Hobbyist Dream - Weller Soldering Iron

Rework/repair tools, soldering guns and irons and accessories. 60 Watts, 240v Temperature Controlled Soldering Station. This is My Iron and a stand i made.

There’s no mystery about soldering; it’s as easy as you make it. Follow a few simple rules, and metal joins metal like magic. This little book gives you the rules in pictures—with as few words as possible. All you need do is follow through, step by step, and youll solder sound joints. 

 Weller Soldering Tips : Your Guide to Easier Soldering

 History - "Cooper Industries origins extend back more than 170 years to a small iron foundry in Mount Vernon, Ohio, started by brothers Charles and Elias Cooper in 1833. Today, Cooper Industries has become a leading worldwide manufacturer of electrical products and tools and hardware."

Electronic Product Production and Manufacturing

Some Features

• PU240T power unit,
• TC201T soldering pencil,
• PH1201ESD stand and sponge
• A lighted rocker switch indicates on/off status
• Comes with PTA7 tip
• ESD safe to protect sensitive components

This is close to what i have, which is WTCP-S

QRP and homebrew by DL2YEO

"My name is Udo and I am living in the small village called Spenge, about 15 km north of Bielefeld. The DARC radio club is 'OV Widukind - N59' and the locator is JO42FD. I spend a part of my freetime with designing circuits and home-brewing electronic devices..."

QRP and homebrew by DL2YEO 

• Front Panel Design
• Some useful Tables
• 13.8 V / 15 A from a PC
• 250 W S.M.P.S.
• Analogue Frequency Display
• Oscillators

 

"The electronics industry uses several methods for labelling front panels and enclosures, including screen printing, press forming, erosion, lasers etc.. The common factor of these techniques is that they are generally beyond the home constructor. Having these parts specially made commercially can be very expensive, and the only alternative is standardized scales and fonts."

PY2WM JK De Marco Projects

An Amateur Radio Enthusiast from Brazil. JK De Marco. In these pages Hams will find his ideas on QRP, Antennas and Complete circuits.

PY2WM JK De Marco Projects

“One test result is worth a thousand expert opinions”. This has been attributed to a range of people, but most authoritatively to Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist.

A 40 dB RF Attenuator - "To measure power of a high power transmitter, or to be able to observe the output signal on an oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer, it is necessary that the signal is attenuated in accordance with the instrument, while it must be ensured that the transmitter is "seeing" the correct impedance. So it requires an attenuator that works with three ports (input, output, and output attenuated), all while maintaining the correct impedance of 50 ohms.

The circuit assembly and is shown here in EMRFD and also in the QST. When properly calibrated can be used for precision measurements in section 0-500 MHz, or a a calibration capacitor C1, can be used for the range of 0-50 MHz with reliability."

Other Projects and Ideas

• Simple Homebrew Coil Winding Machine
• Qrp-Br Spectrometer
• Simple ESR meter
• Swr Power Measuring mW To KW
• 5 Volts Reference Voltage Calibrator

PJ Tool & Supply - Papa John’s Toolbox

They have unique variety of  tools for professionals, hobbyists, and do-it-yourself enthusiasts.The Business started 50 years ago by buying and selling of surplus merchandise from the US Military

PJ Tool & Supply - Papa John’s Toolbox

The Helping Hands magnifier is a great hands free device for holding small items in a fixed position for soldering and other intricate work.

Helping Hands Magnifier



PJ Tool & Supply
40-H Corbin Ave. Bay Shore, NY 11706, USA

Step Down Capacitor - No Heat

Sometime in the eighties, I had to change a blind timer design due to non-availability of a component. A high resistance relay 600 ohm coil was not in supply, 150E was available. The Power to timer was derived from a resistor, I put a 0.47uF 630V and it Worked !. This design of mine, deriving a low voltage from a capacitor shown on right adaptation became popular. I used a 0.47uF 440V AC or 630V DC Plastic Capacitor.

