bootstrapping #toread
on 02025-02-05#video of 240kV power #electronics driving a 30kA Lorentz-force-confined plasma 10 meters starting with a wire. Originally an SRL device. By #LightningOnDemand.
on 02025-02-05#photo of General Atomics Energy Products 160μF 3kV pulse capacitor, containing no P.C.B.s. A metal box the size of two fists. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-01-24#video by #Hyperspace-Pirate of zesty bridgewires with 4kJ in a bank of five capacitors in series, with a calculated peak of 10kA, charged up with ZVS #electronics. He blew up his flyback diode and his SCR. Relatively poor slow motion footage. #hardware
on 02025-01-23password2’s #electronics #simulation on Falstad’s CircuitJS of a design measuring a current through an 0.1Ω current shunt with an opamp and auxiliary voltage source. “Fucking hell, that was simple,” he said.
on 02025-01-20#Mitxela’s FLIP-fluid simulation on a 100MHz STM32 microcontroller in a gold-plated charlieplexing pendant. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02025-01-16#electronics #hardware design for reverse voltage protection: P-MOSFET with input V+ on drain, 100kΩ to V- on gate, and 10V zener from gate to source. On initial connection, body diode biases zener to 10V with tens of microamps through the 100kΩ, pulling the gate low and turning the channel on, eliminating the body diode’s forward drop.
on 02025-01-15#SAO shitty add-on #electronics connector standard has 3.3V and I²C plus two GPIO pins
on 02025-01-13an #electronics parts vendor for hobbyists, similar to old Radio Shack, but mail order. In Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore
on 02025-01-10#GreatScott #video #toread on the #TL431 #electronics #hardware
on 02025-01-08another #openEMSstim #video on #TENS #neurostimulation, this one from Hasso Plattner Institute HCI. The off-the-shelf stimulator, a “TNS SM2 / MF” made by Pierenkemper GmbH, runs off a 9-volt battery and delivers 70mA on I guess each of two channels; three potentiometers offer control, including two supposedly calibrated in mA and one in Hz. He demos stimulating the palm flexor muscle; at 10mA his hand contracts. The electrodes are sticky and come on a plastic pad that permits reusing them without having to apply gel. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-12-20#video about "openEMSstim" #electronics #hardware for #TENS and similar #neurostimulation. Apparently it can communicate over #Bluetooth #BLE. At 6'20" he’s demonstrating controlling his arm from an Android phone.
on 02024-12-20a box of #electronics that tricks your #USB C PD power supply into acting like a bench power supply
on 02024-12-19#video #toread about telephone switches. #electronics #history
on 02024-12-15#video on #bootstrapping "Neurostimduino" #TENS and EMS neurostimulation unit with a 25mA current limit on each channel. One-minute ad. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-12-14#video on #bootstrapping #TENS #electronics from what looks like a 555 and a 9-volt battery and some aluminum foil. #toread
on 02024-12-14#TENS #electronics #bootstrapping #video with a 556 timer and a power transistor on some perfboard in a painted wooden box with some pots and a couple of stainless steel paddle electrodes. Just photos.
on 02024-12-14apparently aluminum rectifiers using borax #electrolysis make a faint glow. #electronics #materials
on 02024-12-13discussion of how apparently aluminum rectifiers using borax #electrolysis make a faint glow. #electronics #materials
on 02024-12-13#video #toread reviewing the Art of #Electronics lab manual book
on 02024-11-29"Afterburner" is a #PAL/#GAL programming #electronics #hardware design for #Arduino based on #GALBlast, including “experimental support for ATF1502AS and ATF1504AS”
on 02024-11-27"ATFBlast", #GALBlast derived #electronics #hardware design for #PAL and #GAL programming, supporting National GAL16V8; Lattice GAL16V8A, GAL16V8B, GAL16V8D; Lattice GAL22V10B; and Atmel ATF16V8BQL, ATF22V10B, and ATF22V10CQZ
on 02024-11-27#PAL #GAL programmer #electronics design "GALBlast" for programming “16V8/A/B/C/D/Z/ZD, 18V10/B, 20V8/A/B/Z, 20RA10/B, 20XV10/B, 22V10/B/C/Z, 26CV12/B, 6001/B and 6002B” but not “AMD PALC and PALCE, ICT PEEL or Atmel ATF chips” with parallel-port #hardware
on 02024-11-27the PMS150G #datasheet #PDF (the 2¢ variant of the #Padauk #microcontrollers) #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-22obsolete #retrocomputing #electronics #hardware for #delay-lines; right now there’s an ADL-SE2246F combo filter/delay line (for PAL) for £3. But most of the alternatives are silicon chips.
