We start this week with very sad news indeed. You may have heard about the horrific fire on the dive boat Conception off Santa Cruz Island last week, which claimed 33 lives. Sadly, we lost one of our own in the tragedy: Dan Garcia, author of the wildly popular FastLED library. Dan, 46, was an Apple engineer who lived in Berkley; his partner Yulia Krashennaya died with him. Our commu ...

I made a xylophone that uses an Arduino Mega to detect when a note is struck, and generate MIDI output. This project is wondeful because I essentially made a xylophone, a drumkit, and any other MIDI controlled sound instrument, with one tool. The following steps  will outline what I used to make this xylophone. https://youtu.be/w2GtNwTf-9c Step 1: You Will Need... To construct the xylophone I used the ...

Compared to the simple diode needed to demodulate AM radio signals, the detector circuits used for FM are slightly more complicated. Wrapping your head around phase detectors, ratio detectors, discriminators, and quadrature detectors can be quite an exercise. There’s another demodulation method that’s not so common, but thankfully it’s also pretty easy to understand: the pulse counting detector. As [Allan ( ...

Cloom, a reliable wire harness, and cable assemblies manufacturer, today published a “Cloom-Battery Cable Cuide.” It has four chapters that cover some useful terms about battery cable assembly knowledge. "The Cloom R&D team adapts quickly to the changing market needs. The R&D team helps customers in developing the design, advising on the material, developing new products, and ensuring that the essen ...

How to Route Differential Pairs in Autodesk EAGLE If you’re designing a high speed PCB, then chances are you’re working with the latest and most powerful technologies, like HDMI, USB3.0, Ethernet, or DDR. But with great power comes great responsibility! As a result, you’ll likely be dealing with issues like electromagnetic interference (EMI) and noise. So what do you do about these problems? When you’ve got ...

If poetry is your thing, this hack might convince you that your brain is more advanced than the rest of us poor sots. [Roni Brandini] designed a system that prints lines of poetry when you concentrate. The Mind Poetry project uses an EEG headset from Mattel’s Mindflex toy and pipes your brain’s signals to an Arduino Mega 2560. The system then looks for patterns of brain waves that indicate concentration. As ...

https://www.wiringo.com/electrical-connector-everything-you-need-to-know.html Cloom, a reliable wire harness, and cable assemblies manufacturer, today published an “Electrical connectoe–Everything You Need to Know.” It has four chapters that cover some useful terms about Electrical connector knowledge. The publication is available here for free. This guide sheds insightful light on these electrical connecto ...

With the host of protocols available in electronics interfaces, choosing a protocol is a hard job. Some protocols are designed for long distance and reliable communication applications such as RS-485. Others are used for low cost and short range communication such as I2C, and so on. The backbone car’s network is the Controller Area Network (CAN). CAN is reliable and adopted widely in automotive industry but ...

The ScanaQuad 200 by Ikalogic is a high-performance 4-channel logic analyzer and digital pattern generator. It is designed to be the best companion of a hobbyist when working on serial protocols like UART, SPI, I2C, 1-Wire, USB, I2S, CAN, LIN, RS232, RS485, and more. With the ScanaQuad 200 Logic Analyzer, you can capture signals, you can play them back, and you can even program genuine test signals using Sc ...

Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip. While the sound effects1 produced by this 1978 chip seem primitive today, it was used in many video games, pinball games. But what's inside this chip and how does it work internally? By reverse-engineering the chip from die photos, we can find out. (Photos courtesy of ...

You’re in a crowded street with many high buildings around you and you find your car position on Google maps is wrong. That’s usual, right? This is caused from (fake/distorted) GPS signals reflected from the high buildings around you which make your GPS receiver do some wrong calculations. So be careful don’t always listen to what GPS assistant says! Even with no wrong calculations, the current GPS accuracy ...

Fitting transmit and receive capabilities of radio signals into one device may be impossible without using a significant filter, which is needed to isolate sent and received signals from each other. The major obstacle to achieve that is the weakness of the received signal compared with the much stronger transmitted signal. However, researchers from Cornell University found their way to jump over this obstac ...