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Avoid smoke with power protection circuit

When designing an electronics device you want to make sure that it won't go in smoke under unexpected circumstances. You never know what may go wrong during life time of device especially if it is powered from mains. Jon Chandler made a great overview of common and pretty simple power protection circuits that may help to avoid lots of trouble. Small circuit between your battery and device may protect it from mistakes like reverse power polarity.

LTC4365

His lists starts with simple series diode which is cheap but may help protect from reverse polarity. Like any other it has a downside – voltage drop (0.7V) that may be a pain for low voltage devices.

IR remote control extender

IR remote control has a limited range and doesn't work when it is out of line of sight. But what if you need to control your appliances even if don't see them. [Michail] suggest to build an IR remote extender that stands between your remote control and device to be controlled.

IR remote extender

Nicer PC HDD activity indicator

Normally computer hard drive activity is indicated with single flashing LED when there is write or read operation performed. [Harvey Wilson] wanted something different then just flashing LED and came out with spindicator. He replaced single LED with 10 LEDs mounted in circular shape.

Multivibrator – back to basics

Multivibrator circuit is one of the first projects you start learning electronics. It is really wonderful circuit widely used for educational purposes and even in end projects as waveform generators. Lots of hobbyists simply grab a microcontroller/Arduino to blink LEDs. But using basic circuits like multivibrator may be cheaper, faster and even fun. [Ray] decided to go through multivibrator theory and explain its working in detail step by step.

Circuit itself consists of two transistors, two capacitors and four resistors. When powered, circuit generates square wave signal that can be used to flash LEDs, or clock other circuits. You will get an intuition on what causes multivibrator continuously generate. Formulas allow to calculate resistor and capacitor values for particular frequency. Especially if you are starter in electronics build one on a breadboard and do some experiments, why not to start wit Christmas lights.

Free Pachube for everyone

Pachube is a great service that allows sending and receiving data over internet. You don't have to take care of most technical aspects as they are providing lots of ready apps and surely the API itself. Thanks to that API data is transferred like feeds to and from internet. Quite long time this service has several account options: free with lots of limitations like number of requests or number of feeds.

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by Dr. Radut.