Given the schematic for a simple circuit, make it a real circuit with the base components, some conductive thread, and a 3D printer. No solder, no etching chemicals, no sending away for anything. 3D-Printed Circuit Boards, for solder-free printable electronics Instructable is to serve as the how-to guide for a 3D-printed electronic circuit library implemented →
EFFICIENT SOUND CARD BASED EXPERIMENTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS OF NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION paper tells that sound cards can be turned into measurement tools, making science experimentation very efficient and cheap. Sound-card experimentation becomes really viable only if we demonstrate how to connect different sensors to the sound card and provide suitable open-source software to support →
Is your working desk clean or messy? Do you have a home laboratory and how messy it it? Computer History Museum honors Jim Williams and Bob Pease tells that some messy engineering working desks end up in Computer History Museum as exhibit. Both work of Bob Pease and Jim William have been a source of →
Apple iPad uses a MicroSIM instead of normal SIM card. And many operators can just give you a normal SIM. So what’s the solution? How To Convert a SIM to a MicroSIM with a Meat Cleaver! article tells that you can do the conversion from normal SIM to MicroSIM with a chopping board, a meat →
I just saw Slashdot posting mentioning Open Hardware Journal. Open Hardware Journal is a new open technical journal on designs for physical or electronic objects that are shared as if they were Open Source software. It’s an open journal under a Creative Commons license. You can download the magazine in pdf file format and redistribute →
Unless you add a measurement instrument to your computer, you have only the sound card as an analog I/O port. You can use the sound card to digitize ac analog voltages but only within a limited range. You can, however, add some signal processing and measure a wider variety of signals, even those that produce →
One day I had an old flashlight that had burned light bulb on it. It was a small cheap model powered with two AA batteries. I could fix it with new light bulb, but going through the trouble of trying to find exactly suitable replacement light bulb felt like more than the value of the →
The whole world seems to be going in ARM’s direction. ARM has practically taken the mobile phone and tablet markets. The latest version of Windows 8 will also run on ARM processors, Raspberry Pi is a $25 ARM based machine etc.. Slashdot tells that now the open source Arduino platform has a new member — →
What else can you do with our ubiquitous PC-board material? We’re all familiar with printed circuit board material, also called PC board or PCB. The most common type is FR-4, with glass-epoxy substrate (see here), but there are other materials available, such as low-cost, easily punchable phenolic. FR4 is a strong, stiff, hard-to cut, tool-dulling, →
There are many Arduino-compatible microcontroller boards nowadays. The Ruggeduino is a ruggedized Arduino-compatible microcontroller board. Features include overcurrent and overvoltage protection on all I/O pins and 5V/3.3V outputs, ESD protection on all I/O pins and USB port, total microcontroller overcurrent protection, and operation at up to 24V. There are some things a regular Arduino will →