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Transmitting power and data through thick metal enclosures
So let’s say you have a submarine, or a nuclear containment chamber which has walls made of thick metal. Now let’s say you want to transmit power or data through this wall. Obviously you’re not going...
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Powering an Ultrasonic Transducer
[Lindsay] has a wonderful writeup about a new toy in the shop, an ultrasonic transducer. The 28kHz, 70W bolt-clamped Langevin transducer by itself is not much use, you need a power supply, a horn to...
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Making a Speaker with Resin, Magnets, and Wire
A speaker is just about the simplest electronic component possible, just barely more complex than resistors and wire. They’re also highly variable in their properties, either in size, shape, frequency...
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Turning an Ordinary Pen into a Covert Radio Receiver
[Ben Krasnow’s] latest project will be good for anyone who wants a complicated way to cheat on a test. He’s managed to squeeze a tiny FM radio receiver into a ballpoint pen. He also built his own bone...
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Beyond Measure: Instrumentation Essentials
The physical world is analog and if we want to interface with it using a digital device there are conversions that need to be made. To do this we use an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) for...
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What’s a Piezo Optomechanical Circuit?
Ever hear of a piezo-optomechanical circuit? We hadn’t either. Let’s break it down. Piezo implies some transducer that converts motion to and from energy. Opto implies light. Mechanical implies…well,...
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Hacked Diamond Makes Two-Atom Radio
It used to be pretty keen to stuff a radio receiver into an Altoid’s tin, or to whip up a tiny crystal receiver from a razor blade and a pencil stub. But Harvard researchers have far surpassed those...
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Acoustic Levitation with a Twist
Don’t blame us for the click-baity titles in the source articles about this handheld “acoustic tractor beam”. You can see why the popular press tarted this one up a bit, even at the risk of drawing the...
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Floating Ants and Drops of Liquid with an Acoustic Levitator
Amuse your friends, amaze your enemies, and perplex ants and other insects, insofar as they are capable of perplexment. Accomplish all this and more with this handy dandy homebrew acoustic levitator....
View ArticleFail of the Week: The Little Ultrasonic Knife That Couldn’t
We all know the feeling of an idea that sounded great when it was rattling around in our head, only to disappoint when we actually build the thing. It’s a natural consequence of trying new stuff, and...
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The Diaphragm is the Coil in These Flexible PCB Speakers
Speakers used to be largish electromechanical affairs, with magnets, moving coils, and paper cones all working together to move air around in a pleasing way. They’ve gotten much smaller, of course,...
View Article72 Tranducers For Acoustic Levitation
Levitation has a way of arousing curiousity and wonder wherever it appears. There’s a multitude of ways to do it, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and ideal use cases. [Julius Kramer] tried...
View ArticleDIY Ribbon Element Upgrades A Studio Microphone
For those with some experience with pro audio, the term “ribbon microphone” tends to conjure up an image of one of those big, chunky mics from the Golden Age of radio, the kind adorned with the...
View ArticleFlex PCBs Make Force-Mapping Pressure Sensor for Amputee
What prosthetic limbs can do these days is nothing short of miraculous, and can change the life of an amputee in so many ways. But no matter what advanced sensors and actuators are added to the...
View ArticleSimple Ultrasound Machine Shows The Skeleton Lurking Inside Us All
That first glimpse of a child in the womb as a black and white image on a screen is a thrilling moment for any parent-to-be, made possible by several hundred thousand dollars worth of precision medical...
View ArticleCapture a Star in a Jar with Sonoluminescence
If nothing else, [Justin Atkin] is persistent. How else do you explain a five-year quest to create sonoluminescence with simple tools? So what exactly is sonoluminescence? The short answer is as the...
View ArticleWood and Carbon Rods Used for This Handsome and Effective Microphone
Anyone who was active in the phreaking scene or was even the least bit curious about the phone system back in the Ma Bell days no doubt remembers the carbon capsule microphone in the mouthpiece of many...
View ArticleBrass and Nickel Work Together in this Magnetostrictive Earphone
When you go by a handle like [Simplifier], you’ve made a mission statement about your projects: that you’ll take complex processes and boil them down to their essence. So tackling the rebuilding of the...
View ArticleHands-Free Haptic Braille Display is Making Waves
In the last few months, most of the world’s population has shied away from touching as many public things as possible. Unfortunately, anyone with low vision who relies on Braille signs, relief maps,...
View ArticleCool Off with a Piezo and a Glass of Water
Some cool-mist humidifiers work by flinging water at a vaporizer, but our favorite kind uses a piezoelectric transducer. These work by using high-frequency sound waves to pound the surface of the water...
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