on 02024-11-22#PDF dissertation from 01968 where Backers proposes “Ultrasonic #delay-lines for the PAL colour-television system” #history #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-22air-based #delay-lines #hardware #electronics for memory
on 02024-11-22more about #delay-lines #hardware from TVs. #electronics
on 02024-11-22using #delay-lines #hardware from a PAL TV for 32 bits of memory #electronics
on 02024-11-22some FETs, especially SiC power JFETs, come in packages with an additional source lead for making “kelvin connections” for the gate drive. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-16Shan (shantaram.xyz, Siddharth Singh) got five of these theattentionbutton.in PCBs fabricated by Bangalore PCB fab Lioncircuits for ₹1000, 46.75×70mm, which is about US$12, with about 8 day turnaround (except they took 12 days last time because they forgot; later he described himself as “really fucking disappointed”). #electronics #manufacturing #pricing
on 02024-11-13#video #toread on many different #electronics #hardware #manufacturing prototyping techniques
on 02024-11-12#video on scratching off the surface of copper-clad FR4 PCB with a scriber in order to make a quick prototype board for surface-mount #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02024-11-12#Marco-Reps #video #toread on #precision #metrology power supplies #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-12#Marco-Reps #video on #precision #metrology for evaluating his open-source ADR1000 voltage standards. He ends up #3D-printing #flexures out of ASA for its low creep to preload copper-on-copper rotary-switch contacts to try to keep oxidation down. His stator contacts are bare copper on an aluminum PCB. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-12#video about LED #lighting lightbulb #electronics failure modes. A resistor came desoldered from the aluminum PCB on the first one. (I didn’t realize that some of them have current-limiting resistors shrinkwrapped into the leads from the E35 lamp base to the board, 10Ω in the case he shows.) In another case, a 200Ω surface-mount resistor had failed short. Interestingly he disassembles the lamp bases by running a boxcutter around under the metal base, breaking the bond to the insulator that separates the base electrode from the thread electrode. An older bulb with a cast-aluminum heatsink has a switchmode power supply in the base. Its power transistor and other major components were good, so he doesn’t find out what the problem was. #hardware
on 02024-10-30the Steinhart-Hart equation is a complicated equation for semiconductor resistance in #electronics #hardware
on 02024-10-28Jeff Laughton’s KimKlone got a Bride of the Son of Cheap Video, following #Don-Lancaster’s Cheap Video Cookbook approach. #hardware #electronics
on 02024-10-24#video about #Mr-Electron #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with a carbon brush from a motor as the cathode in a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, or some bent-up baling wire. He’s hacksawing the top off a lead-acid battery case from an old motorbike and gets an open-circuit voltage of about 1.6 volts and a short-circuit current that’s initially 20mA with an aluminum-foil anode; when he replaces the carbon-brush cathode with the bent-up baling wire this jumps to 40–80mA. #hoarding #electronics #energy #toread
on 02024-10-18#Shirriff #reverse-engineering 7805 #electronics #hardware with die photos
on 02024-10-16#bigclive #video #toread on overcomplicated air freshener #electronics #hardware
on 02024-10-16#video on #3D-printing an #STM for #microscopy. This is a unimorph disc type made from a piezo buzzer; he ruined several before switching to ultra-fine magnet wires and low-temperature solder (ChipQuik?). His kinematic mount seems to consist of three bearing balls, one in a V-groove, one on a flat glass surface, and one in some kind of a pit, each adjustable with a knurled screw. He seems to have used heat-set inserts to build his frame out of 3-D printed plastic — although PLA has the best TCE of common plastics, he’s using PA-CF, carbon fiber reinforced nylon, which ought to be pretty stable in the X and Y dimensions, like wood. (He mentions that many STMs are made out of Zerodur or similar glass-ceramic #materials.) Printed on a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon. The voiceover might be an AI reading a script because it mispronounces a lot of words and sometimes gets the prosody of sentences wrong, despite having a bog-standard GA accent. He put metal tape on the parts for EMI shielding; looks like aluminum flashing. To pre-amplify the nanoamps or picoamps signal from the tunneling current, he copied Dan Berard’s open-source STM preamp circuit, naturally using a current-to-voltage converter built around an op-amp, but I can’t tell which one. He shielded his cable to the probe and put the analog electronics in a Faraday cage to reduce EMI further, getting only about 10pA of noise. Berard’s #electronics design used an OPA124, but he says “The chips used in Dan’s design are hard to find these days.” When it comes to #microcontrollers #hardware, he’s using a Teensy 4.1. He’s using an aluminum plate and some rare-earth magnets to damp the oscillations of his stable platform. “This is the first atomic image captured by a 3-D printed scanning tunneling microscope.”
on 02024-09-28"UniFlash" an opensource Unisoc/#Spreadtrum feature phone flash reader/writer. Cross-platform MediaTek feature phone dumping had been achieved long ago with MTreader. Now it’s time to do the same for Unisoc (ex-Spreadtrum) phones. And not only that, but also to be able to flash them and extract their compressed firmware contents!” #ghettobotics #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-27#Spreadtrum firmware dumper for #ghettobotics. “1. Feature phones based on the SC6530/SC6531DA/SC6531E chipset. 2. So far, only a flash dump. Smartphones with Spreadtrum/Unisoc chipsets, but only tested on Tiger T310. You can read, write, erase partitions and repartition flash memory.” #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-27the actual #eesim.dev in-browser #SPICE #simulation of #electronics with #ngspice compiled to #wasm. Doesn’t seem to work very reliably, iloops sometimes and stuff.
