Elektor Labs Summer Contest 2019 –10 Days Left To Show Us Your Home Lab

LimeSDR Mini -- Functions Maxi! A pocket-sized SDR for transmitting and receiving

Although Elektor Magazine and their Labs have been relatively slow to jump the bandwagon called retro & vintage electronics, and specifically the revival of the Nixie tube, the projects and background articles we did see were delightful and well-engineered. The prime examples are the New Precise Nixie Clock and the Q and A on Nixie Tubes. In the wake of their Nixie and VFD clock projects, free-lance contributing designers Ilse Joostens and Peter S’heeren from Belgium (just around the corner from Elektor Labs) now surprise with another gem for in the living room: a thermometer with a traditional degrees C/F column but a “warm” readout. The secret: a perfect match of the old and the new.

The MightyOhm Geiger Counter is a device for detecting beta and gamma radiation levels. Because radiation is so harmful, you may want to keep an eye on the environment you live in and invest in a radiation detector like the MightyOhm Geiger Counter reviewed here.

If (like most electronics buffs) you only have two hands with ten fingers on each, but lots of measurements to make on your boards, here is an interesting gadget for you. It’s the missing link between crocodile clip and contact point. It allows you to measure, continuously, hands free, with contact points without mechanical attachment, held in place by a flexible gooseneck arm. The probes are interchangeable and the support is very stable.

Help your children dream STEAM! Neither a toy nor a gadget, this WaterColorBot is an attractive educational project, involving girls, kids, adults, and teachers into active robotics and creative making. It not only provides opportunities for young people to build and learn about computer numerical control and to learn how to program a robot. It can be used far beyond that horizon. The WaterColorBot V2.0 is essentially a specialized pen plotter, using watercolors to paintbrush onto paper before your eyes. It dips its brush in water, goes and gets the right color. Standard watercolor paints and paper are used (no specialized supplies required).

DJs and fans of light shows are devotees of USB/DMX512 converters to control their projectors from their laptop PCs. Unfortunately, those found in the commercial world are often not (well) isolated from the mains voltage. Here, on the other hand, an isolated DC/DC converter powers the isolated RS 485 transceiver. Like any DMX device worth of the name, this new converter has an XLR socket.

Although we usually expect them to surprise us, the British know how to make a grand announcement. Even their most anticipated surprises remain real surprises. And sometimes very good surprises. So it is with the new version of that celebrated British single board computer that is found everywhere, even hidden within the labs of NASA. The star of the week is Version 4 of the Raspberry Pi.

This is a submission from Rutronik about their distribution agreement with the Chinese manufacturer of Bluetooth technologies Shenzhen Minew Technologies Co. Ltd. Founded in 2007, Minew counts Google, Here, Huawei, and Alibaba among its IoT customers from over 100 countries. The agreement encompasses all of Minew’s products.

This is a submission from Microchip Technology Inc about the announcement of an expanded data center portfolio and its entrance into the memory infrastructure market with the industry’s first commercially available serial memory controller.

Best of the BAY-ern [10]: IoT & electronics getting integrated in Munich, Bavaria. Easier to create robotic applications. Summer Contest 2019

The Telit LM960A18 Mini PCIe (mPCIe) data card delivers high-speed data rates via Advanced LTE for products in network appliance environments such as routers, mobile gateways and access points.