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I often run a large number of USB devices on my lab bench—tablets, mobile phones, and various microcontroller projects. I also use a mix of USB-A and USB-C connections. Some older devices don’t behave correctly on USB-C ports due to misconfiguration, so having both types available is important. All of these devices are relatively low
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If you’ve ever tried plugging a passive guitar straight into a computer soundcard, you might have noticed that it sort of works… but the signal is low, the tone is flat, and moving your guitar’s controls can sometimes do weird things. Typical solutions are USB sound interfaces, or dedicated preamps — like the more advanced
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This tiny pre-amplifier converts the low-voltage, high-impedance signal from a guitar into a low-impedance, line-level output—making it suitable for direct connection to a sound card or other consumer audio equipment. Guitar preamps aren’t complicated, but there’s plenty of ways to make mistakes. Get the virtual ground biasing wrong and you’ll introduce noise. Skimp on decoupling
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I’ll be honest from the start: when I began designing the SOT-223 LBA, my RF knowledge is far from complete. I wanted to build something educational—a flexible platform where I could learn by doing, make mistakes, and actually understand what was happening inside an RF amplifier rather than just copying cookbook circuits. The goal was
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Both the RTL-SDR Blog V3 and V4 are low-cost software-defined radios capable of receiving a wide range of frequencies, including the AM broadcast band. However, neither includes an antenna suitable for AM reception out of the box. The most common advice online is to use a long-wire antenna, but this isn’t always practical, especially if
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Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers you can build — and a brilliant way to learn how radio waves become electrical signals. In this post, I’m taking that idea into
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Starting out in electronics can be overwhelming — there are so many tools and gadgets to choose from. To help beginners get going without breaking the bank, I’m focusing on the two tools essential every project: a reliable soldering iron and a versatile multimeter. These are low-cost items I personally use and recommend. Soldering Station
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Generating true randomness on a tiny microcontroller can be a real challenge. Many small MCUs, for all their versatility, lack built-in hardware sources of entropy, yet countless projects depend on high-quality randomness for security, simulation, and creative experimentation. In this post, we’ll look at how to extract genuine unpredictability from a simple, reliable circuit, using
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When I left off in the previous post, I had a working oscillator, but there were still some unresolved issues. We had a functioning oscillator, yet: The second version of this circuit will attempt to address both issues by changing the amplifier topology. Eliminating Miller Effect Capacitance In the first single-transistor version of the circuit,
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I decided to play with a familiar watch crystal – a 32.768 kHz tuning-fork quartz – but without using a convenient microcontroller or crystal oscillator IC. The goal was purely educational: to learn how crystal oscillators really work (phase shift, loading, gain, etc.) by building one from scratch with transistors. I wanted to see if I
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Discrete 32.768kHz crystal oscillator: Attempt 2.November 28, 2025
Silicon Junction 