On an old fashioned bench a signal generator was once an indispensable instrument, but has now largely been supplanted by the more versatile function generator. Sometimes there’s a less demanding need for a clock signal though, and one way that might be served comes from [Rupin Chheda]’s square wave generator. It’s a small PCB designed […]
Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train. It’s usual to have a 32.768 kHz crystal and a 15-stage divider chain, which in turn normally sits inside an integrated circuit. Not so for [Bobricius], who’s created […]
We’re all used to crystal resonators — they provide pretty accurate frequency references for oscillators with low enough drift for most of our purposes. As the quartz equivalent of a tuning fork, they work by vibrating at their physical resonant frequency, which means that just like a tuning fork, it should be possible to listen […]
We’ve got to admit to being a bit of a Casio G-Shock watch geek. The big, chunky watches were every day carry items that survived everything we dished out, right up until the smartphone made wearing one seem redundant. But others continue to use and abuse G-Shocks, and some brave souls even hack them. Replacing […]