Electronics Now articles from April 1995

Electronics Now archives from April 1995

Laser light show.(Cover Story)
April 1, 1995... Have you ever been impressed by a professional laser light show at a nightclub or a concert? Now you can impress all of you friends by creating your very own laser light show! This easy-to-build project works with any laser to create unlimited...

Put that phone on hold! (telephone hold circuit)(Cover Story)
April 1, 1995... If you have touch-tone telephone service, you can now put a call on hold from any phone in your house by plugging this simple device into any telephone jack. The universal hold circuit works with any phone that has a keypad with a # key. To put a...

Voltage converters.
April 1, 1995... This article explains the design of a many different low-power electronic voltage converters. These circuits generate higher-value supply voltages from low-voltage DC sources and negative DC voltages from positive DC voltage sources. The circuits...

Custom meter faces.
April 1, 1995... SKIP WITHROW, WBOBBE Even in today's world of digital electronics there are still times when an analog meter is the better choice for displaying voltage, current, or other signal levels. With the use of a personal computer and a laser printer,...

Telephone cost meter.
April 1, 1995... Have you ever been shocked by an excessive phone bill? If so, PhoneMeter's for you. This low-cost, "intelligent" device allows you to monitor the cost of your phone calls - as you make them. In addition, it also provides useful clock and alarm...

A high-tech career for the '90s. (electronics technicians)
April 1, 1995... BILL HANSEN COULDN'T HAVE BEEN happier, as well as being surprised. At 28, and only three years out of a two-year technical college in Los Angeles, he had just landed a lucrative electronics technician's position at Advanced Electronics, Inc.,...

Off-line regulators.
April 1, 1995... This article explains how to build two lightweight, miniature power supplies. One will provide an adjustable output between 8 and 12 volts DC at as much as 100 milliamperes. The other will provide a precision 5-volt DC output. Off-line linear...

Hardware hacker.
April 1, 1995... My incoming letters tell me that some readers ought to get back to the fundamentals of efficiency and economics before they write me letters - either to praise or condemn me. Several recent letters gave me the idea that the time was right to do a...

Audio update. (audio-video cable tester)
April 1, 1995... I'm departing from my usual column format to share with you a gadget that I built to alleviate a personal problem I had with shielded connecting cables. The problem, of course, is that they don't always stay that way - shielded and connected,...

Computer connections. (book 'Unauthorized Windows')
April 1, 1995... Windows. Can't live with it, can't live without it. But what is it? What is its relationship to DOS? Is it an operating system, as Microsoft has in recent years started to claim? Or is it simply an oversized branch grafted onto that spindly old...