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Sorting out the Velleman MK170 Christmas Star
Last Christmas I bought a Velleman MK170 Christmas Star project for my Wife to build. She often shows interest in my various electronics projects and I thought it would be a good way for her to build something that she could show off to friends and family, whilst at the same time teaching her a […]
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Simple circuit for controlling LED brightness
Recently I was asked to produce a circuit to create a variable ‘dim’ control for an existing LED based exhibition. I decided to go with a simple 555-timer based design which provides control of the pulse width of an output, whilst keeping the oscillation frequency fixed. The circuit is shown below. It’s an unusual design, […]
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Happy Valentines Day Project
Happy Valentines Day! A few years ago I created a little valentines day project, shown in the video at the end of this post. It’s basically just a multi-vibrator circuit with two groups of LEDs, arranged as an inner and outer heart: The full schematic is shown here, click on it for a full enlarged […]
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RC5 Decoder
Introduction I completed this design a number of years ago when I was still learning to program. In fact, this was my first “proper” project that I directed my new-found programming skills towards. My programming skills have improved by many orders of magnitude since, and with that in mind I was a bit ambivalent about […]
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Hacking a Nokia7710 GLCD
Hack! The other day I stumbled across an old Nokia mobile phone sitting helplessly in the drawer. It’s not really that old, but already it’s pretty useless in terms of what we expect from a mobile phone in this day and age. What should I do with it? Throw it away? No! What self-respecting electronics […]