on 02024-09-25in-browser #SPICE #simulation of #electronics with #ngspice compiled to #wasm at "eesim.dev"
on 02024-09-25#video of reusing #hoarding old earphones for #electronics #hardware. There’s a continuity-tester Android app, haha! Nice #jugaad with a 2.2kΩ resistor desoldered from a power-supply board, hot glue, and heat-shrink tape. And apparently there’s also a TV remote control Android app called ZaZaRemote by Tiqiaa if you plug infrared LEDs into your microphone port, which the app knows under the name “Smart-ZaZa” or “Audio-IR device”. #bootstrapping
on 02024-09-24#DIYPerks #video about things you can make from old laptops. Speakers (especially for laptops made around 02008). Heatpipes and cooling fan for cooling high-power LEDs. Diffusion sheets (for lampshades), fresnel lenses, and acrylic back panels (edge-lightable with LED filaments) from the screen. Or use them all together together with the existing backlight to get a lightbox or fake window. Non-smashed screens can be connected to an external driver board to make a monitor (they sell these?). Microphone (he recommends some prefab preamp board with AGC). Hard drive: disc sander for pencil sharpening (just by popping the cover off and gluing on sandpaper), wind chimes from platters, round mirror for analog clock face, laser galvo from the heads’ voice coil actuator (with a laser-pointer diode glued to it instead of using a mirror, you get an “analog VU meter” even with just one axis). 18650s from “older” battery packs (this video is from 02020, so maybe he means before 02010); he suggests sort of manually shapering your way through the plastic case, and using 2.8V as the lower limit for usable batteries, and apparently “single-cell battery-bank cases” are also a thing you can buy. Laptop webcams are usually USB! (Certainly true of this laptop here.) #hoarding #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-23#Dr-Volt #video about converting an old Logitech mouse into a camera. It had a custom Logitech DIP on a single-sided PCB, separate from the ADNS 2610 camera sensor DIP, which has an 18×18 array of photodiodes visible under a microscope, with an “AGILENT 28D3D” label on the exposed die and a date of “2004”. Since he didn’t have a datasheet for the Logitech microcontroller, he hooked up the sensor chip to an #ESP32 S3 (programmed with #PlatformIO and VSCode) from his collection of #microcontrollers, like the one he’d built a laser scanning microscope from before. The chip uses an SPI-like protocol, but using a bidirectional data pin, and it exposes registers for not just Delta_X and Delta_Y but also some others including Pixel_Data, reads from which provide one pixel after another (so there’s no way to request a particular pixel). The mouse’s native resolution seems like a decent monochrome microscope, but with a very small field of view. He was able to get about a 3fps frame, unsurprising for what’s basically a debugging feature. He grafted the ESP32 into the mouse. #hoarding #electronics #hardware
#video about using an FT232R UART/USB converter chip with USB OTG to get some GPIOs out of an #cellphones. #hoarding #electronics #toread
on 02024-09-23discussion of #ngscopeclient super oscilloscope software for #electronics
on 02024-09-23#azonenberg’s #ngscopeclient super oscilloscope software for #electronics
on 02024-09-23#PDF of #ngscopeclient super oscilloscope software #documentation (312 pp.) for #electronics
on 02024-09-23#video by #Akio showing his Arduino-driven #switched-reluctance motor #electronics control board and working motor #hardware
on 02024-09-22#ElectroBOOM #video about the Veritasium long-parallel-wires experiment, showing the nicest demonstration so far of the time lag in connecting and disconnecting the far end at 11'55" #electronics
on 02024-09-18#video #toread about flawed grounding concepts in #electronics (“bad grounding concepts many engineers believe, part 6”)
on 02024-09-16#video on the #history of #electronics #manufacturing in mainland #China
on 02024-09-11#video by #Cesar about #hoarding HP printer/scanner #electronics #hardware recovering an optical disc encoder labeled “200 LPI” (driven from a DC motor with a toothed belt), some buttons, an external power supply, optointerruptors, a carriage mechanism (with linear tape optical encoder), another motor with encoder from the scanner part, an RGB LED strip (running on 5V with a common anode), a solar fruit dehydrator,
on 02024-09-10#Cesar #video #toread about #hoarding CD and DVD drives. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-10#video about #hoarding old TVs, specifically a Samsung CW-28D83N CRT unit. He gets two speakers (8Ω 10W), a heatsink from the electron-gun driver, some resistors, electrolytic caps, ceramic caps, film caps, some zeners, etc. He thinks the yoke has “very interesting parts” because magnet wire is “very expensive” and it has a “good chunk of ferrite” and another one. He also likes recycling wires. He’s even excited about the steel wires between the springs that held the CRT in. Okay, the degaussing coil actually is pretty fine magnet wire, though I wouldn’t describe it as having “epthepthional” quality as he does. He also really likes the powerline RFI filter, which is on a separate single-layer board, and he power cable, and the flyback transformer. And the pushbuttons, and the infrared phototransistor, and the PTC overcurrent safety, and more film caps from the main board, an NTC probe, the bridge rectifier, some 7805-family regs, more resistors and electrolytics and inductors, and the big chopper transformer, and the hard-to-find big transistors for driving the deflection yoke. He keeps saying each diode is Zener, which makes me wonder if he just thinks all diodes are Zener diodes, except for a couple of Schottkys; I think he also maybe identified a couple of MOVs as ceramic caps, but maybe I’m just misidentifying ceramic caps as MOVs. He likes the TDA7297 audio amp chip and the heatsinks. Oh, toward the end he identifies an epoxy power rectifier as a diode without saying it’s a Zener, but then he misidentifies the glass signal diode next to it as a Zener, despite being contradicted by the silkscreen. This is kind of borderline; I don’t think this quite deserves a plonk for “electro jungla”, but it’s so not a high-quality video. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-10#Cesar #video about #hoarding #cellphones #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-10#EEVBlog forum thread about #Padauk #microcontrollers #hardware #electronics
on 02024-09-07#Padauk and other super cheap #microcontrollers (Holtek, etc.) #electronics
on 02024-09-07#Padauk #microcontrollers #hardware overclocked to drive WS2812s #electronics
on 02024-09-07#video #toread #OCW on power #electronics #hardware (43')
on 02024-09-05#ElectroBOOM #video #toread #formina on how to turn an LED on #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-05#Electronoobs #video on #PID #control of a 220VAC heater with a triac #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-05#video on the Sharp #memory-LCD I have; Andrej reports that it works fine at 10 megahertz even though it’s only specced for 2. That’s 100fps!! #electronics #hardware
on 02024-09-04#video on desoldering #electronics #toread
on 02024-09-03#video playlist #toread on easy #electronics experiments; the first recycles an RF modulator from a VHS VCR to modulate a signal from an analog security camera. #hoarding