This circuit has been drawn from my memory and i have not tried it out again, just see if it is ok and then try. You should use the fuse of 100mA a slow blow if you want but it is very important. This circuit has to be enclosed in a plastic sealed enclosure to avoid contact.

Mains Voltage Indicator with a LED

• Mains Voltage Current LED Indicators
• Simple Mains Voltage monitor LM324
• Mains Voltage monitor using LM3914

Cornfield Electronics - Mitch Altman

Mitch Altman, president and founder, invented the company's hit product TV-B-Gone® and turned the product into an international success practically overnight.

Cornfield Electronics - Mitch Altman

Solder your ArduTouch kit together, and it works! You can make way wonderful music, sound, and noise.



Use the ArduTouch Library or hack the existing sketches to create your own cool synthesizers.
The documentation is getting good enough to learn how to use Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to make your own sounds for your own projects.

Cornfield Electronics, Inc.
1800 Market St. #123 San Francisco, CA 94102, USA

Beetle Robot guided by Light

First have a look at this How to Build a Robot a BeetleBot. This sparked the long lost memory of a book i read around 35 years back. My age was in single digits. This was when i had neither an idea of electronics or could afford any parts.

I had built many physics projects like weighing scale, gramophone, telegraph system, crystal radio. I will try to explain these later. Calling bells, gears and magnets from the flea markets my source of electricity & magnetism.



I read a hobby book from UK for children. It was a Beetle Car Bot, with four wheels and 4 light sensors. It could be LDR or photo-transistors, i do not remember. The light sensors were at the four corners of the car. The maneuvering was by variation in the speed of each wheel. It was based on germanium transistors mostly.

Four large lamps like 40W, had to be mounted on the ceiling, at the four corners of the room. By turning on and off these lights, this bot could go anywhere in the room. The whole book with pictures was dedicated to one bot and how-to build one.

Now that we have PIC and AVR; we can use Dimmable LED Lightning arrays to guide the bot. The challenge is in the mechanics of the bot, we have to forget that we have wireless for some time. Try this out.

GainClone Chipamp Audio Amplifier

Gainclone or chipamp is a type of audio amplifier made by do-it-yourselfers, or individuals interested in DIY audio. It is a design based on high-power integrated circuits, particularly the National Semiconductor Overture series.

GainClone Chipamp Audio Amplifier

The Gainclone is probably the most commonly built and well-known amplifier project amongst hobbyists. It is simple to build and involves only a few readily accessible, inexpensive parts. As an amplifier it is highly regarded by many in the DIY community.



GainClone Amplifier Rod Elliott (ESP)

"The amp is based on the Project 19 PCB, so uses a pair of LM3876 (or LM3886) power opamps, run from a ±35V supply. ...........The power supply is conventional in almost all respects. I used a 160VA transformer, a 400V 35A bridge rectifier, and a total of 20,000uF per supply rail - 4 x 10,000uF caps in all."

Recording Technology History

1877 - Edison made the first recording of a human voice ("Mary had a little lamb") on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph Dec. 6 (the word "Halloo" may have been recorded in July on an early paper model derived from his 1876 telegraph repeater) and filed for an American patent

Dec. 24. John Kruesi built this first practical machine Dec. 1-6 from a sketch given to him by Edison that was made Nov. 29 (not on "Aug. 12" that Edison mistakenly wrote on another sketch in 1917).

Recording Technology History - https://www.aes.org/aeshc/



When Kruesi heard Edison's first words Dec. 6, he exclaimed "Gott in Himmel!" (but these words for "God in Heaven" were not recorded and thus have been forgotten). Others before Edison had tried to record sound, but Edison and his tinfoil phonograph were the first to succeed.

History of sound recording

The phonograph expanded on the principles of the phonautograph. Perfected by Thomas Edison in 1878, the phonograph was a device with a cylinder covered with an impressionable material such as tin foil, lead, or wax on which a stylus etched grooves.

