11 August 2008

Occasionally, when I am allowed out by myself, I wander off to the auctions for the day. I always enjoy the experience but I have learnt that what you might gain is at the expense of a day's lost wages and if you do buy something, it's often a pig in a poke with no guarantees.

11 August 2008

This new amplifier module supersedes both the Plastic Power module described in the April 1996 issue and the Ultra-LD module presented in the March 2000 issue. It produces high power at very low distortion. In fact, as far as we are aware, it is the lowest distortion class-AB amplifier that has ever been published.

08 August 2008

Imagine a colour printer that outputs images not just in the two dimensions we're all familiar with - width and depth - but adds the third dimension, height, so that the "printed" images can be physically held, picked up, turned, inverted . . . just like any other 3D object.

06 August 2008

How would you like to try some basic radio astronomy - listening to the bursts of noise originating from the planet Jupiter, or from the Sun? You don't need a lot of fancy equipment to do this, just the simple shortwave receiver described here. It�s hooked up to a basic dipole antenna (which we describe as well) and to the sound card in your PC, so that you can print out "chart recordings" of the noise signals.

05 August 2008

In last month's article, we detailed the construction of the DSP Musicolour. In this month's article, we guide you through the final testing of the DSP Musicolour and give troubleshooting tips. We also explain the operation of the firmware in more detail as well as discussing possible accessories.

01 August 2008

The 300MHz DPO3034, with its wide "digital phosphor" LCD screen, is a serious oscilloscope with an impressive list of features and an excellent user interface.

18 July 2008

If Swan's 2nd Law is: "Microcontrollers can never have too many I/O channels" . . . what's his first?

16 July 2008

Would you like to connect a stereo amplifier in "bridge mode" in order to deliver double the power to a single loudspeaker system? This simple adaptor allows you to do it, without any modifications being necessary to the power amplifiers themselves.

14 July 2008

Want to connect a professional microphone with balanced outputs to the line input of your PC's soundcard or an MP3 player, for high-quality voice recordings? This microphone preamp circuit lets you do just that. It features a balanced input, has a clipping indicator LED and can be powered from a USB port or from an external DC source.

12 July 2008

This compact device will help you tune almost any musical instrument - acoustic or electronic. It can produce any note on the tempered musical scale (standard pitch) in any of the eight most commonly used octaves, with an accuracy of better than ±0.08% or 1.3 musical cents. The selected note is compared with that from the instrument either by ear or visually by using an eight-LED stroboscopic beat indicator.