Electronics Forum / Basics / August 2006

Hello, I was reading through sci.electronics.basics and saw that you had
several lcd's laying around.  I am actually looking to get my hands on a 15"
lcd monitor to fix a projector that i made a while ago (lumenlab.com)  I was
wondering two things.  1) any chance you would have ...

What kind of inert gas is typically in a lightbulb?
What happens if you let it out and operate the lightbulb without it?

I'm looking at the manual of a stepper motor device that turns a focus knob
on a telescope. It talks about micro step pause, step size, cycles and
counts. The software program allows one to specify the # of pauses from 1 to
20, and steps (step size, microsteps) from 1 to 255.

Small video and audio transmitters stuffed into what looks like mundane
Mideast street trash, i. e. food wrappers, pieces of rubber painted to
look like asphalt and rickrack would be packed cluster bomb style to
eavesdrop on Hezbollah infested neighborhoods.

I have been looking all over the place for an electric clock that has a
traditional 12-hour dial and a continuously-moving second hand that's
synchronised with some accurate external reference.  I found few web sites
with any, and they were all of industrial suppliers.  However, I ...

Anybody have an idea on the frequency stability of older large low
frequency quartz crystals compared to the stability of small tunning
fork cyrstals used in watches?
I have an old 31.5Khz crystal in a large can that measures about 5/8 by

I am a new member of this group; I am hopeful that I will be able to
obtain some clear answers to my questions.
I am a disabled indivdiaul and I own a scooter; I bought it at a local
outlet (and I must say that I was extremely ignorant about the quality

I've successfully cascaded 4 of the 74LS193 binary up-down counter chips to
count up to full, off a 555 oscillator. Now I'm stuck. I want the circuit to
count to full and then count back down to zero and continue this cycle
endlessly. I've googled my flanges off and can't find a ...

Hello, I am working with a 5V train pulse encoder (Scancon), and I
would like to use this same signal in some different devices, four
tracking cards, two PLC's... Does anybody know if there is an
industrial commercial repeater to do it? The encoder has six signals A,

Greetings.  I need some quick help on this easy question.  I am testing
capacitors in the power supply and other sections of an LCD monitor
using a RadioShack 42-Range DMM with capacitance testing functionality.
When I connect the leads to the electrolytic capacitors (polarity is

First, I want to personally thank everyone who responded to my
questions concerning the batteries in my scooter. Since buying the
"machine," I have had nothing but problems with the batteries and I
joined this group -- thinking that, for once, I might be able to get to

I have a question for the PIC programmers among you.
I'm programming a PIC18F2455, and I tried the code
segment below to exercise the PIC and test the
outputs with an LED.

Maybe people who would try to deal with physical things like transistors and
wire that are made of chemical elements like silicon and copper SHOULD TRY
TO GET A LITTLE BIT OF KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY BEFORE THEY SMART
OFF.

I've got a bunch of general purpose NPN transistors and I want to turn on
and off 15Vdc with 5Vdc from logic chips like binary counters or different
logic gates (XOR, NAND,etc). From what I read about these transistors I
guess I want them to go into saturation which is maximum CE ...

I see so many circuits that want +/- 10 volts or 12 or 15.  But when I
look at transformers, they're always around 6 or 12 volts.  If I want a
+/- 15 volt supply, I'd think I'd want a 36 volt transformer, to put
three volts higher than the output on the regulator.  But I rarely ...