Experiment 18: More components.

A small update. Saturday I received the rest of the components that I need for the Reaction Timer (Experiment 18 of Make:Electronics) and the rest of chapter 4.  I couldn’t get all the components on the shopping list (see pg. 147) from my online supplier so I had to choose some alternative components. Notably the […]

Valentine LED chaser part 3: problem solved

I reread the part of Make:Electronics about the inside of the 555 timer in the astable mode (page 162 of the book) hoping that this would give me a clue about what went wrong with the Valentine LED chaser. This gave me the idea that the 1 uF capacitor connected to the pin 6 of […]

Valentine LED chaser part 2: transfer to the perf board

Last Friday and Saturday I transferred the components to the perf board. I used regular perf board this time instead of the breadboard type perf board that I used for the alarm circuit. I had to make a sketch of the circuit on the perf board before I started to solder. The sketch was simply […]

Valentine LED chaser part 1: the breadboard

It is time to take a temporary departure from Make:Electronics. The question is: has all these theory and experiments from the book enabled me to finish my own project? After working with the 555 timer in astable mode last week I remembered an article about this chip that I read a year ago, the so […]

DIY bar stool as part of the bar table

A couple of weeks ago I built a bar table out of scaffolding wood. Today I had the time to build a stool of the same material. I used a drawing of Cando (a Belgium based DIY shop). You can find the link of the drawing on their website here together with the bill of material. […]

Experiment 17: The astable mode of the 555 timer

Last weekend I had a chance to continue with the next experiment. Make:Electronics suggests to set it up on the same breadboard that still has experiment 16 on it. This is for later experiments when the 555 timers will be chained. Again this is an easy experiment although I almost forgot all important connection between […]

Experiment 16: monostable mode of the 555 chip

This experiment (and the next experiments) are centered around the 555 timer chip. The circuit that been built (figure 4.14 of Make:Electronics) results in the monostable mode of the 555 chip. Once triggered the 555 emits a single pulse of a fixed duration. I lacked the required 5K linear potentiometer and I used a 2.5K […]

Building an Intrusion alarm part 5 (finishing up is hard)

I spent several hours fault tracing the circuit from the intrusion alarm. I used the multimeter together with the minigrabber and checked the relay part of the circuit. I was able to measure the voltage over all the components and at first couldn’t find any problem. I decided to replace the transistor since the soldering […]

Building an Intrusion alarm part 4: disaster strucks.

I completed the projectbox yesterday. It is looking good (well good enough) and I was eager to wrap-up the project. Just a few solder joints and it was finished. Before I started soldering, as I final test, I screwed the circuit board in the box and plugged in the power, I opened the magnetic sensor […]

Building an Intrusion alarm part 3

I solved the problem with the circuit. I simply forgot to place a single wire that powers the coil. After this I was ready to solder the complete circuit on the Adafruit perfboard. I started with the noise making part of the circuit and tested it. Then I continued with the sensor and the relay […]