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Product TOL-10326 | about 5 months ago

Yeah, if you set it down after use, the heat propagates back and trips the uh-oh mechanism. Nice that it has one, but it’s poorly placed or too sensitive or something.

I’ve found that by hanging mine on a hook when I’m done, convection cools it nicely and it doesn’t disable itself. Works, but awkward.

News - Free Day 2012 | about 7 months ago

How would one even MAKE an Alot of heatshrink? http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

One thing’s for sure, it would be a gruesome beast…

Product DEV-10918 | about 9 months ago

Does this play nice with Powerline Ethernet products? I was just reading Anandtech’s review of same, and it seems like a wild west interference nightmare out there.

News - Building a Cheap Thermoca… | about 9 months ago

So it’s a single-pixel IR thermometer, scanned across a plane to build up an image. Cool, but I don’t know if I’d call it a camera. An imager, perhaps, but as there’s no focal plane I don’t think it counts as a camera.

News - Dispatches from Maker Fai… | about 10 months ago

Glad you guys could make it out! I3Detroit has actually been pretty quiet since the Faire as people take a breather, but things are ramping up again, and we’ve got a few events coming up that any Detroit-area readers here might be interested in.
Soonest, on the 20th, is a Kryoflux floppy-disk archiving party. It’s too late for many floppies (see http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191 for details), but we’re gonna do what we can to preserve what we can, with the coolest tool ever made for the job.
Of broader interest to those under age 30 is probably the Android meetup, on the 23rd. Users and hackers alike are invited to do, well, whatever! My noobly self will be there taking another stab at upgrading this infernal Galaxy Tab…
A bunch of us are headed out to Maker Faire New York, so we’ll be seeing you again soon!

Product PRT-10811 | about 10 months ago

The other classic technique is to drill a hole in the perfboard and use a panel-mount jack. Free-wire from the back terminals back to your power circuitry.

News - Project Gado | last year

Oh goody, we’re gonna drag you back to i3detroit for the afterparty, then. ;) Official announcement forthcoming, but there will be beer and solder, you can count on that much.

Product ROB-10507 | about a year ago

I’ve been tinkering with stepper drivers the last few days, and I just tried hooking up a 5-wire unipolar motor to a 4-wire bipolar drive, ignoring the fifth “common” wire. It worked fine, and even seemed quieter (I’m guessing because the magnetic fields are now symmetrical). Should work for 6-wire motors, too.
Is there any reason I shouldn’t keep doing this? Unipolar drives are cheaper and simpler, of course, but if I’m just gonna keep a few on hand, I’d rather stock only a single type of drive, and bipolar drives seem universal. Thoughts?

News - The Return to Shenzhen - … | about a year ago

@Rooster: And you’re telling me you didn’t run right out and learn to use chopsticks because of that? You can dedicate a whole hand to holding the component or connector, while the other hand works both probes. The productivity gains, especially in awkward situations, are hard to overstate. You might want to reduce the safety-shields on the probes, though, because they can collide when being used this way.
I’m American born and raised, and was in my teens before learning to use chopsticks. It doesn’t take much practice! It should be like the resistor color code, something every electronics hobbyist learns soon after they start dabbling. And it opens the door to so much amazing foooooood…

Tutorial - Anode vs. Cathode | about a year ago

billclawson:

If you’re dealing with clear LEDs, you can look inside the device. The cathode has a ‘large’ flat space on the end of it, where the LED semicondoctor is located. The anode ends in a point, and a small wire runs from the anode tip to the center of the LED die on the cathode.
This is the most reliable way to tell. My little LED tester box has the following doodled onto it, all oriented the same way:
Diode schematic symbol,
words “anode” and “cathode”,
through-hole diagram with long and short lead,
round LED diagram with flat spot on package,
interior structure with anode bondwire,
plus and minus symbols.