Let’s say you want to blink an LED. You might grab an Arduino and run the Blink sketch, or you might lace up a few components to a 555. But you needn’t go so fancy! [The Design Graveyard] explains how this same effect can be achieved with a single transistor. The circuit in question is […]
If there’s one lesson to be learned from [Aled Cuda]’s pulsed laser driver, it’s that you can treat the current limits on electronic components as a suggestion if the current duration is measured in nanoseconds. The components in question are a laser diode and an NPN transistor, the latter of which operates in avalanche mode […]
Whether it’s a game of D&D or encrypting top-secret information, a wide array of methods are available for generating the needed random numbers with high enough entropy for their use case. For a tabletop game this might be a single die but for more sensitive applications a more robust method of generating random numbers is […]