my recent reads..

LEAP#212 Stay Creative!

A simple project inspired by Make your own LED Sign VU Meter by GreatScott!. The catch-phrase should be familiar if you subscribe to his channel;-)

It's a VU meter, but rather than doing the "bar graph" thing à la LM3915, it pulses the intensity of all LEDs to the volume of the incoming audio.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.



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LEAP#211 Buck Converter Modules

There are many super-cheap buck converter modules available, often based on the LM2596S-ADJ. The "BuckConverterModules" project is where I've recorded notes on the individual units I get to see. So far I've tested four. Two perform really well; two are OK but I have my doubts about the specs of the converter chip.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.






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LEAP#210 Pump up the Jam!

This is a super cheap amplifier kit built around the TDA7297 15+15W dual bridge amplifier chip. All the other parts in the kit are essentially the basic supporting components for the TDA7297.

Performance is very good, although my impromptu speaker boxes don't do it justice. They need better baffles at least, but I can hardly blame Straits Preserves for not making marmalade boxes to the specification of speaker enclosures!

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.



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LEAP#209 a funky little LED display

I found this interesting LED display at Sim Lim Tower, and grabbed one to test. The LED unit combines 7 x 7-segment display (no decimal points) and 7 indicator LEDs (Red-Green-Yellow).

It is marked as "72R02PHIL T9717". I have no idea what that means(!), and of course there's no sign of a datasheet on the net, so pinouts needed a bit of reverse-engineering. All in all, an interesting display unit for a combination of numerical and status display.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.


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