View allAll Photos Tagged electronics.
This is the Synte 2 processor board. It contains an MC6800 microprocessor, two 2Kbyte EPROM chips, two 128 byte RAM chips and two MC6821 I/O interface chips. The clock frequency of the processor is 1 MHz (the big metal component is a crystal oscillator).
A little firefly made of paperclips, at ATtiny13 and an LED. It capacitively senses its body to determine if it is being touched, waking up every ten seconds or so on watchdog to do this.
If it's being touched, it'l start pulsing its LED gently, flashing a random number of times for a random duration each time before going back into a deep sleep.
I finally got a dedicated workspace for my electronics and ham radio projects instead of just doing them on my computer desk.
Macro of some 'old school' electronics, meaning pre-surface mounted devices and computer chips. Circuit board from an old battery backup emergency light.
nothing exciting here, just thought i'd try out some focus stacking software.
subject is (a tiny part of) an inverter circuit for a laptop screen; the lettering on the top left is approx 1.5mm in height.
28 focus-bracketed shots taken with a 50mm f/1.7 prime reversed on a 70-300 zoom lens. The zoom was set to 100mm and f/4, the aperture on the prime was wide open. Stacked using a trial version of Helicon Focus.
Electronics Technology
Front row L to R: High School medalists—Silver-Matthew A Dickson, Auburn Riverside High School (Wash.); Gold-Zachary Snyder, Warren County Tech School (N.J.); Bronze-Chelsie Cloutier, Orleans Career & Technical Education Center (N.Y.). Back row L to R: National Technical Committee Member Phillip Kevin Gulliver; Postsecondary/ college medalists—Silver-Jordan Steidinger, State Technical College of Missouri (Mo.); Gold-Cody Leahy, Fox Valley Technical College (Wis.); and Bronze-Josiah Duff, College of Western Idaho (Idaho)
Electronics hobby
Designing and building a high power amplifier capable of driving low impedance (as low as 2 Ohm’s @ 50 Vpp) loads.
www.diyaudio.com/ see alias FdW
History of DIY audio
Audio DIY came to prominence in the 50s to 60s, as audio reproduction was relatively new and the technology "complex," audio reproduction equipment, and in particular high performance equipment, was not offered at the retail level. Kits and designs were available for consumers to build their own equipment. Famous vacuum tube kits from Dynaco, Heathkit, and McIntosh, as well as solid state (transistor) kits from Hafler allowed for consumers to build their own hi fidelity systems. Books and magazines were published which explained new concepts regarding the design and operation of vacuum tube and (later) transistor circuits.
While audio equipment has become easily accessible in the current day and age, there still exists an interest in building one's own equipment, including amplifiers, speakers, preamplifiers, and even CD players and turntables. Today, a network of companies, parts vendors, and on-line communities exist to foster this interest. DIY is especially active in loudspeaker and in tube amplification. Both are relatively simple to design and fabricate without access to sophisticated industrial equipment. Both enable the builder to pick and choose between various available parts, on matters of price as well as quality, allow for extensive experimentation, and offer the chance to use exotic or highly labor-intensive solutions, which would be expensive for a manufacturer to implement, but only require personal labor by the DIYer, which is a source of satisfaction to them.
Not my photograph - one original source is:
www.canadien.biz/electronics-online/electronics-board/
but it's also floating around on lots of wallpaper websites.
Electronics hobby
Designing and building a high power amplifier capable of driving low impedance (as low as 2 Ohm’s @ 50 Vpp) loads.
www.diyaudio.com/ see alias FdW
History of DIY audio
Audio DIY came to prominence in the 50s to 60s, as audio reproduction was relatively new and the technology "complex," audio reproduction equipment, and in particular high performance equipment, was not offered at the retail level. Kits and designs were available for consumers to build their own equipment. Famous vacuum tube kits from Dynaco, Heathkit, and McIntosh, as well as solid state (transistor) kits from Hafler allowed for consumers to build their own hi fidelity systems. Books and magazines were published which explained new concepts regarding the design and operation of vacuum tube and (later) transistor circuits.
While audio equipment has become easily accessible in the current day and age, there still exists an interest in building one's own equipment, including amplifiers, speakers, preamplifiers, and even CD players and turntables. Today, a network of companies, parts vendors, and on-line communities exist to foster this interest. DIY is especially active in loudspeaker and in tube amplification. Both are relatively simple to design and fabricate without access to sophisticated industrial equipment. Both enable the builder to pick and choose between various available parts, on matters of price as well as quality, allow for extensive experimentation, and offer the chance to use exotic or highly labor-intensive solutions, which would be expensive for a manufacturer to implement, but only require personal labor by the DIYer, which is a source of satisfaction to them.
