Due to historical engineering decisions made many decades ago, a great many irrigation systems rely on solenoid valves that operate on 24 volts AC. This can be inconvenient if you’re trying to integrate those valves with a modern smart home control system. [Johan] had read that there were ways to convert these valves to more […]
After having been sent a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) based clock for a review, [Anthony Francis-Jones] took the opportunity to explain how these types of displays work. Although VFDs are generally praised for their very pleasant appearance, they’re also relatively low-power compared to the similar cathode ray tubes. The tungsten wire cathode with its oxide […]
Normally, if you want to blast out samples to a DAC in a hurry, you’d rely on an FPGA, what with their penchant for doing things very quicky and in parallel. However, [Anabit] figured out a way to do the same thing with a microcontroller, thanks to the magic of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. […]
Espressif has unveiled its latest major chip in the form of the ESP32-E22. Officially referred to as a Radio Co-Processor (RCP), it’s intended to be used via its PCIe 2.1 or SDIO 3.0 host interface to provide wireless communications to an SoC or similar. This wireless functionality includes full WiFi 6E functionality across all three […]
In an update video by [Hacker University] to an earlier video on ESP32-C3 Super Mini development boards that feature a Flash-less version of this MCU, the question of adding your own Flash IC to these boards is addressed. The short version is that while it is possible, it’s definitely not going to be easy, as […]
One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in following the world of new semiconductor devices, spotting interesting ones while they are still just entries on manufacturer websites, and then waiting for commonly-available dev boards. With Chinese parts there’s always a period in which Chinese manufacturers and nobody else has them, and then they […]
Since the RP2040 microcontroller is available as a stand-alone component, it’s easy enough for third parties to churn out their own variations — or outright clones of — the Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus we end up with for example AliExpress sellers offering their own versions that can be significantly cheaper than the genuine article. The […]
Variable capacitors may be useful, but the air gap that provides their capacitance is their greatest weakness. Rather than deal with the poor dielectric properties of air, some high-end variable capacitors replace it with a vacuum, which presents some obvious mechanical difficulties, but does give the resulting capacitor a remarkable quality factor, high-voltage performance, and […]
Today in power electronics, the folks over at Texas Instruments have put together a video covering low-dropout (LDO) linear regulators. For a hacker, power is pretty fundamental, so it behooves us to know a little bit about what our options are when it comes time to regulate power to our projects. In this video [Alex […]
If you’ve seen a big air-variable capacitor, you may have noticed that some of the plates may have slots cut into them. Why? [Mr Carlson] has the answer in the video below. The short answer: you can bend the tabs formed by the slots to increase or decrease the capacitance by tiny amounts for the […]