on 02024-09-01#video #toread on tiny Soviet pentode #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-31#video #toread about reusing OTP EPROMs from the guy who explained how to reuse 8051s. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-31#video #toread about 8-bit #microcontrollers becoming obsolete, from the guy who explained how you can reuse 8051s. Or, rather, he claims that components can’t become obsolete. “Has anybody in their right mind ever said that 74-series logic is obsolete?” Yes, I think so, use a CPLD. Video quality is not good. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-31#Raspberry-Pi RP2350 #microcontrollers review by #Dmitry Grinberg #electronics
on 02024-08-27#video by #GreatScott from two years ago endorsing the #Raspberry-Pi RP2040 Pico #microcontrollers #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27#video #EEVBlog about oscilloscopes and designing test engineering #electronics instruments
on 02024-08-27#video about the book “Practical #Electronics for Inventors”, basically just paging through the book
on 02024-08-27a 240-megahertz Renesas RX72N with 4 mebibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for US$20.85 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a 600-megahertz Cortex-M7 using external program memory and a mebibyte of ram for US$14.48 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a dual-core 150-megahertz Cortex-M0+ with 2 mebibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for US$12.92 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27a 480-megahertz Cortex-M7 with 128 kibibytes of Flash and a mebibyte of RAM for us$11.27 #microcontrollers #pricing #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-27#LCSC #pricing for #CH32V003 #electronics #hardware is 12.45¢ in quantity 500. These are #RISC-V #microcontrollers
on 02024-08-27Jean Hoerni’s patent notebook for the 2N709 transistor. #history #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-25Fairchild’s gold-doped 2N709 transistor was designed specifically to enable the #CDC 6600 to achieve its 10MHz clock speed and therefore good #performance despite using RTL, by reducing saturation charge. The PMBT2369 or MMBT2369 is a current replacement that works slightly better. A six-stage ring counter on a PCB runs at 17.7MHz, which is a propagation delay of under 5ns, reducible to 3.5ns with a higher gate current of 10mA. #hardware #retrocomputing #electronics
on 02024-08-25The #M5Stack folks have a credit-card-sized computer with a QWERTY keyboard, a tiny 240×135 IPS color LCD screen, an Xtensa ESP32, a MicroSD card slot, an infrared interface, a microphone, Bluetooth, and a #HY2.0-4P connector for their sensors. 84 x 54 x 17mm. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-20#HY2.0-4P #connector mechanical drawing for #I²C #electronics #hardware
on 02024-08-20another #HY2.0-4P #connector thing for #I²C #electronics #hardware, this one a multiplexer to let you use six devices with the same ID. Sometimes called Grove apparently
on 02024-08-20apparently a common #connector for #I²C devices (or maybe an #M5Stack specific one?) is this JST #HY2.0-4P thing (“Grove”?): 2.0 millimeter spacing between 4 pins. #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-20new cheapest #microcontrollers: Cypress CY8C4045FNI-DS400T, 1.5¢ in quantity 1000. It purports to be a 48MHz Cortex-M0 ARM with 32KiB of Flash and 4KiB of SRAM in a 1.6mm x 2mm package, 0.31-0.37 mm thick, with nine GPIO pins. I think that’s 4000 Dhrystone MIPS per dollar. #electronics #hardware #pricing
on 02024-08-01NY8A051 family of 1.8¢ #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02024-07-17#PDF #electronics #hardware #datasheet for NY8A051H 1.8¢ #microcontrollers.
on 02024-07-17marketing #video on #battery testing #electronics #hardware for battery manufacturers and electic vehicle manufacturers
on 02024-07-11#TPAI #video #manufacturing a #CNC milling machine from mostly scrap metal. He’s using the crankshaft timing pulley from a VW Golf 2 1.8 8V engine to couple his head-sized NEMA 34 junkyard stepper motors to his junkyard Acme leadscrews for the Y-axis, because the pulleys cost US$5. The pulleys have a size-L toothed belt with a 14.5mm bore and four M8 threads around the outside, one offset by 5°. He drills the pulleys out larger to fit onto the leadscrew shafts, then makes an aluminum driving adapter to bolt the pulleys to so he can couple them to the shaft. For coupling the other pulleys to the 14mm stepper shafts, he also drilled them out bigger, then made a brass tube adaptor to which the pulleys are held with three setscrews. For his X axis he’s using a junkyard ballscrew. He mentions that ATX power supply #electronics have their -12V rail connected to their enclosures and to the ground wire, which I didn’t think was correct, but anyway he removed that connection in order to be able to use four of them in series to get 48V. For sheet metal bending without a brake, he clamped his sheet metal to the edge of a table and whaled on it with a 4×4 board. He demonstrates the use of his existing homemade CNC plasma cutter. Finally he mounts a 2000-watt wood router onto the large gantry he’s built and uses it to route some beech butcher block and some aluminum plate, and even 4mm-deep grooves in steel (using a tungsten carbide bit). He mentions the need to minimize the number of piercing operations for CNC plasma cutting because of how they wear out the nozzle quickly, a consideration I hadn’t realized.
on 02024-07-06supercapacitor #electronics #hardware: 10 year life, 2.7 volts, 10 farads, 10mmø × 31.5mm, US$1.26 in quantity 50
on 02024-06-29#electronics #hardware: some of those electrolytic capacitors without the safety-pressure-relief cuts aren’t actually electrolytic, they’re conductive polymer. Others are, though, they just use a conductive-polymer cathode and have more subtle pressure-relief cuts. They still degrade over time, though, because the polymer oxidizes and breaks down.
on 02024-06-26#video of Iran’s #Shahed 136 kamikaze drone servomotor. It uses an #STM32 with six power MOSFETs to control a brushless motor and read from an encoder; these motors sell for €20 in Ukraine. There’s a silicone conformal coating to protect the board. It uses a conventional 600μs–2.4ms PWM control signal. Interesting reverse-polarity protection circuit on the ground rail. Detailed schematic analysis, awesome. #electronics #hardware #microcontrollers #flying #weaponry #Le-labo-de-Michel
on 02024-06-26#video on “impedance reflection” in transistors, a technique for easily calculating input and output impedance. But it comes down to just multiplying your emitter resistor by β, or dividing the impedance seen by the base by β to get the impedance seen at the emitter if that’s what you want. He does eventually explain why. Very slow-paced lecture by #AaronDanner, but informative. #electronics
on 02024-06-25#video on #3D-printing for #manufacturing #electronics #hardware with the Micronics SLS nylon printer #toread #Krasnow
on 02024-06-25#video #toread on the best DIY method for #manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs) using UV-curing ink and solder mask. 3 hours. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-06-24current #neural-networks do not work for just spitting out working #electronics #hardware designs.
