Electronics Now articles from May 1995

Electronics Now archives from May 1995

DVD coup. (digital video disc)
May 1, 1995... Sony and Philips, proprietors of basic patents on the compact disc and its variations, including CD-ROM, were shocked by an apparent coup d'etat when major Hollywood and consumer-electronics interests backed a competing proposal for a digital...

A.P.E. SMD-250 solder/desolder station.
May 1, 1995... A tool for any sophisticated repair center. The soldering iron is perhaps the most important tool for assembly and repair work in electronics. The basic soldering iron can tackle nearly any job involving common leaded components - not only...

Retreat of the barbarians. (Borland)
May 1, 1995... Growing up can be bittersweet. On one hand, you get to learn the truth concerning many things you were curious about. On the other, you do learn the truth. Borland is the company that never grew up. Throughout the first decade of its...

Green PCs. (personal computers)(Cover Story)
May 1, 1995... Do you want to save money and the environment? Then think green! Everyone wants to save money, and most people want to improve the well-being of our planet. Well, you can do both by simply using such energy-saving computer products as "green"...

The Power Pincher. (keyboard-monitoring device)
May 1, 1995... Whether electric power is generated by nuclear, hydroelectric, natural-gas, or coal-powered generators, one thing is for certain: it costs more today than it did yesterday. You can bet that it will cost more tomorrow than it does today. If the...

Power semiconductors.
May 1, 1995... Power semiconductors are semiconductor devices that have been designed to handle or switch power. They include bipolar and field-effect transistors, thyristors, solid-state relays and a fairly new class of device called the power ICs. There is...

Voltage Cursor Adapter.
May 1, 1995... Have you ever had trouble measuring the voltage value of a waveform on an oscilloscope screen? Are you tired of counting graticule squares and "guesstimating" those values? If so, you need the Voltage Cursor Adapter. It superimposes horizontal...

Magnetic storage tips.
May 1, 1995... You can tame magnetic storage gremlins with these helpful hints. Magnetic-tape and floppy-diskette storage are based on reliable technologies that have been proven over many years for storing analog audio and video as well as digital computer...

The ProCar security system. (part 3)
May 1, 1995... This is the third part of a series of articles about building ProCar, an automobile alarm, anti-theft, and anti-carjacking system. The second part of this article (Electronics Now, March 1995, page 65) picked up on the discussion of ProCar's...

AC motor drives, new BASIC stamps, PIC microprocessor resources, more magic sinewaves, and more.
May 1, 1995... Way back in the seventh grade, I had a brilliant idea on how to "improve" VHF radio vacuum tubes by eliminating all of their internal interelectrode capacitances. That would be achieved by arranging the cathode and plate planar beside each other,...