Going all the way hack to the heady days of Eee PC modding, hardware hackers have been on the hunt for small USB hubs that can easily be liberated from their enclosures and integrated into whatever project they happen to be working on. From time to time you see recommendations out there for makes and models which lend themselves to this sort of repurposing, but it’s seemed more difficult than necessary to s ...

My university had a bunch of old server motherboards that were headed to the dumpster. I decided to see the feasibility of turning them into something useful! Go ahead and grab the attached pdf plans, print them out full size, and build your own! Step 1: Prepare the Motherboard Pop in your earbuds, turn up some tunes, and spend some quality time with your heatgun. If you have a sacrificial toaster oven big ...

Today I'm going to teach you how you can build your own RGB LED Glasses very easily and cheapThis has always been one of my biggest dreams and it finally came true! A huge shout out to EasyEDA for the amazing PCB's and personal support! :) The parts you will need for this project are the following: PCB - http://tinyurl.com/zx6t96768 x WS2812 LED's - http://tinyurl.com/zdod8eh68 x 100nF 0 ...

With all the different ways capacitors are labeled, figuring out the values of your capacitors can be challenging. Especially if you don’t have a digital multi-meter to test them. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build three different capacitance meters using an Arduino and a couple resistors. After finishing this project, you’ll be able to measure all of your capacitors and label them for future refe ...

First steps in circuit design for the budding electrical engineer. San Francisco, CA (October 25, 2018)—A Beginner’s Guide to Circuits ($17.95, 80 pp., October 2018) introduces beginners to the magic of electronics. With easy-to-follow instructions, it’s sure to be the perfect book for young readers who want to understand the everyday electronics around them and gain the skills and confidence needed to vent ...

My MQTT network at home moves up and down a lot of messages: sensor values, triggers, notifications, device statuses,… I use Node-RED to forward the important ones to PushOver and some others to a Blynk application. But I also happen to have an LED display at home and that means FUN. LED displays are cool. Your team’s score, your number in the IRS queue, the estimated arrival time for your next commute,… No ...

A recent ebay fishing expedition yielded an interesting little part for the very reasonable sum of about five pounds. It’s a voltage regulator module from a Dell PowerEdge 6650 Xeon server. I originally bought this because I had the idea of salvaging parts from it to use in another project. These are high quality modules that will have very good inductors and sometimes an array of high value ceramic capacit ...

When I started to deal with Chinese electronics suppliers from websites like Alibaba, Aliexpress and Taobao, I discovered that there are huge amount of undiscovered tools from the Chinese market. They are not easily discovered, maybe due to the Chinese language barrier, especially when we deal with a Chinese website like Taobao or maybe because most of us are used to deal with known electronics distributors ...

While most of my microcontroller designs run on 3.3 volts there is still the ocasional 5 volt design. Or I do something with an Arduino. So the need may arise to interface between logic working at different voltage levels. There are several ways of doing this, depending on your needs. Things are relatively simple as long as you know in advance which side is transmitting and which side is receiving. It gets ...

Inrush current or input surge current refers to the maximum, instantaneous input current drawn by an electrical device during its initial turn on. Power converters also feature high inrush currents relative to their steady state currents that may be several times their normal full-load current when first energized. The inrush current of a power converter is typically the charging current of the input capaci ...

Eliminated materials and changed processes to reduce thickness and costs to below $1 Sydney, Australia – May 18, 2015 – CAP-XX (LSE:CPX), developer of flat supercapacitors for burst and back-up power in space-constrained electronic devices, today launched its Thinline series of single-cell supercapacitors. The world’s thinnest at 0.6mm thick, and with prices starting at less than US$1 in large volumes, Thin ...