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 […]
Recently, [Solder Hub] put together a brief video that demonstrates the basics of a Hall Effect sensor — in this case, one salvaged from an old CPU fan. Two LEDs, a 100 ohm resistor, and a 3.7 volt battery are soldered onto a four pin Hall effect sensor which can toggle one of two lights […]
We’ve all done it at some time — made an electrical connection by twisting together the bare ends of some wires. It’s quick, and easy, but because of how little force required to part it, not terribly reliable. This is why electrical connectors from terminal blocks to crimp connectors and everything else in between exist, […]
It’s fair to say that the average Hackaday reader enjoys putting together custom electronics. Some of those builds will be spaghetti on a breadboard, but at some point you’ll probably have a project that needs a permanent case. If you’re looking for a small case for your latest creation, check out [Julius Curt’s] modification of […]
Ever tear open a potentiometer? If you haven’t, you can still probably guess what’s inside. A streak of resistive material with some kind of contact that moves across it as you rotate the shaft, right? Usually, you’d be right, but [T. K. Hareedran] writes about a different kind of pot: ones that use magnetic sensing. […]
As [Sam Ben-Yaakov] points out in a recent video, you don’t often see flyback converters these days. That’s because there are smarter ways to get the same effect, which is to convert between two voltages. If you work on old gear, you’ll see plenty of these, and going through the analysis is educational, even if […]
[porchlogic] had a problem. The desire was to print a crystal-like case for an ESP32 project, reminiscent of so many glorious game consoles and other transparent hardware of the 1990s. However, with 3D printing the only realistic option on offer, it seemed difficult to achieve a nice visual result. The solution? Custom G-code to produce […]