DIY Radio Control Electronic Projects

This project, called "Simple-Timer" is a programmable Timer and electronic switch with an integrated LiPo Battery Monitor that is based around a PIC microcontroller.



The "Simple-Timer" includes a fairly accurate timer that is programmable (via pushbutton) by the user and can be programmed to time a 5, 10, 15, 20,25 or 30 minute event. When the timer/switch is enabled (tap small pushbutton), the onboard LED indicates the output is active by lighting solid (the circuit also outputs the same voltage as your supply/battery voltage using a PN2222 NPN transistor or a high current MOSFET).

Tom's Home Automation with X-10 Schematics Collection

Electronix Express - For Schools and Industry

Distributor of electronic components, test equipment and tools. Custom electronics kitting and value-added services. -  https://www.elexp.com/

Electronix Express - For Schools and Industry

Some of the products they supply include Anti Static Products, Toolkits, Soldering related, Inductors, Logic Probes and Pulsers.

A Benchtop Multimeter,  4 ¾ digit, 40,000 count true RMS AC with Built-in USB & RS232 Interfaces.



Bench Digital Multimeter DM422B

Other features -• Data save and recall with software, Triple display, (main, sub-left, sub-right), 40 segment bar graph display, duty cycle, Temperature function.....

True RMS, USB & RS232 Model

Electronix Express
900 Hart Street Rahway, NJ 07065, USA

Makerbot - 3D Mechanical Prototype Synthesis

The basic setup you'll need to build a plastic extruding CupCake CNC machine. from Bre Pettis
Makerbot - 3D Mechanical Prototype Synthesis. https://www.makerbot.com/

Makerbot is an open source robot that helps people make robots that make things.



"The only fear is that it can Replicate itself" -   ....When i had posted first..

MakerBot Industries is a Brooklyn, New York-based company founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach "Hoeken" Smith producing 3D printers. MakerBot builds on the early progress of the RepRap Project. - 2013 updated

Amplifier.cd - measuring instruments - audio

The Content consists of theory, test, analog technique and measuring instruments for amplifiers, electronics and Hifi. by Ralf Richard Ohmberger

Amplifier.cd - measuring instruments - audio



A Tutorial describes fundamental ideas of electro-technology and the general amplifier and audio technology. The test equipment gallery shows measuring instruments - older, historical and partly new.

Obsolete Test Equipment Gallery

The gallery shows measuring technique, with which electronics are developed. Some are special and classic devices, which are still in use and some already represent a historical value. Many of these devices have special functions, which are very popular. The side does not intend to show newest test equipment from the portfolio of the manufacturers (some devices excluded).

One Watt Mains LED Lamp or Tubelight

Lots if Light on One Watt, yes this works, but should be built by those experienced in High Voltage usage and Knowledge of insulation techniques.

Home Made Circuits.

This has to be encapsulated in a insulated fire retardant plastic enclosure. You can change the values around what is indicated to experiment with types of White LED available.

This project is not for Youngsters or those who are still learning. High Voltage can cause injury and can be fatal too, when used or applied without experience, training or supervision.

Arduino and Freeduino Knowledge

Things are easier than before, there is so much more you can do with this. Starting with a Embedded Project with Arduino type of uC is easy. A PC USB inteface for testing your code. Analog Interface is good for trying out Measurement or Robotic Projects.

Freeduino began as a collaborative project to publish open-source Arduino-compatible production files. The files that resulted from this project allow users to create boards that are 100% functionally, electrically and physically compatible with Arduino hardware. Over time, Freeduino has come to mean hardware that is "Arduino-compatible".

Arduino and Freeduino Knowledge



Freeduino is a free-form version of the Arduino, in that is not developed under a centralized design process.There is no Freeduino team, or anyone to ask permission of: anyone, anywhere, can design and produce a Freeduino product, no questions asked, no royalties paid.

