pcb

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

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.

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.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down an Esinomed Infoview medical tablet computer built around an 800MHz AMD Geode board, exposing extremely shoddy construction and design.

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.

Styropyro tests an eBay laser tattoo removal device and finds it is a roughly million-watt pulsed laser, powerful enough to ignite air in the beam. He had bought it hoping to salvage an Nd:YAG laser cavity.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows that a plain laser diode can measure sub-micron vibrations from centimeters away using self-mixing interferometry, and can also be used for range-finding.

A three-minute demo of a series circuit with three LEDs that behaves in a surprising way, posed as a question of how it works.

BigClive tears down a heated electric shower head of the type common in some countries, often called a suicide shower. He examines the construction and the dangerous fault conditions, such as poor insulation and missing earthing.

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.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

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.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds a DIY microbalance from an analog panel meter with an optical servo loop. It reaches about 5 micrograms of precision and is used to weigh a single eyelash at around 35 micrograms.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a fake Apple A1265 USB charger and shows the shortcuts that make it unsafe, such as poor isolation.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether USB Type-C connectors are more durable than Micro-B by repeatedly plugging and unplugging them. In the test, Micro-B failed at around 8000 insertions while USB-C kept working.

Two experimenters hold blades of grass near a radio transmitter antenna and hear the AM station through the arc between antenna and grass. It is a short, informal demonstration of unintentional AM demodulation.

A short University of Washington demo of ambient backscatter, where battery-free devices communicate by reflecting existing wireless signals. It shows devices powered and linked by ambient RF.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Dave Jones of EEVblog investigates why a 4K BenQ monitor switches itself off, tracing it to static discharge from an office chair. He uses an oscilloscope to examine the static impulses.

A one-minute clip where an AM radio station can be heard through the arcing of a high-power transmitter tower.

A short demonstration of radioteletype (RTTY), a digital communication mode used in amateur radio, showing what the signal sounds like.

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.

Dave Jones of EEVblog demonstrates that a frequency counter can detect gravity through the 2g tipover effect on quartz crystal oscillators. He shows the reading shift as the instrument's orientation changes.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.