24 June 2009

In the first part of this story in May SILICON CHIP Barrie Smith tipped us into the maelstrom of the funny yarns about Tech Support. Now he gets serious and investigates how the major companies handle the floods of enquiries and queries that rain upon enterprises brave enough to market their products... and daring enough to back them up with help and comfort for the buying public.

22 June 2009

Do you need to test audio equipment, including amplifiers and speakers, in the field and in the workshop? If so, you could use this compact and inexpensive digital audio oscillator. It can produce sine, square, triangle and sawtooth waveforms in the frequency range from 10Hz-30kHz and features three output ranges: 20mV, 200mV & 1V.

21 June 2009

Malcolm Faed has produced the first electric vehicle conversion using an industrial 3-phase induction motor controlled by a variable frequency, variable voltage converter. As far as we know, it is the first such road-registered DIY conversion in Australia and it is probably one of the first in the world.

19 June 2009

Recent SILICON CHIP articles on HopeRF 433MHz data transceivers have drawn our attention to other monitoring modules made by this Chinese firm. Amongst their offerings is a well-priced and calibrated humidity sensor, the HH10D. This has shown itself capable of extremely simple interfacing to even the humblest PICAXE, although factory calibration values first need reading via an I2C-level PICAXE such as the 18X.

17 June 2009

VoiceMe is a voice-activated remote control. It can be used to control up to ten functions on your TV, DVD player, Home Theatre system or whatever and it can have up to four separate users. If you are one of those who often loses remote controls, it could be an attractive option.

15 June 2009

In this final instalment we discuss the signal formats and give a comparison of DAB+ and DRM. Also included is a brief discussion of antennas suitable for DAB+ reception.

11 June 2009

Ideal for solar power battery monitoring but also perfect for a wide variety of rechargeable battery applications, this smart battery meter monitors the charge and discharge of lead-acid, Nicad and NiMH batteries with an operating voltage range of 9-60V and currents up to 80A. It has settable overload and under-voltage protection and it can be connected to a PC for logging of battery condition.

09 June 2009

Based on the GlobalSat EM-408 GPS module, this compact GPS receiver/driver board mates with the 6-digit display described in Pt.1 to form a self-contained GPS clock. It can also be housed separately and used to provide NMEA 0183 time and date information to a PC, via a serial port.

05 June 2009

Here's an easy-to-build accessory for the Time Delay Photoflash Trigger described in our February 2009 issue. It triggers the delay unit and your photoflash in response to an object interrupting an invisible beam of infrared (IR) light. Alternatively, it can be used on its own to directly trigger a photoflash.

01 June 2009

Interesting circuit ideas which we have checked but not built and tested. Contributions from readers are welcome and will be paid for at standard rates.