Mechanical switches are pretty easy to understand—the contacts touch, the current flows, and Bob is, presumably, your uncle. But what about soft switches? Well, they’re not that difficult to understand either, as explained by [EDN]. You can build a touch switch quite easily with old-school chips. The traditional softswitch takes input from a momentary single-pole […]
Most Hackaday readers are familiar with computers from the 70s and 80s, but what about ones even older than that? The Digi Comp 1 was a commercially available computer from the 1960s that actually cost less than a modern-day microcontroller. The catch? It was mechanical rather than electrical. Thanks to retro-wizard [Mike Gardi], now anyone […]