Recently, I have been trying my hand at a bit more professional electronics photography. When taking pictures, I tried to force a particular type of lighting with several panels of WS2812B LEDs, controlled by Arduino. However, constantly changing the code is quite tiresome, so I built a simple device to control this type of LEDs.
During the communist era, pocket calculators were produced by two companies – Wroclaw’s Elwro and Bydgoszcz’s Unitra Eltra. We will take a look at the constructions made in Upper Silesia at another time, today’s hero will be a somewhat strange and already forgotten construction from the Brda River.
Anyone who starts playing with electronics sooner or later encounters on his way the chip numbered 555. According to many, this timer is one of the chips that changed the world. It is hard to disagree with this especially considering the scale of production and the multitude of applications, about which even separate books have been written. In this material I will tell you a little about this unique chip.
In recent years, LED bulbs have made their way into our homes for good, replacing the now-discontinued tungsten filament designs. Not surprisingly, LEDs compare surprisingly well with other light sources – they consume little energy, can shine in a variety of colors, turn on instantly and do not heat up as much.
Since its inception, all digital machines were meant to serve man and help him perform his daily tasks in the office, on the factory floor or at home. However, in order for a machine to be useful, something was needed so that humans could understand it. Nowadays, it is quite normal to have all kinds of screens on which digital systems display information that we can understand, but this was not always the case.
Practically every day we encounter bar codes of various kinds. Although we don’t usually pay attention to them, they play a very important role in today’s world – the identification of products in the store, the flow of packages in logistics centers or the proper distribution of components in production processes. Barcodes are used in each of these areas, thanks in part to their simplicity. The small size of the code can be easily scanned by an automatic scanner or an operator equipped with the appropriate equipment.
There are cases in which a manufacturer releases a device that is already obsolete on the day of its release, lacking modern solutions. An example of such equipment may be the Soviet calculator Электроника MK-33 (Elektronika MK-33), but are you sure?
In the early 1970s, engineers from the Leningrad Electronic Instrumentation Association “Svetlana” (Светлана) began work on the next calculator, the Электроника C3-07 (Elektronika C3-07). This device was a rather simple design with only fifteen keys, meaning that some functions had to be assigned to the same button. Such a solution was quite problematic, more than once there were mistakes, and also just typing in the right sequence took quite a long time. In the successor to the C3-07, the designers had to eliminate these inconveniences.
ALUs, or arithmetic logic units, are part of every processor today. In the past, they were produced as single, physical chips or a collection of multiple logic chips. In today’s material, I will tell you about the construction, history and operation of one of the first ALUs.
The LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) is one of the simpler designs we can run on an FPGA chip, yet it is very useful. This type of application is primarily used for.
