In 1970, Signetics engineer Hans Camenzind designed the 555 programmable timer chip. Fifty-three years later, it’s still going strong as the world’s largest selling integrated circuit. I’ll explain the inner workings of the 555 and help make you an expert on creating your own 555-based designs.
Most of us have seen the car alarm “blinky” light through a vehicle’s window. However, a fake light is easy to differentiate from the real thing in the way it operates. The fake LED would blink constantly, while the “real thing” would blink only once every few seconds. Here’s a circuit to make the fake more realistic.
There are several key steps to setting up a telescope. Some people use a compass and a broomstick to align their telescope. In this article, I’ll show you how to build a laser alignment circuit to easily align your telescope mount/tripod with “True North.”
By extending the life of a multimeter with a faded OLED screen with the help of Python and an Arduino, we’ve created a multimeter-based data logging system, with the multimeter functioning as a high-end measurement engine.
The most often used trouble indicator in a circuit is the ubiquitous LED. Unfortunately, we don’t always have eyes on our equipment to see when problems arise. Here’s a simple way to add an audio trouble alarm to circuits that only have a visual indicator.
This article addresses the subject of semiconductor-based temperature measurement. The theory is developed in a general way and then applied to the construction of a device useful to those of us who spend many hours at our workbench or desk. It’s hoped that the presentation is such as to suggest to the reader many possible variations and other applications.
Are you ready for some serious Rock, Paper, Scissors competition? This game is not just for kids. In fact, the World RPS Association in Canada holds big tournaments every year. Now you can build your own Rock, Paper, Scissors Electrified game that keeps score as you bang away on the huge arcade buttons.
Kids love to compete in all kinds of running games, so here’s an electronic project just for runners. The scoreboard I designed will record a runner’s elapsed time on a large LED seven-segment display. Starting the race is easy! Just press a button at the starting line; wait two seconds for a buzzer to go off; run 20+ yards; slap a numbered flag; and the scoreboard will show who won the race.
While brainstorming project ideas for our microcontroller class at Cornell University, we realized that we all particularly missed visiting amusement parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, we decided to build something that would bring some of the excitement of those parks into the lab. In particular, we thought that using LEDs on a LED strip would be a creative and exciting way to visually simulate different rides.
I bought a Smith-Corona PWP 78DS typewriter from Good Will for under $20. The daisy wheel print quality was perfect, and it included a self-contained word processor. However, there was no way to use it as a printer. I decided to emulate a membrane keyboard with an Arduino Nano Every, so that either an added serial port or the existing keyboard could input text.
