With the arrival of the Kingbright numeric LED with the correct width (see my earlier post) I was able to continue experiment 18 of the book Make:Electronics (pg. 170). In this experiment the reader will eventually build a reaction timer using the 555 timer chip and 4026 decade counter. The layout of my numeric LED […]
This week my wife completed a couple of cushions for our DIY bar stools made of scaffolding wood . At the local market she bought fabric and foam. The fabric is of firm upholstery quality in an apple green color. This matches the color of the wood. The foam was already cut at the right […]
I wanted to continue with experiment 18 of the book Make:Electronics today but discovered that the Kingbright numeral LED’s that I received were the wrong type after all. The width of the component is to small to fit in the breadboard (it is 2/10 inch instead of 3/10 inch). I ordered the 3/10 numeral LED’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]