on 02024-06-24Jim Williams #appnote from 01991 on high-speed amplifier #electronics #hardware design
on 02024-06-18#video #electronics #hardware #history on the Zilog #Z80 which apparently just got canceled (but is still in stock at Digi-Key) #toread
on 02024-06-16#video #toread on repairing ATX power supplies #electronics #hardware #hoarding
on 02024-06-15#video of a detailed anatomy of an AM #radio transmitter doghouse and tower. #electronics
on 02024-06-04another #video on the #Octopus curve tracer. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-06-0440' #video by #Psychogenic-Technologies (Pat Deegan) on designing analog ASIC #electronics #hardware using Tiny Tapeout’s “new analog capabilities”. Basically he’s hacking together a SAR ADC with an 8-stage resistor ladder, although most of that process is omitted; he submitted it to Tiny Tapeout 6 as “WoWA”. I didn’t realize #Tiny-Tapeout had a WebGL GDS viewer. The video has an annoying amount of talking-head filler. He recommends using tinytapeout_analog_vm to get started quickly, and Efabless’s video, “Webinar - Analog schematic capture & simulation with Stefan Schippers”, who wrote #Xschem, which he’s using here, with the open SKY130 PDK. He remapped Magic’s and Xschem’s keys to match Kicad. He says both Kicad and Xschem do simulations in Ngspice. Xschem’s UI for exploring simulation results looks pretty interesting, being able to click on a waveform out of many waveforms on a plot to change which waveforms are displayed in other linked plots. He does a little bit of demo of using Magic, which evidently involves typing Tcl commands in a command window as you use the mouse, and he lays out a two-MOSFET mixer circuit in it, with guard rings and everything, after having designed and simulated it first in Xschem. He says Netgen (?) is a good LVS (layout vs. schematic) checker, even though its errors are hard to understand. He recommends simulating your digital blocks with Verilator.
#video #GreatScott on tiny power #electronics #hardware, building PCBs around a TI TPS63020 4-amp buck-boost converter, which takes 1.8–5.5V and provides 1.2–5.5V (programmed with a voltage divider) with 25μA of quiescent current, using a 2.4MHz switching frequency so it can use tiny external inductors and capacitors, with only 8 passives in all. So he builds the new PCB with 0805s (because he find 0604s hard to hand-solder). The dadashit has a very nice suggested layout. Despite worrying about hand-soldering, he paste-soldered the components with a stencil and reflowed them on a tiny 3-cm-square hotplate he evidently had, labeled MHP30. The 5V output was 5.115V (2.3% high, a big sloppy), while the 3.3V output was 3.393V (2.8% high). He got 2.8A out at 3.3V and 2.04A at 5V, with 71%–91% efficiency, the higher numbers being at lower loads. He did two more tighter layouts where he had to hand-solder some caps on the back after reflow; the current capability decreased to only 2.0A at 3.3V but the efficiency was the same. Comments suggest TPS631000 and TPS63900 as even lower-power alternatives.
on 02024-05-21CERN’s 8.5-digit DIY open-source voltmeter, now in the Open Hardware Repository. #electronics #hardware #precision #metrology
on 02024-05-21#Bitluni wrote an assembler and interpreter for a new CHIP-8-like bytecode in one day on stream. #video of his 10¢ CH32V003 240-LED matrix board. He wants to switch to a CH32X035, which sounds like it might not be #RISC-V, but has USB-C support built in. Previously he had the buttons on a resistor ladder. He has a tiny little postage-stamp-sized hotplate to reflow his QFNs. If you short D+ to Vcc at powerup time it goes into programming mode and you can install new firmware. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-05-19Za3k’s cardboard #Zorchpad #hardware #electronics prototype mockup
on 02024-05-17#video on #electronics #hardware of a synchronous dc-dc converter by #GreatScott. First, for comparison, he rigs up a simple buck converter, whose switch is an IRF5305 p-MOSFET with its gate pulled up to Vcc (12V?) by a 100Ω resistor or down to ground by a BC547 with a 220Ω base resistor; the freewheel diode is a rather large 1N5822 Schottky (½W?), and the output capacitor after the hand-wound 100μH inductor is a 330μF electrolytic. The BC547’s base is driven by a knockoff Arduino Teensy generating an 80kHz PWM signal. So he replaces the freewheel diode with an IRFB3077 p-MOSFET to cut the power losses from 40mW at 400mA to about 0.4mW. To ensure dead time and avoid shoot-through, he drives the MOSFETs with an IR2184 half-bridge MOSFET driver chip and nine passives it apparently requires for its gate-drive network for some reason. He got 92% efficiency in CCM.
on 02024-05-15#hoarding #electronics #hardware #video #toread
on 02024-05-10Airwick fart neutralizer #electronics #hardware #video. He suspects it might be using a “tin oxide volatile organic compounds” sensor to see when to go off; a heating resistor heats a thin-film layer of doped tin oxide, and the “chosen” volatile organic compound lowers the resistance across the film. He wasn’t able to figure out much about it.
on 02024-05-10#video of #gomezgimenez #manufacturing a solder-paste stencil for #electronics #hardware from an aluminum can. The cotton gloves for handling the aluminum are a good idea. He anneals it with a clothes iron on the high setting on a corkboard for 20 minutes, then removes the paint with acetone. First he tries photolithography with photoresist film. For a photomask he prints out three identical transparencies on a Brother laser printer and cyanoacrylate-glues them together. His UV source for exposing the photosensitive film is one of those nail-salon UV caves. 2% washing soda removes the unexposed film. Then he etches the aluminum with a commercial etchant of HCl and sodium persulfate (‽). To remove the exposed photoresist film and the inner epoxy liner of the Coca-Cola can he uses acetone. This produces somewhat uneven and rounded holes. Second, he tries milling with a “CNC 1419” desktop milling machine, using a 100μm conical milling cutter with a 30° included angle. His workholding is supergluing painter’s tape on the back of the aluminum to painter’s tape on a plywood spoilboard. (Stackup: plywood, stickum, paint backing, superglue, paint backing, stickum, aluminum can, air.) The calculated kerf is 207μm from the sum of the 100μm tip, the 200μm surface penetration, and the 30° included angle. FlatCAM ingests the Gerber and runs the mill. His cutting fluid is 3-in-1 oil. This one seems to be cut more precisely, though not quite as precisely as PCBWay’s laser-cut stainless stencil.