It's sort of like electronic harware anarchy- or democracy, depending on how you look at it. We derived the Freeduino files from Arduino for exactly this reason: to see what the Arduino project would have looked like if it had open hardware distribution and manufacturing.

The Hardware Book - HwB

Hardware Book. Internet's largest free collection of connector pinouts and cable descriptions. Connectors, Pinouts for connectors, buses, Cables, How to build serial cables and many other cables. Adapters How to build adapters. tables with info. like AWG.

HwB - The Hardware Book - Joakim Ögren



Some Topics

• Universal Serial Bus (USB)
• Binary conversion
• Serial Port Loopback (9 CheckIt)
• Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T

Labcenter Electronics - Proteus Design Suite

The Proteus Design Suite is wholly unique in offering the ability to co-simulate both high and low-level micro-controller code in the context of a mixed-mode SPICE circuit simulation. With this Virtual System Modelling facility, you can transform your product design cycle, reaping huge rewards in terms of reduced time to market and lower costs of development.

Labcenter Electronics - Proteus Design Suite

Co-simulation of microprocessor software within a mixed mode SPICE simulator.

• Available for PIC, 8051, AVR, HC11, ARM7/LPC2000 and Basic Stamp processors
• See your code interact with simulated hardware in real-time.
• Interactive peripheral models for displays, keypads, etc.
• Over 8000 analogue and digital device models.
• Extensive single step and debugging facilities including system wide diagnostics.
• Works with popular compilers and assemblers.

Proteus Virtual System Modelling (VSM) combines mixed mode SPICE circuit simulation, animated components and microprocessor models to facilitate co-simulation of complete microcontroller based designs. For the first time ever, it is possible to develop and test such designs before a physical prototype is constructed.

PCBWay - PCB and Assembly Services

This is a Sponsored Post, The contributions from these Sponsor Firms help enhance and improve the delabs websites and services.

PCBWay -  PCB  and Assembly Services

PCBWay is a PCB manufacturer in China. They offer the most cost-effective PCB prototype services. The also manufacture larger quantities and provide product assembly services.



Axiom: 100kW motor controller

It is a 3 phase motor controller. It takes a DC voltage and generates 3 sinewaves for driving a motor, conceptually similar to those small ESC for drones and bikes. The difference is that this particular setup can safely work with a 400V battery, flowing 300Amps all year long.

"In order to give support to many electronic enthusiasts who want to build projects but do not have enough money, PCBWay is the first manufacturer who gives them at a low price."

Six reasons why PCBWay is the best PCB manufacturer

Considering a large proportion of electronics enthusiasts are students or beginners, PCBWay has created dedicated channels for sponsorship to encourage these electronics enthusiasts to create their own projects. PCBWay has sponsored more than 1000 projects so far which include robots, rockets, racing cars and so on. PCBWay has also sponsored Makerfaire, SHA2017 and other activities.

(Above content provided by the sponsor firm.  Refined and moderated by delabs)

Fritzing is Product Design or EDA in Simplicity

"Fritzing is an EDA - Electronic Design Automation software with a low entry barrier, suited for the needs of designers and artists. It uses the metaphor of the breadboard.."

Fritzing is Product Design or EDA in Simplicity

"in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their Arduino and other electronic-based prototypes, and to create a PCB layout for manufacturing."

Fritzing Starter Kit to start learning Arduino

What do you get? The ultimate beginners book teaches you everything you need to know through a series of practical--yet playful--exercises. And that playfulness is the key! There is a paper robot who can turn his head; a fortune teller who is (of course) never wrong (no guarantee on that); a dinosaur who relays the news on your Twitter stream and a pong game on a big LED matrix display.



Fritzing's goal is to provide easy tools for documenting and sharing physical computing projects, producing layouts for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and teaching electronics.

Museum Of Electricity - Charles Brush

Yes, there were electric lights powered by central stations before Edison's! Carbon arc lamps saw extensive use throughout the USA and the world from the late 1870s on. - Charles Brush

Museum Of Electricity - Charles Brush

The General Electric Company was formed in 1892. It was the result of a meger between the Edison General electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Company, which themselves incorporated several other companies.



