pcb

A roughly three-hour screen recording of designing a barebones STM32F4 board in KiCad, covering schematic, four-layer layout and routing, USB and a buck converter. It ends with ordering manufacture and assembly through JLCPCB.

A 100-minute tutorial from Phil's Lab on designing an STM32-based 'black pill' PCB in KiCad 6. It covers schematic capture, two-layer layout and routing, USB, and sending the board for manufacture and assembly.

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

Ben Vallack walks through designing a custom keyboard PCB from scratch using Ergogen and KiCad, ending with a gerber file ready to order from a PCB fabricator. The example is a split keyboard.

A hobbyist builds a prototype full-frame CCD camera from scratch, with open-source design files and a custom PCB. The video shows the first, still rough prototype.

AlphaPhoenix builds a scaled-down version of the Veritasium electricity thought experiment using about a kilometer of wire and an oscilloscope. He measures how the signal actually propagates and explains the result.

Ben Eater explains how a USB keyboard communicates, covering the electrical interface, bit and packet encoding, packet contents, and a comparison with PS/2.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

Adam Savage and engineer Zach Radding examine Lumafield CT scans of Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable alongside cheaper USB-C cables. They explain the internal components that distinguish Thunderbolt from ordinary USB-C.

Big Clive tears down the Dubai lamp, a Philips LED bulb developed with Dubai's ruler for maximum efficiency and long life. He examines its construction and circuitry, including underrun LEDs and many filament strips.

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.

Technology Connections explains that the so-called EV charger in an electric car's charging cable or wall unit is really an EVSE, a smart switch that safely delivers AC power. The actual charger is inside the car. The video covers the safety signaling and mechanisms involved.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1970 Wurlitzer 3400 jukebox to show how electromechanical relays and switches automated its behavior without a computer.

EEVblog interviews Richard Stephenson of NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex about how the 70m DSS-43 dish is used to contact Voyager 2. It covers the ground antenna and low-noise receiver side of deep space communication. This is a 2023 re-release of a 2017 video.

Louis Rossmann examines fuses sold on Amazon that fail to trip at their rated current, including a 2A fuse surviving 8 amps. He uses it to criticize Amazon's lax control over safety-relevant products.

Remastered episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines about the radio, covering its development including Hertz and Marconi experiments and Armstrong's FM radio in animated form.

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.

Technology Connections explains how automatic windshield wiper rain sensors work, using an infrared light source and total internal reflection in the glass.

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.

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.

LightningOnDemand revives a pulsed Lorentz plasma cannon, using modern capacitors to extend its range and increase the delivered energy. It is a high-voltage, high-current hobby demonstration.

Branch Education explains how Starlink works, from the ground dish and satellites to phased-array beam steering and data routing. Animations cover how a beam stays connected to a satellite moving at 27,000 km/h.

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.

Marco Reps builds and tests an open-source 8.5 digit voltmeter based on CERN's high-precision ADC design. The video walks through assembly, soldering and measurement of the resulting instrument.

ElectroBOOM examines whether 5G and other electromagnetic waves can harm people, explaining the EM spectrum and the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. It includes experiments and measurements in his usual humorous style.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

Ben Eater explains how the PS/2 keyboard interface works, covering its clocked serial protocol and scancodes. He builds up the hardware-level understanding needed to read keypresses.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

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.

CNLohr explains how he made an ESP32 produce valid LoRa packets without a LoRa radio, using aliasing and clever signal tricks. It walks through the RF math and shows how far the signals reach.

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.

The Signal Path takes apart a Starlink dish layer by layer, analyzing the phased array RF design, system architecture and integrated circuits, with an X-ray of the RF stack.

A 105-minute technical deep dive from Noise In Space evaluating whether Starlink satellites could work as synthetic aperture radar. It covers SAR signal-to-noise, amplifiers, antennas, duplexing, phased array beamforming and simulations of V2 Mini and V3 satellites.

The creator of ESPARGOS, an ESP32-based antenna array from the University of Stuttgart, explains how it senses phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to localize devices and build a WiFi camera. It demos the Python library and project.

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

Dave Jones of EEVblog debunks the marketing claims of the self-charging nano nuclear diamond battery from NDB Inc. He argues it is no better than existing 100uW betavoltaic batteries, with an added graphene supercapacitor.

Styropyro wires 100 car batteries in parallel to produce more current than a lightning bolt and tests what happens when it is shorted. The experiments, done with other YouTubers, show spectacular effects of extreme current.