on 02024-05-09#video by #gomezgimenez on #manufacturing a digital clock that works by illuminating falling sand at 10Hz, all initially controlled by an Arduino (maybe a Mega, not sure), though later he got his own board fabbed with an onboard micro, looks like a PIC18F4550 actually, then soldered the parts down with a solder-paste stencil and hotplate reflow. Demonstrates some interesting #manufacturing techniques, such as CNC-routing a PCB with a D-bit with auto-bed-leveling sensed by conduction to the (coppper-clad) workpiece. Standard captive-nut technique for screwing together FDM 3-D prints and PCBs. Not sure why each digit requires 4 pixel columns of sand instead of 3. Because he’s modulating the timing of the sand release with the (16!) solenoids rather than the timing of the light flashes, he doesn’t have to worry about leakage of light between columns. Unfortunately you’d need a higher refresh rate than 10Hz for this to be practical; a 10Hz flicker is maximally distracting. Also the sand runs out in two minutes. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-05-09#electronics organ laser-cut from MDF and pink acrylic #video
on 02024-05-09#randomtronic Joule Thief build recycling a common-mode choke. #hoarding #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02024-05-09another #video, by #randomtronic, of the #electronics #hardware in a 1.5kV #flyswatter. From a distance it looks like the same design as the contemporary bigclive video, but he has the transformer’s primary winding on its collector as you’d expect — but with a series resistor, which you wouldn’t. And only 7.2MΩ of bleeder resistance, and a slightly different voltage multiplier design, which he describes as “confusing as hell”. He is also skeptical of the transistor pinout he got from the datasheet, so he plugged it into his TransistorTester and found that the terminals were backwards. But the primary of the transformer is still on the transistor’s emitter, as in bigclive’s analysis, rather than its collector. His understanding of how the Joule Thief works is the same as mine and different from the explanation given by bigclive in the previous video, with the current switched by transistor turning it off rather than further on.
on 02024-05-09older #bigclive #video on the #electronics #hardware in an electric #flyswatter, labeled as 1.5kV. It uses a (slightly weird) Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier on the transistor output, terminating in an 0.022μF kV cap with a 44MΩ bleeder, and has the primary side of the transformer on the (8050SS) transistor’s emitter (!) rather than its collector but otherwise a similar circuit to the later video.
on 02024-05-09#bigclive #video on the #electronics #hardware in an electric #flyswatter. The circuit is extremely simple! A transformer, a transistor (C2328A 30V 2A 1W), a 560Ω resistor, a diode, an 0.33μF 630V film storage capacitor, a 2.2MΩ bleeder resistor for it, and a probably unnecessary LED (with its own 560Ω resistor) and power button. It all runs off 3 volts from two AAs. It’s a blocking oscillator, basically a Joule Thief with a high-voltage secondary which is half-wave rectified into the storage cap; the resistor limits the current into the base of the transistor. Although I think I may have misunderstood how the Joule Thief works — he says the feedback winding turns the transistor on more until the core saturates, at which point it starts turning off. The two primary-side windings attached to the transistor are 1.5Ω each, and the high-voltage secondary is 150Ω. A commenter says his is 1500V, and he altered the output to 1μF 10MΩ for a “nice loud bang”.
on 02024-05-09#video #Cesar about #hoarding and recycling TVs and monitors. Magnet wire from the CRT yoke, 0.4mm diameter in one case; a ferrite core which works well as a microwave susceptor; a 40MΩ potentiometer; power transistors; the flyback transformer for high-voltage supplies; a 2-digit 7-segment LED display; an IR phototransistor; electrolytic capacitors; high-voltage ceramic capacitors; switches; clock crystals. He disassembles the CRT to show its parts; he suggests using the shadow mask as a fine mesh screen, and harvests the phosphor from the inside of the screen with a paintbrush, then dissolves the aluminum it’s mixed with using lye. #hardware #electronics
on 02024-05-08#video #hardware #electronics US$10 #calculators as of last year apparently run Android 9 (Pie) with multitouch screens? This “GHLBD” brand four-function calculator has a gigabyte of RAM, a 32-bit quad-core Allwinner A50 507 CPU (1512MHz Cortex-A7), 3+ gigs of Flash, and a 2700mAh LiPo battery. So this wild hacker installed bunch of #retrocomputing N64 #games in an emulator. Doom 3 runs at 16–32 fps.
