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[GranTotem] is delighted by the sparks put out when a capacitor is rapidly discharged. But he’s not impressed at the relatively slow process of connecting them to a power supply for a recharge. So he built this auto-charging station for his capacitors that provides a shockingly good time almost continuously. Check out the video to see what we mean. We always like [...]

Tags:  fun capacitor charger charging-station capacitors misc hacks  

[Gil] recently wrote in to tell us about some awesome research going on at UCLA. Apparently by layering some oxidized graphite onto a DVD and tossing it into a lightscribe burner, it’s possible to print your own super capacitors; some pretty high capacity ones at that. For those that are unaware, supercapcaitors are typically made [...]

Tags:  print research supercaps gil capacitors graphite chemistry hacks  

[glytch] sent in a tutorial on replacing dying capacitors on a motherboard, and we honestly can’t think of a better subject for an introductory tutorial. There’s nothing like having your friends think you’re a wizard for bringing broken electronics back from the grave. For the repair a dead motherboard was [glytch]‘s quarry. After taking a [...]

Tags:  motherboard glytch tutorial introductory-tutorial capacitors quarry repair hacks  

If you’ve ever torn into very old equipment for a little refurbishment, you’ve seen ancient capacitors among tube sockets and carbon resistors. These caps are long past their life expectancy and are dried out. Putting a brand-new metal can cap in a piece of equipment from the 40s just seems wrong, though. Luckily, [unixslave] posted [...]

Tags:  equipment tube refurbishment tube-sockets capacitors resistors classic hacks  

Tim wrote in to tell us about this simple hack where he replaced the stock button lights with some really cool Blue LEDS on an ’87 BMW. He uses some capacitors, to achieve the effect that it takes a bit for the charge to drain out so the lights stay on for a bit after [...]

Tags:  hackaday links bit tim blue-leds capacitors hackaday  

Regular reader [Grenadier] wrote in to let us know about his newly published hacking hardware trading post called The Junkbox. Apparently when he’s not blowing up capacitors or building his own high voltage ones, he makes time to code up a website where you can buy, sell, and barter leftover components. We have something like [...]

Tags:  reader Hardware bartering junkbox capacitors high-voltage misc hacks  

A few years ago, [Beth] came up with the idea of using an AVR as an RFID tag. She’s gotten sidetracked with a few other projects in the meantime but her idea has surfaced again, this time as a duct tape RFID tag. The build is just four components: 0.1 µF and 1 nF capacitors, [...]

Tags:  tag avr rfid beth rfid-tag capacitors duct-tape microcontrollers  

[grenadier] wrote in to show us a video of some capacitors being blown up. Yup, that’s it. Just some capacitors being blown up. You might be wondering what there is to learn from this video. The answer is… nothing. It sure is fun to watch though. We’re all busy trying to find some nice hacks [...]

Tags:  video blowing grenadier capacitors hacks home entertainment  

We have been featuring some home made capacitors this week, and [Mike] wrote in to share his with us. While rolled capacitors are nice, they can be somewhat difficult to construct and grow to unwieldy sizes as capacitance and voltages increase. His solution is to stack the layers up using plastic plates. In this forum [...]

Tags:  capacitors plastic plate mike plastic-plates capacitance HackIt  

Rolling your own electronics components can be fun, but can also help in explaining how certain items actually work. [Addie] from The Toymakers recently set off to figure out how capacitors work, by making her own. She understood the general concept behind capacitors and how they are constructed, but she wanted to see how it [...]

Tags:  fun rolling roll toymakers electronics-components capacitors misc hacks  

That’s exactly what [Kenneth Finnegan] figured out with his original investigation into low powered MSP430-based circuits. He was able to keep a count-up timer running off of 20F worth of capacitors for over 10 weeks. Although quite impressive by its own merit, many people left comments that questioned whether similar results would be seen in [...]

Tags:  investigation msp low kenneth-finnegan finnegan capacitors timer clock hacks  

[Jeri Ellsworth] recently released another video in her “A-Z of Electronics” series – this time Capacitors are the subject. As a penance for my boneheaded AC Capacitor suggestion yesterday (I swear it was lack of sleep talking), [Caleb] suggested that I be the one to write this article. Since I’m not an electrical engineer (I [...]

Tags:  capacitors electronics jeri caleb jeri-ellsworth electrical-engineer lack-of-sleep news  

We look at a lot of projects that have microcontrollers in them. That’s because microcontrollers do cool stuff, but there are still plenty of tricks you can pull off with analog circuits. [Osgeld's] latest project explores this realm, controlling the discharge of capacitors through an LED. His setup uses just nine components and, if you’ve [...]

Tags:  analog beginner concepts analog-circuits capacitors cool-stuff misc hacks  

[Jim] was the happy recipient of 11 non working Itona VXL thin clients. The units he received were 800Mhz CPUs with 256 MB of Ram and 256MB of storage. None would power up. Upon internal inspection, he found a common theme. Leaky bulging capacitors in the power supplies. Since these came with custom 50W power [...]

Tags:  power vxl itona jim thin-clients thin-client capacitors pcs hacks