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First Quarter, 2012
Previous Issues
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| Let's drop in
on Wily and look over his shoulder at his latest project.... |
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Shooting Range Flasher |
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Wily received an
email message from the owner of a shooting range, not far from his home.
The guy wanted a unique indicating device which would detect when a steel
target was hit with a bullet and flash a bright light.
The guy said
that when hit the steel targets he used at his range make a loud “ping”
sound. But, when his shooting range was busy, often a shooter could
not always hear the ping sound from his target above the other sounds along
the range. Could Wily come up with something? Wily was intrigued
and scheduled a visit to the guy’s range the next day..... |
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con't page 7 |
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Wily Widget,
the Lone Inventor
with Gadget & Gizmo |
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| WHAT
THE WORLD NEEDS NOW is an....Old style Wind Mill for Electricity
Generation |
| My new Lubbock Texas home has
a lot of wind. I would love to be able to tap into that renewable
energy resource. However, my neighborhood home owner’s association has
covenants which restrict the installation of wind generators on tall
towers.... |
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con't on page 6 |
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Testing LED
Light Intensity
By: David Johnson
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| The human eye is
not a good instrument for measuring how bright a light is. Our eyes tend
to be logarithmic. When making a comparison between two lights, unless
one light is considerably brighter than the other, you will not know which is
really brighter. You need a linear device to make such a measurement.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make
good intensity measurements. A fairly accurate device is the bare
silicon photodiode. As the cart below illustrates, a silicon photodiode
has a broad light response, covering invisible ultraviolet, through the entire
visible spectrum, into the invisible near infrared band. These parts act
as small solar cells. The DC current generated by them is directly
proportional to the..... |
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story con't on page 4 |
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Power Supply Problems -
Excessive +5v Supply Current Drain
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I was troubleshooting a
circuit board the other day, which had a +5v power supply problem. I
thought I would walk you through some of my techniques for tracking down power
supply problems. Circuit boards with power supply problems are quite
common, mostly due to the number of parts that are touched by a DC supply.
The board I was fixing was
part of a complex video processing circuit I designed some 15 years ago.
One of my old clients had collected about 10 of the old boards and needed them
tested and repaired.... |
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story
con't on page
3 |
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Bad Alkaline Battery Charger |
| A while back I bought a battery
charger, which claimed to charge alkaline 1.5v cells. I seem to use a
lot of 1.5v batteries. I have many flashlights, computer mice and MP3
players which only work with standard 1.5v alkaline cells. The markings
on almost any alkaline battery say that you should not attempt to charge their
devices. They warn that doing so could cause the battery to leak or even
explode. Still, many people claim to have some success in putting some
energy back into these otherwise disposable batteries. The purchased
charging device claimed to have the “intelligence” to properly charge
batteries. So, I thought I would test the thing..... |
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story con't on page 5
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Water Train
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Many states in the US are in a brutal drought.
Reservoirs, ponds and lakes, which supply drinking water to many
cities, have been drying up. Even water wells have been
forced to go deeper to bring up the valuable water..... |
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story con't on page 2 |
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