on 02024-05-08#video about paperclip paddles for Morse code, hooked up to an iambic keyer; three jumbo paper clips, bent to shape with needlenose pliers, are screwed into a wooden block that the cable is stapled to. The nickel or chrome plating on the paper clips has kept them from oxidizing in storage. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-05-01DIY semiconductor photosensors from copper oxide #video #hardware #electronics
on 02024-04-29#video about improved #mechanical servomotors for hobby robotics. He’s using an SPI magnetic encoder with on-chip sensors to read the motor position, controlled with an #STM32 G0 interfaced via I²C, programmed in Rust, which controls an LV8548 H-bridge driver chip, which can handle 12V 2A output. #microcontrollers #electronics #hardware
on 02024-04-28#TPAI on boost converters #hardware #video with a demo of a manually-operated one. He mentions the TL494, which he “doesn’t recommend as a beginner’s project”, for which he recommends the LT1070, which he then builds a 20V laptop charger around. For his water-wheel power supply, he uses the “Delon circuit”, a full-wave rectifying voltage doubler with five components. Then he uses it to charge his cellphone and a gel cell from a stream. #electronics
on 02024-04-06#bigclive high-power shady £16 #ozone generator teardown with schematic #electronics #hardware #video. Arrived with a broken ceramic plate through which it arced. Operates around 4000V and uses the “ridiculously high power” of 155 watts with a power factor of 94%. He says it really needs to be mounted in an enclosure with a fan so it doesn’t overheat. The wires to the high-voltage conductive-ink grids (very hard ink, harder than his box cutter) are silicone-insulated for high temperature, and the solder connections are silasticked over, presumably to prevent lower-voltage corona discharge. He explains that capacitive coupling through a high-dielectric-strength insulator gives you lots of tiny little sparks when you’d get an arc without the insulator. The input bridge rectifier is made out of 1N5399 1.5A 1kV diodes. An interesting oscillator design using a sort of totem pole of two npn transistors, perhaps FJP13009 (700V 12A; they’re labeled J13009-2), driven from (opposite-sense?) feedback windings on a high-current toroid, only used for feedback; its primary is in series with the primary of the resin-potted high-voltage transformer (2Ω primary, 100Ω secondary). Surprisingly to me, there’s a diac in the oscillator, which he says is the “start circuit”. The transistors are mounted on a giant aluminum heatsink through an insulating film (mica?). The primary of the toroid is tied to both rails of the power supply through rather large (0.47μF 400V) film caps, which discharge through the transistors when they come on. There’s no storage cap, so the oscillation dies down when the 50Hz signal is close to its zero-crossings. Originally I thought it was a blocking oscillator, but apparently the feedback through the toroid is positive, not negative; what terminates a pulse is when the film cap, discharging through the two transformers, runs out of charge, and thus stops turning on the transistor it was discharging through. “Normally, with transistors to a positive rail, you’d have a pnp transistor, but in this instance, because it effectively has its own transformer-coupled supply to its base here from the emitter, you can use standard npn transistors for both of them. (...) Much simpler circuitry than I was expecting.” The diac to the base of the negative-rail transistor is activated by a .01μF cap charged up through a 470kΩ resistor pulling it up toward the positive rail, though I’m not sure why you need the cap. The size of the heatsink makes me think it can’t be dissipating more than 5–10W, which means better than 92% efficiency.
on 02024-04-06#PlayWithJunk #video: most useful tool for #electronics #hardware repairs is a simple Huntron Tracker curve tracer or “VI curve tester”. Includes very simple schematic with a transformer and three resistors, labeled “#Octopus in-circuit component tester”, though it seems to me like it would not work very well and might actually blow up your scope if the circuit under test had a ground connection. He demonstrates using it to diagnose a blown PSU, desoldering components with an electric-air-pump solder sucker, something I’ve never seen before
on 02024-04-06salvaging things from an old computer detailed #electronics dissection of a CD-ROM drive, extracting the head, the plastic gears, the ground dowel rail, the stepper leadscrew, and the brushless spindle. He hooks the spindle up to a power supply and sticks a propeller on it. Without a propeller he gets it up to 16000 rpm according to his laser tachometer. From the computer he also recovers a CPU cooler, the ATX power supply, a piezo buzzer, a power LED, and a floppy drive. He removes the connectors from the power supply but fails to look up what some of the wires are for, although he does somehow look up the use of the “turn on” green wire. Amusingly, his test for the 12-volt line was the same as mine: a car headlamp bulb. He charges a couple of 1.5-volt rechargeable AA cells (1100mAh) with the 3.3 to 5 volt difference, which I guess is pretty safe for Ni-Cd or NiMH cells. But then he inadvisably charges some bare lithium-ion cells with the 5-volt line dropped down to 4.4 volts with a series diode. Then he hooks up a 22-amp 12-volt DC motor to the 12-volt lines with a larger propeller, and then a 24-volt brushless motor (maybe salvaged from a printer) across the ±12V lines. Then he runs a 36-volt ebike motor from the ±12V lines. Then he charges a 12-volt lead-acid battery from the -3.3V and +12V lines with a diode to drop the voltage a bit. From the floppy drive he salvages the #brushless motor but can’t figure out how to use its driver board, so he hooks it up to an external ESC, the same one he used to drive the CD-ROM spindle motor. In order to desolder its windings he turns down his old soldering iron tip on a lathe. (I don’t remember having previously seen someone heatshrink tubing with a soldering iron.) The floppy drive motor goes 6000 rpm at 17V and 14000 rpm at 19V. #hoarding product-shill #video #hardware
on 02024-04-05megaphone amplifier #hardware #electronics. A grounded-emitter amp (with no emitter degeneration!) with an 0.1μF cap on its base to a microphone feeding an emitter follower. Lots of talking-head filler. Didn’t bother to finish. #video
