The function of an LED is to emit light when the device is forward biased within its operating range, and it’s known by most people that an LED can also operate as a photodiode. Perhaps some readers are also aware that a reverse biased LED also has a significant capacitance, to the extent that they […]
Although the saying of caveat emptor rings loudly in the mind of any purveyor of electronic components, the lure of Very Cheap Stuff is almost impossible to resist. Sure, that $0.60 ADC on LCSC that swears it’s a Ti ADS1115 may be a knock-off since the same part on Digikey is $4 a pop, and […]
We were recently tipped off to quite a resource — on the Texas Instruments website, there’s a page where you can view and download a compendium of analog sub-circuits. Individual circuits can be downloaded in the form of PDF files. If you chose to register (which is free), you’ll also gain access to the pair […]
When we think of a motor controller it’s usual to imagine power electronics, and a consequent dent in the wallet when it’s time to order the parts. But that doesn’t always have to be the case, as it turns out that there are many ways to control a motor. [Bram] did it with a surprising […]
The first transistors were point contact devices, not far from the cats-whiskers of early radio receivers. They were fragile and expensive, and their performance was not very high. The transistor which brought the devices to a mass audience through the 1950s and 1960s was the one which followed, the alloy diffusion type. [Play With Junk] […]
Generally people equate the Arduino hardware platforms with MCU-centric options that are great for things like low-powered embedded computing, but less for running desktop operating systems. This looks about to change with the Arduino Uno Q, which keeps the familiar Uno formfactor, but features both a single-core Cortex-M33 STM32U575 MCU and a quad-core Cortex-A53 Qualcomm […]
If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires […]
Occasionally a design requires capacitors that are much closer to being identical in value to one another than the usual tolerance ranges afford. Precision matching of components from parts on hand might sound like a needle-in-a-haystack problem, but not with [Stephen Woodward]’s Capacitor Matchmaker design. The larger the output voltage, the greater the mismatch between […]
Radio experimenters often need a variable capacitor to tune their circuits, as the saying goes, for maximum smoke. In decades past these were readily available from almost any scrap radio, but the varicap diode and then the PLL have removed the need for them in consumer electronics. There have been various attempts at building variable […]