Category Archives: DIY

Low noise amplifier – 100MHz to 300MHz

In this video Hpux735 demonstrates his Sky67015 LNA breakout board: A Low noise amplifier (or LNA) is a special amplifier that is designed to be the first amplifier in a receiver. It is vital that the first amplifier of a receiver has low noise, because the noise of the whole system is dominated by the first […]

CD2003 – yet another simple FM radio receiver

Dilshan Jayakody writes: In last few days we are looking for some simple FM radio receiver to integrate into one of our ongoing project. For that we try several FM radio receiver ICs including TDA7000, CD2003/TA2003/TA8164, CXA1019 and KA22429. Out of all those chips we select CD2003 (or TA2003/TA8164) based receiver for our project because of […]

Soldering iron cycle timer temperature control

A soldering iron temperature control cycle timer from PCB Smoke: Shown below is a photo of the unit that started me thinking about how to find a way to control the temperature of a regular plug-in soldering iron. The unit got very hot the first time I used it. It has a built-in adjustment dial. […]

DIY soldering robot

Here’s Brian Dorey’s completed project the DIY soldering robot project. We wrote about it previously: The DIY soldering robot which we have been building in our spare time over the past few months is now working and we have been able to solder some test Raspberry Pi expansion board headers with the machine. Project info at […]

10×5 RGB LED Matrix with only 5 IO pins

Here’s an instructable on LED Matrix with custom code/software by Ole_L: This is the software which you need: -Arduino -Processing Flash the software to your Arduino and open the processing project with… Processing! Now you should change the line “String portName = “/dev/ttyACM~”;” to your Serial port, on WINDOWS “String portName = “COM~”;” Via the contact […]

Audio oscillator with frequency counter

Xristost blogged about his DIY Audio oscillator with frequency counter project: After I finished the oscillator, I made some minor changes in the square signal part of the schematic. I connected five of the inverters in parallel with low value load resistors, thus reducing the influence of the parasitic capacitance of the PCB. The goal is […]

DIY ESP8266 Development Board

A DIY ESP8266 Development Board from Electro-Labs: In this project, we are building an ESP8266 Development Board which lets the user make connection to ESP8266 from a PIC microcontroller and a PC. The board also provides all the needs to be used as microcontroller peripherals such as LCD display, pusbuttons, indicator LEDs and GPIO extension. The PC […]

DoorBell + Moteino = Awesome

Felix of LowPowerLab has written an article detailing his DIY Moteino DoorBell: A lonely doorbell activated by a boring push-button at the front door is not very exciting in a world of Arduino and “Internet of Things”. I’ve been wanting to Arduinize the doorbell into the Moteino Framework gateway interface so that I could: observe/count/graph when the doorbell […]

Embedded Linux System

hak8or was inspired by Henrik’s Embedded Linux system so he made his own: The repository is divided into two SOC’s, one being Atmel’s AT91SAM9N12 which is what the currently working board uses, and the other being Freescale’s I.MX223. Each SOC subdir contains schematics, board files, the required code modifications in the form of git patches to the […]

SPG8640-based crystal frequency generator

Hendrik Lipka has written up documentation on his SPG8640-based crystal frequency generator: When I needed a small frequency generator for a project several years ago, I did neither had the time nor the skills to build something like that. But I had in my parts box a nice chip that seemed perfect for a small tool – […]

Arduino based high-altitude balloon tracker

Ugifer wrote this instructable detailing the build of his Arduino based high-altitude balloon tracker: The tracker is based upon the Atmel ATMeag328 Microcontroller which forms the heart of many of the popular “Arduino” boards. We are going to make an “Arduino Compatible” board which we can program using the Arduino IDE. Because the GPS module and […]

40W handheld laser cutter

Martin Raynsford has written an article detailing his 40W handheld laser cutter: To generate the high voltage required to start lasing within the tube, I connected 200x 9V ‘dead’ batteries together, this generates nearly 2000V across the laser tube. I’ve been collecting these batteries for months, you can use old batteries for this because they only […]

Low power longwave transmitter experiment

Sverre Holm writes: There are several low power transmitters around that can be purchased, but most of them only cover the mediumwave band and not longwave (153-279 kHz). Further they are quite complicated as the frequency necessarily has to be user settable. I looked for a simpler way to make a single-frequency transmitter and found […]