Cars That Think
MARCH 24, 2022
Unfortunately, the cost of buying instruments commercially severely limited how many trackers we could deploy. So, I set about building an open-source ice tracker from DIY components that not only proved to be much, much cheaper but also much more capable than the commercial options. microwatts.
Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
Thanks to a few recent technical and commercial developments, I was able to come up with an e-bike conversion that cost me less than US $200 and yet functions impressively. Here I took advantage of already owning an electric lawnmower, figuring that the 40-volt, 4-ampere-hour battery I had for it would serve well.
Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
Thanks to a few recent technical and commercial developments, I was able to come up with an e-bike conversion that cost me less than US $200 and yet functions impressively. Here I took advantage of already owning an electric lawnmower, figuring that the 40-volt, 4-ampere-hour battery I had for it would serve well.
Cars That Think
APRIL 26, 2022
commercialized around 2010. But feeding it to a second op amp configured as a simple comparator (one that compares the input with zero volts) squared the signal up nicely, with the output switching between the +12-volt and –12-volt supply rails every 3 milliseconds or so. It can be purchased. on Amazon for just US $40.
Cars That Think
JUNE 22, 2022
So when I decided to build a cheap DIY scintillating gamma spectrometer, it was the natural choice—although I didn’t realize I’d find myself navigating around teething problems of the sort that often affect a first-generation integrated circuit. This article appears in the July 2022 print issue as “DIY Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy.”.
Cars That Think
FEBRUARY 25, 2022
November 2018 Hands On article, “DIY Pro Audio ” in IEEE Spectrum , and it convinced me it was possible, although I wanted to go beyond just a power amplifier to something more like my lamented Sansui. In commercial product development, an optimized microcontroller would be the way to go, but for my DIY project, a Pi was perfect.
Cars That Think
NOVEMBER 1, 2023
volts for about 60 hours. So the researchers bought a commercial microgenerator designed for wearable and IoT devices called the Kinetron MSG32. In the future, DIY may not even be necessary. For capacitors, voltage translates to electrons stored —the voltage drop across a capacitor is proportional to its total charge.)
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