You know those nixie tube displays? Well, 14-year-old Spanish maker pinomelean made an edge-lit glass nixie that consists of ten etched glass plates stacked atop each other, with SMT LEDs lighting them up individually — similar to this display we blogged last year.
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Collin Cunningham explains what diodes are all about, describing the history of the component, the various types, and even touches on creating your own. [M]aking this installment of the series taught me quite a few things. Prior to reading up on the diode, I wasn’t aware how closely its development was tied to the birth […]
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Instructables user Kurt E. Clother shows how to make a shunt regulator out of a Zener diode.
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Collin Cunningham’s videos remain golden! In Circuit Skills: LED Matrix he talks about LED matrices and how to control the LEDs with a multiplexing IC. He uses it to make a mini game machine! Many an experimenter, hacker, tinkerer, & maker have heeded the call of the mighty matrix – and it’s no mystery why. […]
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June’s Component of the Month is the diode, and a 7-segment display actually consists of seven light-emitting diodes! So, why not matrix them up? Skot Croshere built a matrix out of 512 7-segment displays: he calls it the DigitGrid: The DigitGrid is an array of seven-segment displays. There are 4096 LEDs, forming 512 7-segment digits […]
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Stephen Richardson of Tangent Audio built the AZIZ light ring for his Bausch & Lomb stereo microscope. AZIZ is an LED microscope illuminator that I designed and built from scratch. It is designed around a Texas Instruments TLC59116 constant-current PWM LED driver chip, and an Atmel ATTiny1634 AZIZ has 64 LEDs, half super-bright and half […]
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A diode made from a semiconductor can generate electricity in the presence of light. Instructables user nevdull shows how to generate a modest amount of power by arranging four 1N4148 diodes in parallel.
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