digital electronics

Big Clive tears down a cheap eBay digital caliper, explaining its capacitive linear encoder and measuring its quiescent current. He finds it surprisingly accurate and repeatable for its price.

Adafruit's Ladyada interviews Paul Horowitz, co-author of The Art of Electronics. He discusses how the book came about and the third edition.

Ben Eater shows how to build logic gates out of transistors, including NOR gates. It is part of his clear hardware-from-scratch teaching style.

Ben Eater finishes building a minimal VGA video card from logic circuits. He explains analog RGB signals, stores an image in an EEPROM and builds a simple digital-to-analog converter to display it.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Corridor Digital's comedic fake video of a Boston Dynamics robot fighting back against its human tormentors, made with motion capture and VFX.

Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org gives real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit depth and dither using real audio equipment, including both digital analysis tools and vintage analog bench gear. It shows that sampled audio is not stair-stepped and corrects common misconceptions about digital audio.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

Ben Eater's short update announcing his plan to build another 8-bit computer from scratch on camera. It kicks off the breadboard computer series that became widely known.

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

A roughly 3.7-hour Lex Fridman podcast with Pieter Levels, the solo developer behind over 40 startups. They discuss programming, viral AI products, indie hacking and digital nomad life.

Unity's real-time cinematic teaser 'Enemies' from its Demo Team, showcasing HDRP lighting, strand-based hair and an advanced digital human toolkit. It is a short showcase of high-end real-time rendering.

A short project video in which Greg Raiz turns a 32-inch eInk display into a wireless digital newspaper showing daily front pages. It runs for months on battery, and the code is published on GitHub.

Electronics hobbyist bigclivedotcom tears down a cheap USB power supply with a manufacturing fault that carries full mains voltage to the USB ports, showing the risk of electric shock.

Shahriar of The Signal Path tears down and experiments with Keysight's UXR real-time oscilloscope, which offers 110GHz bandwidth and 256GS/s sampling, and compares architectures from Keysight, LeCroy and Tektronix.

Big Clive gives a 38-minute beginner's guide to identifying common electronic components and what they do. He keeps the maths minimal and aims to fill gaps for people just starting out.

A Corridor Digital parody of a Boston Dynamics promo, showing a CGI military robot trained for combat that goes rogue and refuses to kill a robotic dog.

Part 2 of a Q&A workshop with security researcher Jacob Appelbaum from April 2012, covering mobile phone security, cellphone forensics, state repression and surveillance. Topics include booting Tails from USB and surveillance self-defense resources.

TechAltar's history of Philips, once Europe's largest tech company and a world leader in lighting, radio and physical media. It traces how the company sold off or spun out its businesses, until little remains but the licensed name.

CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.

Ben Eater gives a detailed look at how an NPN bipolar junction transistor works and what it does. It is an eleven-minute explanation aimed at building real understanding of the device.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

Afrotechmods plays with 2600F ultracapacitors that can dump hundreds of amps, shorting them to vaporize bits of metal. Along the way he explains the three most important capacitor equations. The uploader warns that the capacitors are not designed to be shorted.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar explains how a full bridge rectifier works, the building block of AC to DC converters, with his usual humor and a demonstration of the circuit.

Dave Jones of EEVblog looks at a sub-3-cent microcontroller from Padauk and other obscure Chinese manufacturers. He shows how to find such parts and where to buy them in stock.

Dave Jones of EEVblog shows hand soldering of surface-mount parts, including drag soldering and tack-and-reflow of 0.5mm fine-pitch ICs, with solder paste and hot air.

Shawn Hymel of DigiKey introduces KiCad and explains how printed circuit boards are manufactured. It is the first part of a beginner series that builds a 555 badge project.

Jeri Ellsworth demonstrates a PMOS transistor she fabricated herself in a home chip lab. She shows some of its electrical characteristics.

Dave Jones builds the Evil Mad Scientist discrete-component 555 timer kit, then tests it and explains the internal circuitry of the 555 at transistor level. He finishes with scope waveforms.

Applied Science builds a replica Apollo DSKY using an electroluminescent driver circuit and screen-printed conductive ink, with source and PCB files published.

A three-minute demonstration of professional hand-soldering techniques for multi-lead surface mount parts, to IPC class 3 criteria.

Tech Ingredients demonstrates how microwaves work and how they affect objects at range, then shows ways to defend against them. It includes a correction about rectifier output frequency.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

mitxela shows his KiCad plugin that rounds PCB tracks to give circuit boards organic, melted-looking layouts instead of rigid geometric ones.

Ben Eater explains why he builds computers on breadboards, including testing their signal behavior on an oscilloscope. It is a companion to his 6502 breadboard computer series.

Big Clive does a complete teardown of a lithium phone battery, taking apart the protection circuit, case and the cell itself. He notes it was risky because the cell was not discharged first.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

Technology Connections explains why car turn signals appear to drift out of sync at stoplights and how thermal and other flasher designs work. It also covers how synchronization could be achieved.