on 02024-04-05#video from 02015 by "fullspectrumtechnician3798" on salvaging #microcontrollers for #hardware #electronics projects. Socketed DIPs are easiest to remove from the equipment. Old computer printer boards are one of his examples; he exhibits one with an UV-erasable 8748, which you can also “enable the external access” (I think this is pulling the EA pin high, maybe pin 7) to make it run a program from external ROM/RAM. He also exhibits what looks like a Packard Bell full-length ISA hard drive controller, saying, “normal Winchester drive controllers, pretty much all of them will have either an 8048 or 49 or 8051, usually...labeled, like, Winchester, something like WD1015.” He demonstrates one thus salvaged and hooked up to an external EPROM. Then he exhibits a full-height 5¼ IDE hard drive, saying they usually have an 8051, but this time he’s pointing to something like a PLCC. Then he exhibits an ISA modem card, which he says pretty much always has a microcontroller. He says the Winbond 78C31B on that modem is an 8051 (and therefore also has EA). “Some network cards like this old [ISA] LANTastic have a Zigalog Z80... luckily the serial chip, the RAM, and the CPU are all socketed.” Then he exhibits an old (01980s) UPS control board with a Philips 87C52E socketed DIP, which is another 8051. He says the MC6800 series is also useful even if preprogrammed, by using the “special functions” pins (?) to “tell them to boot off of an external ROM”. Though the one he shows is UV-erasable. Holding up a PLCC chip, he says hard drives, especially Western Digital, use the Intel 80C196 style, which is 16-bit but still has the “external access” pin. And he says keyboards often use the NEC D8048-8C, which is of course an 8048. #bootstrapping #hoarding #video #scouting
on 02024-04-05#EEVblog teardown of a CCD scanner array from a fax machine. He mentions at about 2’20" that people complain when he pronounces “LEDs” as [lɛdz]. Most of the video is microscope footage. There’s a massive array of tiny lenses which he describes as “kind of like an optical zebra strip”, which seems fair, but it turns out it’s called a “rod lens array”; the lenses are something like ten times as thick (5mm) as they are wide (0.5mm?), so presumably what they’re doing is putting a virtual image of the page very close to, or on, the CCD itself. The 25 or so transistors attached to each pixel of the sensor array makes me wonder if it’s maybe actually a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD, since a CCD can serve as its own shift register. #hardware #video #optics #electronics
on 02024-04-04#GreatScott build an HV generator. His HV transformer has a low-voltage feedback winding on the primary side which he uses to turn on an NPN BJT to ground, via a 100Ω resistor and a UF4007 diode on the base, which turns on the other (113μH) primary coil; apparently this makes a 19kHz blocking oscillator like a Joule Thief, but this time with a high-voltage secondary. He burned up his first transistor pretty soon by dissipating 2.8 watts. An IRF740 N-MOSFET died even sooner. So he switched to a flyback converter built around an IRF840 driven by an external square wave and a DRC snubber. He reports that above 200kHz he could no longer feel the shock, but did burn his skin. But it still wasn’t as efficient as he wanted, so he drove it with the ZVS oscillator he’d built previously for induction heating. #electronics #hardware #video
on 02024-04-04Doug Hoyte’s slide deck about how to measure small-value capacitances by loading a JFET Hartley resonator. #electronics #metrology #hardware
on 02023-12-29The #Framework laptop #electronics #hardware connectors’ design.
on 02023-12-06#PDF #ebook of the TV Typewriter Cookbook about how to rig up a cheap character generator displaying on a TV with late 01970s parts. #hardware #electronics
on 02023-11-18In addition to the #one-bit computer, Laughton also built #hardware to add 24-bit bank-switching to a #6502, giving it a 16-megabyte memory space, with four 8-bit bank registers in a coprocessor. The K0 bank register is used for all code fetches and, by default, data fetches, but there are “segment prefix” instructions that activate K1 or K2 for a single instruction, and K3 is used for far jumps and far calls. #electronics
on 02023-09-02Jeff Laughton’s original page on the #one-bit #hardware design with the clock line running into the ROM address line. In his case he used 74C374 registers for the state and CD4000 chips for the I/O, and wrapped two of the CD4099 output lines to the CD4051 input multiplexer to give it two bits of RAM. #electronics
on 02023-09-02another #Skywater PDK #tutorial #hardware #electronics #EDA
on 02023-07-08notes from a #tutorial workshop on how to use #Yosys with the #Skywater PDK, etc., as part of "OpenLANE" #hardware #electronics
on 02023-07-08“A Two stage CMOS OPAMP with frequency compensation has been designed using open source Google’s #SkyWater 130nm Technology. This OPAMP operates at 1.8V of Vdd single supply voltage. This circuit has been designed and simulated using eSim open source #EDA tool developed by IIT Bombay.” #electronics #hardware
on 02023-07-08Graeme Smecher’s "Minimax" #RISC-V implementation is really an RV32C native core which emulates non-compressed RV32I instructions by trapping to millicode, using 116 FFs and 398 CLB LUTs, which is crudely maybe 2000 gates or 8000 transistors, not counting the memory. 16 RV32E registers, 512 bits, are maybe another 4096 transistors, bringing the total to maybe 12000: roughly three times the size of the Intersil 6100 or the 6502, and about a fourth the size of the Cortex-M0. This “compressed-first” or “RVC-first” approach is really interesting to me. #small-is-beautiful #electronics #hardware
on 02023-07-07#lcamtuf on #microcontroller #electronics driving #SSD1309 #LCD #hardware with an #AVR
on 02023-01-24“A small collection of electronic circuits for the hobbyist or student. Site includes 100+ circuit diagrams with text descriptions, several electronic calculators, links to related sites, commercial kits and projects, newsgroups, and educational areas.” #electronics #circuit #hardware
on 02022-05-21“The effect is known as a #Mott-transition and can be used to build smaller field-effect transistors, switches and memory devices than possible with conventional materials.” #band-structure #physics #electronics #hardware
on 02021-12-19#Don-Lancaster’s blog, largely about #electronics
on 02017-11-25How the #TL431 programmable precision reference/shunt voltage reference/variable zener works, with a schematic. #hardware #electronics
on 02017-05-19on #electronics #education by way of learning to use diodes to design a circuit.
on 02016-04-19Ken #Shirriff dissects the #electronics #hardware of a MacBook #power-supply. He finds a 16MHz 4.6MIPS #MSP430 (MSP430F2003) inside! And a 1-wire chip inside the plug to tell the Mac the serial number of the charger!
on 02015-11-25Development of a MEMS-Based Acoustic Energy Harvester, a doctoral dissertation #paper #energy-harvesting #hardware #electronics #mems #pdf
on 02015-09-29#energy-harvesting with electret microphones #electronics #hardware
on 02015-09-29Ultrathin, Rollable, Paper-Based "Triboelectric Nanogenerator" for Acoustic #Energy-Harvesting and Self-Powered Sound Recording #abstract #hardware #electronics
on 02015-09-29#energy-harvesting module brochure #electronics #hardware #pdf
on 02015-09-29
