[Dhananjay Gadre] happened across a useful little trick the other day. Take any old 1N4148 or 1N914 glass-package signal diode and wire it up right, and you’ve got yourself a nifty little IR detector. It’s that simple. The trick is to treat the diode just like you would a proper IR photodiode. The part should […]
If you ever wished electrons would just behave, this one’s for you. A team from Tohoku, Osaka, and Manchester Universities has cracked open an interesting phenomenon in the chiral helimagnet α-EuP3: they’ve induced one-way electron flow without bringing diodes into play. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The […]
On paper, electricity behaves in easy-to-understand, predictable ways. That’s mostly because the wires on the page have zero resistance and the switching times are actually zero, whereas in real life neither of these things are true. That’s what makes things like switch-mode power supplies (SMPS) difficult to build and troubleshoot. Switching inductors and capacitors tens […]
Normally, when you want a low DC voltage from the AC line, you think about using a transformer of some kind. [RCD66] noticed that an AC monitor meter must have some sort of power supply but had no transformers in sight. That led to an exploration of how those work and how you can use […]
[Julian] knows that real diodes you can buy don’t work exactly like we say they do. That’s actually pretty common. We routinely ignore things like wire resistance and source resistance in batteries. Diodes have problems that are harder to ignore, such as the forward voltage drop. So, while a real diode will only pass current […]
We didn’t think we needed a basic guide to diodes until we saw it was from [W2AEW], and then we knew we’d pick up some new things. Entitled “Diodes from Ideal to Real” the 18-minute video doesn’t disappoint with a mix of notes and time with a curve tracer to learn all about these devices. […]