01 August 2007

Technology is fighting the war against terrorists

31 July 2007

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.

31 July 2007

16 July 2007

A little over five years ago, before water became a "cause celebre", we published a design for a simple tank water level indicator. Now, with thousands of home water tanks being installed every year (and prompted by many requests for such a project), we thought it time to resurrect the idea, albeit with a couple of tweaks.

14 July 2007

Designed for use in our new Class-A Stereo Amplifier, this Speaker Protection & Muting Module is really a universal unit. It can be used with other SILICON CHIP amplifier modules and commercial stereo amplifiers and protects the loudspeakers in the event of a catastrophic amplifier failure. A second function of the unit is to mute the loudspeakers at switch-on & switch-off to prevent thumps.

12 July 2007

What's a PID controller? PID stands for "proportional integral differential" and relates to a process which seeks to continuously correct the error between a measured variable and a desired setting by calculating an appropriate correction process. In practice, it can largely avoid the large overshoots and undershoots that occur in simple temerature control systems.

10 July 2007

One of the most popular uses of PICAXE chips is in sound orientated projects. Both the new PICAXE-14M and PICAXE-28X1 support the 08M 'play' and 'tune' commands, which allow the PICAXE chips to play mobile phone ring-tones directly via a piezo sounder.

09 July 2007

We have been wanting to produce this Nixie Clock project for a long time and now it has finally come to fruition. It has the warm, fascinating glow of Nixie tubes with their hypnotic counting action, mixed with a cool blue glow from a high-brightness LED from underneath each tube. It makes an eye-catching display, both during the day and at night.

08 July 2007

It seems these days it's not enough to protect your property - if the b*****s want it enough, they'll go to extraordinary lengths to steal it. What you need is the evidence to help catch them - and this could just do it for you!

06 July 2007

Elsewhere in this issue (and indeed previous issues of SILICON CHIP) we rail against the huge energy wastage of all-too-popular halogen downlights). Perhaps their days are numbered...