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The LED flasher circuits below operate on a single 1.5 volt battery. The circuit on the upper right uses the popular LM3909 LED flasher IC and requires only a timing capacitor and LED.... [read more]

In most countries it is now mandatory or at least recommended to have a rear fog light on a trailer with the additional requirement that, when the trailer is coupled to the car, the rear fog light of the towing car has to be off. The circuit shown here is eminently suitable for this application. The circuit is placed near the rear fog light of the car. The 12-V connection to the lamp has to be interrupted and is instead connected to relay contacts 30 and 87A (K1, K3). When the rear fog light is turned on it will continue to operate normally.... [read more]

This is basically a Schmitt Trigger circuit which receives input from a cadmium sulfide photo cell and controls a relay that can be used to switch off and on a street lamp at dawn and dusk. I have built the circuit with a 120 ohm/12 volt relay and monitored performance using a lamp dimmer, but did not connect the relay to an outside light.... [read more]

You can't expect great performance from such a simple detector-based meter. Sensitivity is just adequate enough to get a basic idea of the power that your transmitter is capable of.... [read more]

This current-limiting circuit, shown in this example as part of a small bench power supply, could in principle be used in conjunction with any dual-rail current source. The part of the circuit to the left of the diagram limits the current at the input to the dual voltage regulator (IC4 to IC7) so that it is safely protected against overload. The circuit shown produces outputs at ±15 V and ±5V. The voltage regulators at the outputs (7815/7805 and 7915/7905) need no further comment; but the current-limiting circuit itself, built around an LM317 and an LM337, is not quite so self-explanatory.... [read more]

This circuit controls a load (in this case a dc brushless fan) based on a temperature compared with a setpoint. THe transduced is a diode in the forward polarization regime. In fact when forward biased, the forward voltage drop accross a diode has a temperature dependance, in particular has a negative linear(ish) slope. This because of the boltzmann distribuition, causing electrons to pass to the conduction band thermically, lowering the voltage drop accross the diode.... [read more]