Electricity, technology, and lots of arcs and sparks!

Museum Of Electricity contains Vintage Electrical and Historical images and description. They include the Edison Lamp, Tesla Coils, Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity and the .....

Amazing Jacob's Ladder

So how do they work?  First two conductive metal rods are positioned in a rough “V” shape with a slight space between them at the base.  A sufficient voltage differential is provided from a high voltage transformer to breakdown the air in the gap between the rods.

Single Digit Voltmeter with LM311

I wanted to design a logic probe as a tutorial, but there were many good ones in the web so i have tried to design a single digit voltmeter. This circuit is a design, i am unable to test it now, later if i test it and find mistakes i will update this page. You can help me by pointing out the errors.



First bear it in mind that it is a single digit voltmeter which is 0-9 counts only on the positive side, that is it can measure +0 to +9V DC +/- 1V error. That may not be practical for the cost of the components above. It may be used as a toy logic probe. The reason for the circuit is not for usage, but to give design ideas. The methodology used is Gut Feel - Thumb Rule method.

Lauriers Handy Dandy Little Circuits

A site for electronic hobbyists, includes all kinds of small electronics hobby circuits. Now in the wayback archive.

Lauriers Handy Dandy Little Circuits

Some of the Projects are Temperature Controlled Soldering Iron, Digital Capacitance Meter, DC Power Supply, Six-digit Freg.Counter, RPM Meter, Wirekess Remote Control Switching.



Some circuits are Microphone Pre-amplifiers, FM Transmitters, Transistor tester, Phono Pre-amp to Sound card, Signal function generator, Car Pseudo Alarm project,  Percussion Generators, Audio Equalizer and Metering a Power Supply.

Laurier Gendron, Coquitlam, B.C., Canada.

Elliott Sound Products - The Audio Pages

There is a very wide range of power amplifiers, preamps, guitar/ bass amplifiers, studio equipment, effects, and other projects to build, including loudspeakers, subwoofers, and many others

Elliott Sound Products - The Audio Pages

• Projects - Complete listing of ESP's free project and design articles
• Articles - Informative articles about audio, building projects, and electronics in general
• Buy PCBs for ESP Projects - boards supplied have very comprehensive documentation.

ESP Resource of Rod Elliott - The above pages has many useful ideas and practical tips - delabs

It is by Hobby and DIY - Do it Yourself, Education Starts even without books. Then you need to read to enhance your abilities to Design your own.

In order to compensate or enhance your education, you need to work at a small shop as an apprentice even as a student, not for the sake of project work alone. An Evening job at a factory or a home mini workshop-lab is very essential for obtaining the skills - Solderman 1702

Strippenstrolch - Elektronikbasteln

"Strippenstrolch" is thus a pitch name for "electricians". here you can also see a innovative project that combines rainwater harvesting and a solar energy operated pump to flush toilets.

Strippenstrolch - Elektronikbasteln
 
LED Lighting Projects, Learn Electronics, Basic Circuits and how they work. All in German.

"In Germany one finds this designation now and then for an electrician on the work. Particularly in the winter, if it is still dark in the morning, one often sees "Strippenstrolche" with its building lamp on the building site:"



Combination of Rain and Sun Harvesting
 
"The inspiration for a self-sufficient toilet flush was now close at hand: I thought at first to work with a power supply that provides me the 12V to the pump. But as a power supply would idle constantly consume energy, I rejected this solution. I have long experimented with solar power, so I decided, now a solar system for our toilets to build. On the flat roof of our garage I installed two 12V - 55Wp - solar - modules (Conrad Electronics). This I switched in parallel."

"As a solar storage currently serves an ordinary car battery 45Ah (later 3 pieces with a total of 135 Ah). The charging control acquires an 8A charge controller (Conrad). So all very simple."