Introduction This little project was one of my first projects with microcontrollers. First, I made the circuit then, for years, I was wondering what I could do with it, until one day I came across this IKEA plastic bag dispenser. I knew immediately, it would make a perfect “housing” for …
Introduction I have always been fascinated by photographs about lightnings. While it is relatively easily to put a lightning strike in any photograph using image editing techniques 🙂 I still prefer the real thing. Since photography is a hobby of mine, I wanted to be able to photograph lightnings. However, …
Introduction This is an old school circuit – I made it (with the help of a friend) in 1987, when I first started out in digital electronics. At the time there were no PCs – or at least not for the average person in Hungary. So all the planning was done in …
Introduction This digital clock displays the time in binary format. Binary clock s have become very popular recently, many hobbyists create their own version of it and they are even available commercially. To decode the time you need to be familiar with the binary number system and have to decode …
Introduction During the development of embedded projects debugging sometimes can get difficult. There are a number of ways to help troubleshoot problems – a scope or a logic analyzer go a long way narrowing down the problem (although a bit expensive for the hobbyist), a serial connection is extremely useful …
Introduction Some time ago I came across a website where I saw a novel way of showing the disk activity of a computer. I liked the idea very much and decided to make one on my own. Since the working of the circuit is explained in detail and very well …
Introduction I found a small project at another site about fading an LED in and out smoothly, without a microcontroller. I changed it a bit. In my version I removed one of the transistors and changed some resistor values. This is supposed to result in lower costs and smaller footprint. …
We have a timer in our staircase that controls the light after dark: when someone presses a button (a button is located on each floor) the lights light up for a preset period. Lately, the timer in our staircase light has started to behave weirdly – no matter what settings …
Introduction The aim of this simple project is to provide simple debugging capabilities to any digital circuit. It is nothing more than 8 LEDs on a piece of PCB with a pin header to connect easily to a test board or breadboard. The circuit The circuit doesn’t get any simpler …
