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Category Archives: Electronics
$50 electronics test bench
I’ve been having a hard time finding oscilloscopes and adjustable power supplies in the “hobbyist” price range, but I think I have cobbled together a solution.
A few key components:
- Power supply from old PC
- Make sure to short the correct pins to trick the power supply into turning on. This is usually green to black.
- yellow-black is 12 V
- red-black is 5 V
- orange-black is 3.3 V
- If you want other voltages, well.. time to built a buck-boost circuit!
- Gabotronics Xprotolab mini oscilloscope
- 2MHz sampling
- 8 bits resolution
- $50 (the best part)
Posted in Electronics
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Pitch to Color
Here is the color wheel used by my electronic instrument, Abella. When the music box is playing “C”, the pitch display appears yellow. Middle “C” is set at 262 Hz, high “C” at 523, and low “C” at 131 Hz, and each is displayed yellow. The remaining notes occupy a RGB-CMY color space.
Posted in Electronics, Music
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Shift registers and Voltage display
I’ve been having great fun with the Arduino Uno microcontroller board. Here I’ve got the Arduino using a shift register to light up a 7-segment display output.
Posted in Electronics, Solar
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Introducing Abella
Sound and light!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccJRsY-8vOs
Here is some footage from early hardware development of “Abella,” my Arduino-powered electronic instrument. Yes, it is in a shoebox, and yes, the control knobs are popped through the cardboard. Continue reading
Posted in Electronics, Music
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USB car charger, 2A
The more I’ve learned about switch-mode power supplies, the more amazing it seems to me. So a voltage source across a wide range of values can be converted into another voltage, just by pulsing current though an inductor. Of course, switch-mode power supplies are even easier to set up with ICs like this one:
IC REG BUCK BOOST, 296-17764-5-ND
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Cree XM-L Color
This one is truly a beauty. Here is the new RGBW high-power LED from Cree.
XLAMP XM-L COLOR LED RGBW (XMLCTW-A0-0000-00C3ABB02CT-ND)
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Flea market wafer
I even got to play the rube and ended up paying $20 for a 8″ silicon IC wafer. I think this one was the most beautiful one the vendor had in stock:
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Photon Battery Device (PBD)
Hey it worked! Finally put together my new solar-powered ultra-high power LED and it’s sweet! The solar cell is 1W and the LED runs at 2W, so for every two minutes of sun you get one minute of light!
Posted in Electronics, Solar
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LED First Light
Wow, LED’s are amazing! I just fired up my Cree XM-L2 LED with a 3-cell NiMH battery pack and a 0.91 ohm resistor to keep the current under control. The circuit runs at 500 mA, which corresponds to 1.4 W for the LED and 0.4 W for the resistor… or 75% circuit efficiency and probably just shy of 200 lumens. With 2000mAh batteries I should get about 4 hours of light.
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Gregory Kimball 