Electronics hobby
Designing and building a high power amplifier capable of driving low impedance (as low as 2 Ohm’s @ 50 Vpp) loads.
www.diyaudio.com/ see alias FdW
History of DIY audio
Audio DIY came to prominence in the 50s to 60s, as audio reproduction was relatively new and the technology "complex," audio reproduction equipment, and in particular high performance equipment, was not offered at the retail level. Kits and designs were available for consumers to build their own equipment. Famous vacuum tube kits from Dynaco, Heathkit, and McIntosh, as well as solid state (transistor) kits from Hafler allowed for consumers to build their own hi fidelity systems. Books and magazines were published which explained new concepts regarding the design and operation of vacuum tube and (later) transistor circuits.
While audio equipment has become easily accessible in the current day and age, there still exists an interest in building one's own equipment, including amplifiers, speakers, preamplifiers, and even CD players and turntables. Today, a network of companies, parts vendors, and on-line communities exist to foster this interest. DIY is especially active in loudspeaker and in tube amplification. Both are relatively simple to design and fabricate without access to sophisticated industrial equipment. Both enable the builder to pick and choose between various available parts, on matters of price as well as quality, allow for extensive experimentation, and offer the chance to use exotic or highly labor-intensive solutions, which would be expensive for a manufacturer to implement, but only require personal labor by the DIYer, which is a source of satisfaction to them.
Seen Here: The PCB out of the bag! (Torch see-through vision!)
So, today my PCB for the LED matrix arrived from BatchPCB! For what I paid, the PCB arrived fairly quickly - I ordered it on the 15/02 I believe, and it arrived 11/03 -- 26 days, which is pretty good (they state 19 business days).
The quality is very, very impressive - far better than anything I could pull off at home. The silkscreen and soldermask makes it look really nice, too.
Soldering it was a joy, although there was a LOT to solder and it's all surface mounted.
I had a few problems at first; it wasn't lighting the matrix at all properly but I soon realised with my new design (transistors on the cathodes) I have to write the transistors HIGH to get a LOW on the cathode, so a quick line of code changed to get that working.
Then for some reason the top half of every letter was flipped. It turns out this was my fault: I messed up when making the package for the LED matrix in Eagle, swapping the matrix's 5th cathode for my system's 8th, 6th for 7th, 7th for 6th and 8th for 5th. This was fairly easy to fix in code, however.
Finally USB isn't working to program or communicate, but I can configure the FT232RL chip (after all, it's sending the clock pulse that's driving my ATmega168). I think I have an idea of what's causing this, but I'm not sure yet.
Christmas in June! I bought a used Tektronix 475A oscilloscope online and it arrived today! Here it is, newly unwrapped, with Mrs. W's finger for scale.
It looks very Scientific, doesn't it? Oscilloscopes are diagnostic tools used to show electrical behavior in circuit guts, so they're de rigueur for serious electronics hobbyists. And I could forgive people for thinking scopes are necessary for software development, too, if they've seen one too many ITT Tech commercials.
This o-scope is a bit of a monster, weighing about 30 pounds, and it was probably built about 30 years ago. (Wikipedia's article about oscilloscopes mentions this very model in a sidebar, describing it as "a very typical instrument of the late 1970s".)
I used scopes very much like this one in college in the eighties. They were built to last and I've read that they're very tolerant of the sort of mistakes made by beginners. I used to know how to use one, and was able to remember enough, after a bit of fiddling, to show the pattern output by the front panel probe calibration lug (next picture) but I expect to spend many happy hours learning what all those buttons and knobs do.
Perhaps best of all, this one has the word RADIATION stenciled on the storage bag. I hope that doesn't mean it's radioactive. Possibly my next purchase will be a Geiger counter.
Electronics hobby
Designing and building a high power amplifier capable of driving low impedance (as low as 2 Ohm’s @ 50 Vpp) loads.
www.diyaudio.com/ see alias FdW
History of DIY audio
Audio DIY came to prominence in the 50s to 60s, as audio reproduction was relatively new and the technology "complex," audio reproduction equipment, and in particular high performance equipment, was not offered at the retail level. Kits and designs were available for consumers to build their own equipment. Famous vacuum tube kits from Dynaco, Heathkit, and McIntosh, as well as solid state (transistor) kits from Hafler allowed for consumers to build their own hi fidelity systems. Books and magazines were published which explained new concepts regarding the design and operation of vacuum tube and (later) transistor circuits.
While audio equipment has become easily accessible in the current day and age, there still exists an interest in building one's own equipment, including amplifiers, speakers, preamplifiers, and even CD players and turntables. Today, a network of companies, parts vendors, and on-line communities exist to foster this interest. DIY is especially active in loudspeaker and in tube amplification. Both are relatively simple to design and fabricate without access to sophisticated industrial equipment. Both enable the builder to pick and choose between various available parts, on matters of price as well as quality, allow for extensive experimentation, and offer the chance to use exotic or highly labor-intensive solutions, which would be expensive for a manufacturer to implement, but only require personal labor by the DIYer, which is a source of satisfaction to them.