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 […]
Reverse engineering the 76477 sound effect chip Read More »
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
2018 Will Mark A Milestone in GPS Technology with 30-centimeter Accuracy Read More »
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
Send & Receive Radio With A Single Chip Read More »
I have a $500 Rigol DP832 programmable triple-output power supply sitting on my bench, yet I built a 5V regulator to sit atop a 9V battery for some reason. Perhaps it’s more portable, or cheap enough to toss in with the rest of the project it is powering, or maybe the bench power supply is
5V Regulator Cap for 9V battery Read More »
In electronics, a device is said to be a latching device if it maintains any particular fixed state even after removal of the input signal. The same also applies for electronic/electromechanical relays. Basically the electromechanical relays that are used today are of two types: 1. Non-Latching Relay : These relays are most widely used where
Latching Relay Module Read More »
I bought a couple of IXYS linear MOSFETs (IXTK90N25L2) a while ago to test their capabilities when used as electronic load, and the result was quite impressive. So I decided to build another electronic load using both MOSFETs. As you can see in the video towards the end, this electronic load can sink more than
A 400W (1kW Peak) 100A Electronic Load Using Linear MOSFETs Read More »
DDC’s HSN-1000 radiation-hardened Hybrid Nuclear Event Detector (NED) senses ionizing radiation pulses generated by a nuclear event, such as the detonation of a nuclear weapon, and rapidly switches its output from the normal high state to a low state with a propagation delay time of less than 20ns. The active low Nuclear Event Detection signal
HSN-1000 Nuclear Event Detector Read More »
One of us (Mailland) grew up in Paris in the 1980s, surrounded by advertisements for racy “pink” chat rooms, accessible through terminals connected to France’s Minitel network. They were a lucrative part of the wider Minitel economy, which also let you send messages, check bank balances, and read news. By 2000, as the Internet displaced
From Trash to Treasure: How to Resurrect a Minitel Terminal Read More »
Not many people know, but in some smoke detectors, radioactive materials play an essential role. Today I will present one of those devices, and my -successful- attempt to reverse engineer it and get the circuit diagram. Those smoke detectors use a small amount of Americium-241 (chemical symbol: Am) obtained in nuclear reactors as a decay
Nuclear physics applied in smoke detectors Read More »
Currently I’m trying to make a working version of a radioactivity detector that uses semiconductor as a sensor. It’s a different approach than Geiger-Muller detectors or ionization chambers, more complicated, but also much more interesting. While Geiger-Muller counters can only provide information about the amount of particles in a period of time, semiconductor detectors can
Semiconductor radioactivity detector Read More »
