Wi-Fi Desktop Thermostat

Thermostats are everywhere — in the fridge, in the freezer, on the wall, in the car, everywhere are thermostats except on my desk. Sometimes I want a thermostat on my desk to control, say, a fan because it’s too hot in the room. It may also happen that I need a thermostat to switch off an electric stove when the liquid I am heating has reached a certain temperature, or start a pump when it becomes too cold.

Meet the eSuperBike by American Superbike-building company Roehr Motorcycles. The eSuperBike (what's in a name...?) is claimed to be the world's fastest commercially available electric motorcycle. This electric monster is driven by 2 electric motors supplying it with a combined output of 96 hp. With the eSuperBike only weighing in at just over 225 kg, they're able to get this bike running at a max speed of about 215 km/h! The batteries - with a combined capacity of 7,7 kWh - will provide you wit...

In our fourth exclusive hands-on electric-vehicle mini-review, the e-Solex is up. The people from the Good Bike Company let us give it a spin at the Good!Lelystad event last weekend. Arguably the e-Solex isn't the toughest looking two-wheeled e-vehicle out there, but it sure is a lot of fun to ride! I have to say I’m quite fond of the (real) Solex, both conceptually and aesthetically. It’s small and light, and looks cool. The e-Solex is the newest incarnation of it, which is obvious from the fi...

Let it be no secret that we in Amsterdam like our greens. And so do the people at QWIC! Their Tulp electric scooter is green in every way imaginable: made out of hemp-composite, this electric scooter is totally bio-degradable, silent, clean and durable! The Tulp Vaniek Colenbrander shows the Tulp A week ago, on a very rainy day, me and Augustus visited QWIC’s headquarters, to take a closer look at their Tulp-scooter (Augustus wrote about earlier). Sadly it was too rainy outside to take the T...

It took the genius of Gauss, probably the greatest mathematician who ever lived, to see the proper importance of the discoveries of Oersted: electric current – magnetic needle – telegraph. Gauss and his friend and colleague Professor Weber began experimenting on these lines and in 1832 the needle telegraph was completed. However, neither Gauss nor Weber had the time or inclination to concern themselves with the practical development of the electric telegraph.

Conductivity in the sense it is used in this article is the ability of a substance such as water to conduct electric current. It is expressed in terms of current per unit of applied voltage. It is the reciprocal of resistivity. Conductance is the reciprocal of resistance and is measured in siemens. It is therefore the ratio of the current through a substance to the potential difference at its ends. The tester described in this article is intended for assessing the quality of water, based on the acidity or alkalinity (pH), by means of a measurement of the conductance of the water.

This circuit was originally designed to control the brightness of an electric torchlight, but may find many other applications because of its high efficiency, ease of operation and ability to control (lamp) loads drawing several amps. The dimmer offers brightness control from nil to maximum in 16 steps by means of a small push-button. When the push-button is released, the selected brightness is retained. One of the most remarkable things about this circuit is that it hardly adds to the battery load, its own current consumption amounting to no more than about 4 mA (at a battery voltage of 3.5 V).

Although the electricity supply will rarely fail in most of the UK, unexpected power cuts lasting several hours are not uncommon in many other countries where this magazine is published. Most inexpensive short-range cordless telephones of the ‘base and handset’ type can no longer be used to make calls when the mains supply fails. This article describes a simple, low-cost battery backup unit which enables you to keep telephoning during a power cut.

Distortion, or fuzz effect, units are almost as old as the electric guitar itself. The unit described in this article produces soft clipping, which gives an effect reminiscent of that produced by valve amplifiers. Soft clipping means merely that the signal is not permitted to exceed a certain voltage level. Most listeners feel that soft clipping produces a much more musical sound than hard clipping (in which the tops of the positive and negative signals are chopped off). The unit is intended to be inserted between the guitar and its amplifier.

When playing an electric guitar, you often have to use one or more effects units, since each and every kind of music played on the guitar requires its own special effects (tremolo; distortion; chorus; phaser; flanger; and so on). In practice, this often means that various units have to be plugged in and then out again to make place for others. With the switch unit described in this article all this becomes a thing of the past.