T&L Publications

I suppose the cigarette lighter versions would be more heavy duty because of the need to withstand heat but it should be electrically equivelent to one made as a accessory outlet only. The metals plated on the contact surfaces of the connector and the mating plug would play into the performance the ...

A typical AA battery might have a capacity of 1300mAh while the clock chip may only consume 200uA (more or less depending on the display and if there is a backlight) at that rate the battery should last 6500 hours or about 541 days. These values are just an estimate but you can see how it goes. LCD ...

The DeLorme offering is pretty good but you have to use it with a PC. It looks a little like a mouse and has no user interface which keeps the price down (but the included software just jacks it right back up).<p>The little Garmin eTrex has several models and the basic one can be found for <$100. Wi...

Nothing less than a "Rube Goldberg" machine is required here. It looks like you will need a large cistern, an IR laser w photo sensor(used to sense temp and level of the water), several hundred feet of various kinds of tubing, a bag of 555 chips, 1 foot-3cm of Nitonal wire and a 500W power...

I bow to you Edd. You could not have been more correct. I found the cold solder joint on the exact component you described. See the picture<p> http://www.ultratest.com/NV/Cold%20Solder.JPG <p>Now the tuner locks in just fine.<p>On to the next problem with this set. The On Screen Display (OSD) does n...

Don't know much about muscle wire but it sounds expensive and hard to get. One waekness is that it requires constant power to regulate (squeeze) to less than max flow. If you loose power, the water goes to max.<p>Do you think a servo motor from an RC toy would have enough torque to turn a screw on a...

I finally joined the HDTV club. Since I refuse to pay the cable company even more for something that comes over the air for free, I decided to resurrect the TV antenna on my roof. Works pretty good, I get about 8 digital stations pointing SE in San Jose, CA.<p>Naturally, I want to turn my antenna si...

Oops, me bad. I tend to blame Bill for a lot of things that are not his fault.

Persuing my second suggestion: Start with a telephone that can store enough numbers. This phone should also be able to dial these numbers by pushing a (speed dial) button that is not a number keypad button. There are many brands of telephones that have this feature.<p>Replace the switchhook with a r...

I think it has to do with what you are touching ;) <p>Seriously, when an arc is formed due to ESD both participants should experience a shock regardless of who was more negative or who had greater potential initially. In both cases you were touching the globe. I suspect that your finger (and for man...

It very much depends on the company but usually there is a VP or some other very high level manager within technology companies who carries the title CTO (chief technical officer). It is one of this persons responsibilities to be aware of the market demands and make descisions about what new product...

Hi Michael, <p>Glad to see you finally got the alarm detector working. See you gave up on the IR pair (I recall you were having difficulty modulating the IR signal on the carrier while using parts intended for remote controls) and went for a bright beam detector.<p>By your description of the feature...

[QUOTE]Originally posted by haklesup: [QB]Semiconductor patent law is very complex. You can have a patent on a circuit which protects you from any copy of the ckt no matter what it looks like. However, many circuits are so common that they cannot be patented (like an inverter or NAND gate). In this ...

Semiconductor patent law is very complex. You can have a patent on a circuit which protects you from any copy of the ckt no matter what it looks like. However, many circuits are so common that they cannot be patented (like an inverter or NAND gate). In this case the artwork used to produce the circu...

I saw some TV footage of how a recycling plant worked. The material was fed down a conveyor belt where it would fly off the end and form a ballistic arc (shape influenced by gravity only)<p>This arc of falling debris was subjected to a magnetic field that would attract ferrious materials tward one h...