How to Brew Your Own Conductive Ink
An engineer gets creative and mixes up a batch of conductive ink to make his son a birthday present.
Heathkit: An Employee’s Look Back
Heath Company was the largest kit company in the world. Heath designed and put practically every type of electronic product into kit form. Its products, called Heathkits, were exceptionally popular and many are still in use today. Recently, electronic design talked with Chas Gilmore, who was a Heath executive. For those of you who fondly remember Heathkit and miss its products, here’s a look back at this amazing company and the lessons it offers.
Oscilloscope Fundamentals Poster
Learn how to check the attenuation of your probes, how to check probe compensation, how to connect the probe ground and how to connect the probe tip to the signal you want to measure. Also learn how to avoid pitfalls such as not seeing a signal, aliasing and how to use the built-in help button when all else fails.
Steve~W8SFC says
Conductive ink – what an idea for cheap throw away electronic gadgets like those musical greeting cards. I wonder how long the duty life of circuits using this technology lasts in real world use? The last application I worked with that involved ink and electromagnetic capability was MICR – I was employed maintaining check processing machines that read the ink characters on the bottom of checks. I wonder if anyone still uses magnetic ink character recognition anymore? There was a whole line of machines used in bank check processing departments that read and added MICR to the bottom of checks as they were proccessed for payment. These MICR characters are still on paper checks, however I believe the magnetic ink has been abandoned as most bank machines that deal with checks are high speed optical readers now.