How many remote controls do you have in your home? Don’t you wish all these things were better integrated somehow, or that you could add remote control functionality to a random device? It’s a common ...

For switching high-powered loads from a microcontroller, or for switching AC loads in general, most of us will reach into the ...

Fig. 1: Add this relay to prevent shorted transistors in the MW-1. Usually after a transmitter is discontinued, any hope of upgrades or improvements fades. Some enterprising engineers can’t help but ...

The use of transistors for switching things ON and OFF is a key feature of proper hacking. The ability for bipolar transistors to turn things ON and OFF is one of the less known uses while transistors ...

I recently installed a new stereo head-unit in my car. One of the challenges with installing this head-unit was that a certain wire from the harness needed to be grounded, but only after the radio had ...

The two types of standard transistors are PNP and NPN which differs in circuit symbols. The layers of semiconductor material used to make the transistor are denoted by the letters. To keep a straight ...

Relays usually are driven using optocouplers, which offer isolation between analog and digital grounds to ensure that switching currents in the relay coils do not affect the noise margin of the ...

Large scale digital logic began not with the vacuum tube but the electromechanical relay. Although vacuum tubes were available at the time – and were used on competing machines – Konrad Zuse chose to ...