Bright Flashing LED – traditional analogue...

A flashing LED? What is so special about that, you may well ask yourself. A microcontroller plus a handful of discrete parts, and Bob's your uncle – isn't it? Still, many readers love analogue electronics and so we present a variant that is built entirely from discrete parts and hopefully triggers your own experimentation!

In his article published in the July & August 2016 issue Elektor author Alfred Rosenkränzer presented a wonderfully simple differential probe for oscilloscopes, based around the AD8479 precision differential amplifier. I built one of them immediately and found it particularly suitable for measurements in the audio range, for example. But one small detail was not covered in this article: the power supply used for the probe (or for several of them). Practically all modern oscilloscopes have a USB port on the front panel for data output. Since the power consumption of a probe is very low, it makes sense to use this socket to power the probe.

Occasionally it may be useful to visualize a continuous stream of data arriving through a serial connection as a web page in a browser. But how do you go about? May we suggest a bit of scripting?

The InMotion student team from the Technical University Eindhoven (TUE) in The Netherlands is grabbing this space to publicize they’re working on ‘Electric Refuelling’, a concept which aims to offer a solution to recharge electric cars as fast as you would refuel those with a combustion. Interesting, right? Let’s see what they’re up to...

Here we present a direct-reading audio spectrometer using a microcontroller, a graphic equalizer chip, and not much more. Using seven vertical bars on a graphic OLED display, the instrument covers an equal number of sub bands in the audio spectrum. Two versions are available with different functionality in terms of power supply and audio drive input.

The first edition of the electronica Fast Forward Award (e-ffwd) powered by Elektor in 2016 drew 35 participants from 16 countries and was a resounding success. It will thus be continued and expanded in 2018: The start-up-platform becomes the start-up-week giving all target groups the crucial added value they need.

We all know that electronics are shaping and changing the world as we speak. But while it is obvious in many ways, starting from walking through a door without looking, checking the weather and tide in Hawai within seconds or inspecting a factory across the globe via Internet, statistics and graphs always help to showcase the extent of the transitions.

Elektor congratulates Mouser Electronics, who has been named Distributor of the Year at the 2017 Elektra Awards. Organized by Electronics Weekly, the Elektra Awards showcase the best innovations, people and companies as judged by an independent panel of leading experts and are widely regarded as among the very top accolades in the electronics industry. This is the second time for Mouser to receive this Elektra award.

Terms and Conditions: Microchip and Elektor 2017

Greenpeace says that devices need to be much easier to repair, so they can be used longer. Greenpeace carried out a sustainability study on consumer electronics. Fairphone and Apple received the highest scores. Amazon and Xiaomi were at the bottom of the list.