T&L Publications

mklepper: My suggestion would be that you look into the lighting used in laparoscopic surgery. I think you'll find that they all leave the emitters outside the body and use light pipes to bring the light in. On a larger issue however, while I admire your experimental spirit, for a device that will r...

We have electric fencing here and one day I was out in the back pasture looking for a problem. Since it was clearly not delivering the fully charge I figured a clip broke and the rope was touching a metal post somewhere. I didn't unplug the charger before riding the fence line looking for the proble...

No, the old thread here where jollyrgr posted that circuit was orginally started by me in 2006. I believe that ckt was used in a commercial product. In fact I knew someone who was using a minor variation of it back in 1997 to run low power fluorescent lamps. I think he replaced the inductor with a t...

Hey, thanks! I was the originator of that old thread and I had forgotten all about it. As luck would have it, I have been thinking of building an LED flashlight, so that circuit should come in handy :-) Check out my reply to a posting for a similar project. Mine is the 8th reply and has a schematic ...

I would happily update my signature, site, etc. but this system bloody won't let me change my profile.

I PM'd the admin a year ago and it was supposed to be reset to default, but still didn't work. Eventually I just lost interest in fixing it.

...or you can buy the same thing online at 1/4 the price. RS is nice for the "I must have it today" item, but I find that happening less and less frequently. A dozen or so assorted breadboards from Circuit specialists is probably a year's supply for me, and the total price with shipping wa...

Nice :-) The manual P&P "machines" I've seen are really glorified handrests that reduce hand shake...depending on how much coffee I've had, that can be quite a bit. Ideally I'd like to talk to someone who's used one to find out just how much better/faster they are than doing it with ju...

Checkout cnczone.com there are a lot of plans floating around for everything from building with hardware store parts to ground shaft and bearings.

Do you have any recommendations for manual P&P machines? I thought of building my own, but I can probably find one cheap on the used market. Well, there does seem to be more choices in lower cost SMT tools from China if you check eBay. Other than that, it has not gotten easier to use a single po...

I hesitate to sound like I'm soliciting here but are you interested in purchasing a solution? I'm in the process of developing a Bluetooth-connected temperature sensor. It's not "hobbyist-level" pricing but it should do what you need. If you are, PM me since commercial posts are really out...

And here's the "easy" way to do it :-) Get a cheap cast off PC that will run XP or Win95 and a WiFi card. That's your wireless interface and sensor logger and it will either be free or about $25 if you shop carefully. Buy a cheap USB-analog interface card and a few temp sensors, or get a f...

Any ball valve can be used as a crude flow restrictor.
Since you can't see inside a ball valve, there is no way to
know how much of the hole in the ball is open to the water
stream,

Can't you make a scale under the valve actuator so you can see how far it's open?

I don't remember specifically which one I was looking at, but you can get the datasheets at www.taosinc.com

I do love the level of integration they achieve though!

Let me preface this by saying I love microcontrollers and firmware! Heck, I even got a Master's in Software Engineering. So why do I feel obsolete? Well, after spending the weekend getting a nice low-level light detector circuit working using a high-intensity red LED and a cheap LM324 opamp with one...

Since it will need to be adjustable for the time delay, I doubt any chip you find will offer much that a 555 and perhaps an external FET can't give you.

If you set up a 555 as a retriggerable one-shot, and your load is less than 100mA, problem solved!