These days you can buy various types of LED garlands at a reasonable price. With these, you can illuminate various objects indoors or outdoors with interesting lighting effects. When you use... Read more
This circuit is based on a design for a low dropout voltage regulator in the book 303 Circuits (published by Elektor in 1998). The author adapted the design to make the output voltage adjust... Read more
To monitor the filling of a bath, a water tank, or a swimming pool, or to warn when a gully is overflowing, here’s a very simple water level detector built around a CD4011 CMOS quad Gates IC... Read more
The simplest way to make an adjustable constant current source is to use a voltage regulator in a suitable configuration: an example of what is needed is given in the LM317 datasheet. Howeve... Read more
Guitar amplifiers using output devices such as the TDA7293 (100 W) or LM3886 (68 W) are surprisingly often damaged as a result of the excessive supply voltage in the quiescent state. The tra... Read more
Keen cyclists will no doubt have sometimes thought that it would be nice to have some kind of on-board power supply to charge a mobile device such as a phone or a satnav while on the road. T... Read more
The low dropout voltage regulators from the LM2931 series are not just useful for powering microcontroller systems — they can also act as a low-frequency (practically) random noise generator... Read more
The LED bicycle light that we described in the July/August 2009 edition of Elektor has proved very popular. The author was particularly struck by the basic design, but as always, there is ro... Read more
There are presently many switching regulator ICs. However, the STA801 and STA802 provide two switching regulators in a single package, each capable of supplying a maximum current of 0.5 A. E... Read more
Nowadays, there is a whole series of switching regulator ICs that work according to the step-up principle and thus convert the input voltage to a higher output voltage. This takes place usin... Read more
