Ever needed a low power 120volt AC power source for your car, van or truck? Well this circuit should do the trick for you. It will supply 15 watts of AC power to a device. It should power lamps, shavers, small stereos and small appliances. If you draw to much power the circuit will shut down all by itself. The output of this circuit is a square wave so there may be some noticeable hum on audio units plugged into it. To reduce some of the hum increase the value of the output capacitor which is at .47uf now. That transistor in the circuit are high power PNP transistors. Radio Shack part number...

When testing circuits with a logic probe, it is sometimes difficult to watch the LEDS on the probe to determine the logic state. With this probe the logic states are audible. This probe is designed for TTL circuits only but could be modified for CMOS. The way it works is as follows. The 5 volt power source will be the circuit under test. Clip the ground input of the probe to the ground of the circuit being tested. The other input lead is used to probe the different chips of the circuit being tested. Any input greater then 2 volts will be high and output a high tone through the speaker. Any...

This simple circuit has helped me out on many occasions. It is able to check transistors, in the circuit, down to 40 ohms across the collector-base or base-emitter junctions. It can also check the output power transistors on amplifier circuits. Circuit operation is as follows. The 555 timer ( IC1 ) is set up as a 12hz multi vibrator. The output on pin 3 drives the 4027 flip-flop ( IC2). This flip-flop divides the input frequency by two and delivers complementary voltage outputs to pin 15 and 14. The outputs are connected to LED1 and LED2 through the current limiting resistor R3. The LED's...

Colour sensor is an interesting project for hobbyists. The circuit can sense eight colours, i.e. blue, green and red (primary colours); magenta, yellow and cyan (secondary colours); and black and white. The circuit is based on the fundamentals of optics and digital electronics. The object whose colour is required to be detected should be placed in front of the system. The light rays reflected from the object will fall on the three convex lenses which are fixed in front of the three LDRs. The convex lenses are used to converge light rays. This helps to increase the sensitivity of...

A milliamp meter can be used as a volt meter by adding a series resistance. The resistance needed is the full scale voltage reading divided by the full scale current of the meter movement. So, if you have a 1 milliamp meter and you want to read 0-10 volts you will need a total resistance of 10/.001 = 10K ohms. The meter movement itself will have a small resistance which will be part of the total 10K resistance, but it is usually low enough to ignore. The meter in the example below has a resistance of 86 ohms so the true resistor value needed would be 10K-86 or 9914 ohms. But using a 10K...

This circuit will detect AC line currents of about 250 mA or more without making any electrical connections to the line. Current is detected by passing one of the AC lines through an inductive pickup (L1) made with a 1 inch diameter U-bolt wound with 800 turns of #30 - #35 magnet wire. The pickup could be made from other iron type rings or transformer cores that allows enough space to pass one of the AC lines through the center. Only one of the current carrying lines, either the line or the neutral should be put through the center of the pickup to avoid the fields cancelling. I tested the...

The circuit above turns on a light corresponding to the first of several buttons pressed in a "Who's First" game. Three stages are shown but the circuit can be extended to include any number of buttons and lamps. Three SCRs (silicon controlled rectifiers) are connected with a common cathode resistor (50 ohm) so that when any SCR conducts, the voltage on the cathodes will rise about 7 volts above the voltage at the junction of the 51K and 1K ohm resistors and prevent triggering of a second SCR. When all lamps are off, and a button is pressed, the corresponding SCR is triggered due...

[b:cd456dcffb]Comments:[/b:cd456dcffb] This circuit, designed on request, has proven to be useful to indicate when the voltage in a power supply line is changing from 120V to 240Vac. It can be used in different circumstances and circuits, mainly when an increase in ac or dc supply voltage needs to be detected. D3 illuminates when the line voltage is approaching 120V and will remain in the on state also at 240V supply. On the other hand, D6 will illuminate only when the line voltage is about 240V and will stay on because the latching action of Q1, Q2 and related components. C1, D1 and D2...

The metal detector shown here has, in concept, been widely recognised as a new genre. The general concept, of which I have developed three embodiments, is capable in principle of matching the performance of an Induction Balance (IB) metal detector. This is the first embodiment to be released on the Internet (the other two were published in Everyday Practical Electronics and Elektor magazines). When this circuit is correctly set up, an old Victorian penny (30mm diameter) should induce a shift in frequency of at least one tone on the Medium Wave band at 140mm (5½"). Apart from using two...

The Superprobe project was designed to see how much could be done with a PIC chip and just a few parts. The image at the right shows the capacitance measuring mode. This device is designed around a PIC16F870, a 4 digit LED display module and very little else. [img:eb8cceb438]http://www.circuitdb.com/download.php?fileID=135[/img:eb8cceb438] [i:eb8cceb438]Note: I have recieved a lot of inquiries on this project. To date, several have been duplicated world-wide. Many have been constructed in other types of cases. As long as the circuit is wired as shown, and the object code (below) is...

A Coil Coupled Operation Metal Detector made from readily obtainable components and using an ordinary medium receiver as a detector. [b:b750c4a5c2]Notes:[/b:b750c4a5c2] The metal detector shown here may well represent a new genre. At any rate, after some exposure, it is regarded as such by those who have seen it. It is based on a standard transformer coupled oscillator (TCO) - hence the name Coil Coupled Operation (CCO) Metal Detector. Although requiring a BFO (in this case provided by a Medium Wave radio), it differs from a typical BFO detector in that its performance far outstrips that...

A Beat Balance Metal Detector made from discrete components. [b:8451936e31]Notes:[/b:8451936e31] Various embodiments of the BB metal detector have been published, and it has been widely described in the press as a new genre. Instead of using a search and a reference oscillator as with BFO, or Tx and Rx coils as with IB, it uses two transmitters or search oscillators with IB-style coil overlap. The frequencies of the two oscillators are then mixed in similar fashion to BFO, to produce an audible heterodyne. On the surface of it, this design would seem to represent little more than a...

The circuit provides an easy yet reliable way to detect the intensity of a.c. (or e.l.f.) fields around the home or workplace. It is doubly effective because it does not merely detect the electromagnetic radiation emitted by electrical appliances, but the electromagnetic energy actually absorbed by the body. The circuit in is a standard charge pump which is charged by the alternating eddy currents induced in the human body by a.c. fields. C1 charges virtually instantly, and is read by a digital (or high impedance) voltmeter. To obtain a very rough translation from millivolts to...