This might be just the thing for a robotics project cancelled on account of – “expensive”. Professor Mason created a quadrature encoder by fitting a motor with 2 inexpensive hall-effect sensors and a small magnet – In this application, two sensors are attached 90 degrees out of phase around the motor. A small permanent magnet […]
(photo from Andy Ihnatko’s 2007 You-Do-It Sale Flickr set) Andy Ihnatko writes about the annual You-Do-It Electronics Store Presidents’ Day Sale, which looks like a great opportunity to rummage for cheap, useful, and unusual electronics: The Sale is a big day on the New England nerd’s calendar. And YDI is a special kind of electronics […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Feurig etched a well-planned fish-shaped circuit to hosts a slew of pink LEDs as scales. Great work – though it would be nice to see all those lovely copper traces exposed in the final product. A lot of work goes into designing circuitry and etching your own provides an excellent […]
The New York Times has a writeup on Halted Specialties Company, which I can’t wait to visit in person: MOST retailers would recoil in horror at the thought of keeping unsold products on their shelves for 30 years. Not Halted Specialties Company. It’s willing to hold on to a few thousand vacuum tubes just in […]
I absolutely love this 1940s factory promo film from RCA , describing how they make metal-can octal base vacuum tubes. Check out the all-American family in the living room, huddled around the radio, dad in 3-piece, reading the paper, mom sewing, little Timmy and Janey player checkers on the floor. Gee willikers! [Sent to us […]
How to properly wire an Arduino to a relay.
While developing the Roboduino, Scott had to calculate how many amps his project could deliver to attached motors. He wrote up his findings (and how he arrived at them) as a helpful article – As a review, the total heat generated by the regulator is just the energy in minus the energy out. This is […]
