Making and Hacking

Exploration of using the nanoVNA to measure inductance and capacitance at frequency of use.

There are a number of factors in choosing a toroid for a RF transformer. While one may model electrical performance, calculate predicted...

Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) is a subject that can inspire a lot of discussion, head shaking and some misunderstanding. ESD damaging...

Like many radio amateurs I was initially intimidated by the Smith chart. Transmission line and antenna theory, unfamiliar terms and...

This blog outlines the steps taken to determine why a microcontroller no longer works, and the journey to find the damage on the chip.

This is a light system that I designed and built in 1978 to control large flood lights of different colors, synchronized to disco music...

Being the holiday season I decided to post this article from the December 2014 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine www.nutsvolts.com that I...

A prior post described the development and build of a clock to display time and date for UTC and Local. The clock characters are large,...

The Raspberry Pi (Rpi) is a great single board computer (SBC) that can be used in many projects and comes in different configurations. I...

Recently the Maker Space that I frequent received a number of 4 line 40 character (4 x 40) LCD displays. They asked me to figure out how...