Popular Electronics Classics: Ultrasonic Sniffer
About this March, 1963 feature, Popular Electronics asks, “How would you build this circuit today?” Share your ideas with us. The best idea will be rewarded with a $1,000 shopping spree at Adafruit! Note that we’ve retained the old conventions used in the original, e.g., kc versus MHz, μμf versus pf,...
Teslapathic: Mind Control for your Car
The notion of brain waves being able to exert sufficient energy to influence objects would involve nothing short of a miracle—especially considering that the radiance of the wimpy signals emitted by neural activity don’t extend beyond a few millimeters from the skull. Spoon benders need not apply. But moving a...
Pulse Modulation
Publisher’s Note: To complement Dr. Saleh Faruque’s feature story providing an introduction to RF modulation, as well as Casey Spencer’s feature, Teslapathic, which employs pulse position modulation (PPM), we dug into our archives at Popular Electronics and discovered this terrific introduction to pulse modulation, of which PPM is a variant....
Introducing viciLogic
Initiatives such as Codecademy, Khan Academy, Coder Dojo, Microsoft TEALS, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, and others have stimulated a great deal of interest and activity in Computer Science (CS) and Application Programming (AP). Engaging and enabling a global community, and in particular, a significant young audience, is surely leading to...
POP: The Programmable Open Pedal
As an engineer and amateur guitar player, I was looking for a device that allowed me to design my own sound effects and combine them, at a reasonable price. There are a number of amazing pedals and pedalboards out there; their prices are fair, and I would certainly like to...
What Lies Beneath
The Hill of Tara is a grand stage, an ancient host of a mélange of ritual performances played out over millennia—perhaps 4,000 years or more—spanning the Neolithic to the early Christian period. Throughout its occupation, each incarnation of beliefs and practices subsumed into its worldview the expression of the former...
Inside the Fluxgate Gradiometer
This article aims to describe in simple terms how a fluxgate operates, its use as a component in a gradiometer or on its own simply to measure the Earth’s or other similarly low magnetic field. There is no such thing as a definitive fluxgate design, there being many variants, each...
Will Virtual Reality be the Most Unifying Technology Ever?
I’ve had a hard time getting comfortable with the term “virtual reality”. Most people’s mental model of VR contains too much sci-fi, dystopian future baggage. VR technology is often branded as isolating, gamers-only, and a gateway to a future of blind-folded zombies. Since the term VR is here to stay,...
