[Elektor 311 Circuits
Virginie Fayad
This book contains more than 400 simple electronic circuits which are developed and tested in practice by the authors. The technical solutions presented in the book are intended to stimulate the creative imagination of readers and broaden their area of thought. This should allow readers to look beyond the horizons of possibilities and use ordinary electronic items in a new way.
This book includes new and original radio electronic multipurpose circuits. The chapters of the book are devoted to power electronics and measuring equipment and contain numerous original circuits of generators, amplifiers, filters, electronic switches based on thyristors and CMOS switch elements. Wired and wireless systems as well as security and safety systems are presented.
Due to the high relevance and increased interest of readers in little-known or not readily available information, the different chapters of this book describe the use of electronic devices in industrial electronics and for research, as well as new instruments and equipment for medical use, gas-discharge and Kirlian photography.
A number of technical devices presented in this book are related to research of the mysteries of the earth, nature and human beings by using radio electronic devices. This book will be useful for both radio amateurs and professionals.
I used to enjoy reading Elektor magazine and I found their schematic style easy to read. Some of their circuit collections (300 circuits, 301 circuits, and so forth) can be downloaded from the Internet Archive, e.g.: elektor-301-circuits : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
So with that said I want thank everyone who joined in and gave helpful advice and links. I think I have some reading time ahead of me and some redesign and in the process I am sure I will become more adept at KiCad. Its been a great welcoming onboard thread and I will be back with a bigger project, better design, and hopefully better schematics.
A few months ago I was trying to develop a way of fabricating my own text entry keyboard. It was for a traveling project and it needed to be flat, reasonably rugged, and easy to interface to a busy little microcontroller. I explored a number of different solutions from Cherry MX swithces to Capacitive Touch sensors, but ultimately decided to build the keyboard out of SoftPots. If you haven't used our SoftPot Membrane Potentiometers in a project before, they work the same as any standard 10K pot, except instead of varying their resistance by turning a knob, you vary the resistance by pressing down on a strip of conductive material. These devices are meant to be contacted by a spring-loaded wiper and used for detecting the position of mechanical devices, but with the addition of a pull-down resistor they make really nice touch interfaces. If you want to learn more about using SoftPots, check out Jim's excellent SoftPot tutorial.
My theory was that because the SoftPots are so flexible and appear to have been manufactured by lamination, they would probably survive a trip through our "pouch laminating" machine. I would simply position a few of the devices in a laminating sleeve, add a labeled overlay with the keyboard characters over the top, and then laminate it together into a single piece. I started with a small test to see if the SoftPots would still function correctly after they had been laminated:
And it was a success. Not only did the SoftPot not seem to care about being sealed inside a plastic prison, but the touch events were repeatable and reliable. I quickly scaled the concept up to a simple alphanumeric keyboard and was really happy with the way it looked and performed:
After these traveled to an event and worked (mostly) as intended, I put that idea away in my bag of tricks and forgot about it for a few weeks. Later, while cleaning up my workbench, I picked up my test piece and it got me thinking... "What else could I fit through that laminator?" So, naturally, I tried a few things. But first:
And with that out of the way, let's talk briefly about how these things do what they do. A pouch laminator is intended to preserve documents by encasing them in a thin plastic pouch. These plastic pouches are sold in varying thickness from 3mil up to 10mil, and consist of two sheets of polyester coated in a film of hot-melt glue. When you place a document between the two sides of the pouch and feed it through the laminator, the film activates and glues the polyester to both itself and the document. The laminator consists simply of a heating element for melting the glue, and a set of rollers for feeding the lamination pouch through at a controlled rate, and pressing the stack together. The rollers are made from soft silicone rubber, and this is what we're taking advantage of when we send components through that have a slightly prouder profile than a sheet of cardstock.
My first victim was a simple LED throwie. The lithium coin cell battery made me slightly nervous, but the interior of the laminator doesn't have to get very hot for very long to do its job. Also, the soft rollers weren't likely to damage the battery casing. It's also worth noting that the rollers aren't directly heated, so any heat that the subject receives is radiant and not directly conducted. I placed a battery and a color-cycling LED in a lamination pouch, fed it into the rollers, and started imagining what it would be like to clean the burst coin cell out of the disassembled laminator. Luckily, it didn't come to that, and the throwie survived without incident, neatly sealed in polyester:
This was encouraging, so I got a little more fancy. This time, I assembled a simple Pro Micro circuit. The force sensitive resistor modulates how quickly the RGB LED breakout cycles through a rainbow color pattern. Once the circuit was as neatly arranged as I could manage, I sandwiched it into a laminator pouch and sent it through (click for video):
With this victory under my belt, I felt like I could push the complexity one more step before things got too messy. I threw together a simple noise-maker keyboard. I used a medium-sized SoftPot for the main keyboard, a pair of smaller SoftPots for the pitch bend and parameter controls, a number of LilyPad buttons and LEDs for voice selection, and a piezo element as a flat speaker that could be laminated. After everything was assembled and had survived its trip through the rollers of doom, I cut away a section of polyester around the Pro Mini headers and soldered on a connector for the FTDI breakout. (click for video):
So, what's next for laminated circuits? Well, I'm cooking up a scheme to construct a binder with power and ground rails to power a whole stack of these circuits, which you can flip through like a book. If this project ever comes to fruition, I'll write about it in an upcoming blog post. Also, I'd like to experiment with different ways of providing power to projects that are sealed in laminator pouches, such as inductively charging thin lithium cells, or inductively powering the circuit directly.
Please keep in mind that it is now possible to get some reasonably good flat conductors, I even have a nice flat USB cable. When I need to laminate way too thick objects my laminator has a nice reverse switch so that I can bond part of the sheet and back it out, then bond another edge, etc.... for some objects I force air into the packet to act as a pillow, for others I use a small vacuum pump to remove the air to make it more conformant. I also have an attachment for my soldering iron that has a flat disc at the end (10mm) that allows for spot lamination.
As a suggestion for future sampling, maintain the weather-sealing properties through use of the wireless charging coils to power the circuits. Then as you flip through a book of circuits, you could 'wave the magic wand' over the receiver coil to make it come to life.
I think that's a really good idea, I even have a wireless power module on my desk that would probably fit through the laminator... I would have tried it but I only have the one and I didn't want to accidentally ruin it :)
Very very cool write up!I wonder if you could use a laser cutter to cut out sections of the plastic and then laminate your unsoldered, un-masked, PCB and try and use it as a solder mask. With such a low temperature resistance, I'm not sure how that would hold up.
Such an inspiring idea! I've recently bought a load of soft pots to make thin interface for photoshop and I'm considering this, thank you.Question though, not directly addressed I think. When the soft pots are not stimulated with pressure on the track, you get random noise values. In fact, there must be some reading at all times from the component, and as there is no knob or slider, I imagined this would either be random or default to either extreme edge.
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