Most people have a piece of equipment without which they consider their workshop or bench to be incomplete. For some, it is an oscilloscope, for others a bandsaw, but for many metalworkers, it is a lathe. Lathes are expensive if you are seeking a good one, quite cheap if you don’t mind a bad one, […]
While it might be nice to use a $4,000 oscilloscope in a lab at a university or well-funded corporate environment, a good portion of us won’t have access to that kind of equipment in our own home shops. There are a few ways of getting a working oscilloscope without breaking the bank, though. One option […]
For those that grew up working with through-hole components, surface mount parts can be challenging to deal with. However, there are plenty of techniques out there that are more than accessible to the DIY set. With the right gear, soldering SMD boards is a snap – just get yourself a hot pan of sand (Youtube […]
When debugging ordinary low-voltage circuitry, you’re pretty safe: unless you have some really power-hungry devices that need a ton of current, there aren’t that many truly bad things that can happen, so you can take a lot of liberties with electrical-safety rules. With mains-powered devices, you don’t have this luxury, and a lack of knowledge, […]
A sharp knife is a joy to use, but many of us are guilty of buying the cheapest kitchen tools available and rarely maintaining them. Keeping knives sharp is key to working with them both safely and effectively, but to sharpen by hand requires patience and skill. [CNC Kitchen] instead decided to use technology to […]
One of the most convenient things about modern digital oscilloscopes is that you can access the recorded data on a computer for later analysis, advanced protocol debugging, or simply the convenience of remote capture. The problem is that the software isn’t always ideal. Vendor-supplied utilities are typically closed-source and they try to nickel-and-dime you for […]
Houses with crawlspaces are fairly common in some geographic regions. The crawlspace can make it easier to access things like plumbing and electrical wiring, and can even be used as storage in homes that don’t (or can’t) have a basement. Along with improved building ventilation, these some of the perks compared to homes built on […]
If you play with high speed design for long enough, eventually you’re going to run into clock skew and other weird effects. [Robert Feranec] recently ran into this problem and found an interesting solution to visualizing electric fields in a PCB. A word of warning before we dig into this, for most of the projects […]
We like to pretend that wires are perfect all the time. For the most part that’s acceptable, but sometimes you really do care about those tiny fractional ohm quantities. Unfortunately though, most meters won’t read very low values. There are tricks you can use to achieve that aim, such as measuring low currents through a […]