As usual, Alex at Tinkerlog does an excellent job of clearly describing some electronics arcana, in this case, exactly why one needs to use current limiting resistors on LEDs (and when you can do without them). If you apply a specific voltage to a resistor, you can compute the resulting current with: I = V […]
While conducting historical research for the recent MAKE presents: The Transistor video, I came across references to an earlier iteration of the device apparently created way back in 1933 – a full 14 years before Bell Labs researchers had a working model. What makes the discovery even more compelling and inspiring is the fact that […]
They electronically switch and amplify signals by harnessing the unique abilities of semiconductor materials. Their invention has transformed the world of electronics and accelerated our entry into the digital age. Behold – the Transistor! I learned a lot while making this installment of the MAKE presents series. here’s a few of the information resources I […]
Today on EMS Labs, Lenore has a piece on how to successfully photograph Light-Emitting Diodes: Taking pictures of LEDs can be difficult. Digital camera sensors just don’t respond the same way that human eyes do, so it is nearly impossible to take a picture that reflects what you are seeing. But manipulating a few settings […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Flickr member svofski made this rather sweet touch-sensitive keypad with backlighting – This a custom implementation of capacitive sensing technlogy as per QMatrix Whitepaper. It uses an ATmega8 to scan the keys and outputs ASCII characters to the serial port. Schematic, PCB, and source code are available, though the project […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Flickr member Recotana brings good news for Arduino users in the form of a new code library which facilitates control via the network optimized OSC data protocol. The above video demonstrates basic functionality using the iOSC app for iPhone OS, but the library could be used with any OSC software […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Furan dug into an LED message scrolling badge to gain custom control – This is one of those el-cheapo led nametag badges. The inside of the badge had one of those gloptop chips between some pads for a smt chip, so I dremeled out the gloptop, reverse engineered the schematics […]
