Night vision

In this issue of the useless electronic circuits blog, I'll show you how to create a little infrared lamp.

So why is the post title Night vision? well, it just happens that digital cameras can "see" infrared light, thing that the human eye cannot do. There are other things you can do with IR light but i'll leave that to you to investigate, here we'll make a infrared light source that does nothing without some extra gear.

To get started you will need to get about 10 infrared leds, two 1.5 batteries (AA recommended), a push-button and a on-off switch. If you want your lamp to be fancier you can make a digital gate with transistors to only turn the lamp on when you have the on switch and push the button.

To get a bright and reliable IR light that doesn't turn off when one of the leds fail, we are going to wire them in paralel and in two different circuits, like so:
This diagram doesn't have the switches, that is up to you to decide what type of swith you want.

When you turn on this lamp and see where you are pointing it to with a digital camera you'll see a purple light, that's the infrared. The cool thing is that you cannot see the light with just your eyes, so you won't bother anyone when you are using this thing.

New Project

I have been working on a new project, my very own and serious Electronic Circuits For Beginners Blog. I also have a new electronics hubpage, check it out too.

It is brand new so be sure to come often or subscribe to get the latest in tutorials and circuits.
Why make it? because every electronics tutorial I have seen online looks very unprofessional or is a college lecture transcript.

So another project underway, this will be for fun and the other one will be for business.

Go and subscribe, you'll learn a lot about circuits that you can't easily get elsewhere.

Useless Electronic Circuits

Hello there, welcome to my Useless Electronic Circuits blog. Here I will post some cool looking, challenging yet extremely fun electronic circuits you can build.

So to start, a little introduction as to why start creating useless electronic circuits.

I studied Electronics most of my life, since I was in middle school electronics have been my passion and have been creating some circuits since then. Most of the time when you get information about electronics it is to make some tool you can use to do some other task, it made sense, to use knowledge to facilitate a task.

But after making countless semi-useful electronic circuits I became a little bored with them, the thrill of creating them faded after it was done. So I decided to start making electronic circuits that I can have fun with after i finish them, like puzzles, small games, a little gadget or some other stuff I could share with friends and family.

In that process I noticed many people actually like useless electronics, they found them fun and amusing, so I decided to share my cute little circuits online, so that other electronics enthusiast and their friends may benefit from them.

The first circuit is a little puzzle I created. The purpose is to press a series of buttons in the correct order, if you press the wrong one you'll get the "loser-buzzer", kind of like what happens in that know board game that I can't remember the name, where you play doctor.

The exact rules are up to you, there is a little catch to use the circuit, you have to rewire the buttons to make a new combination, but that is easy and doesn't even require technical knowledge.

So here is the circuit diagram:



The puzzle itself is a logic circuit, designed so that only the correct order of the buttons will turn on the indicator leds, any other will trigger the loser-buzzer.

So there you have it, your first useless electronic circuit ready to play. Any questions or comments about this circuit feel free to post them here.

Privacy Policy

I do not collect any personally identifiable information such as names / email addresses.

I use Google Analytics to collect information about visitors, such as location, browser type, and other traffic stats. None of this information is personally identifiable and I use it only for improvement of the site and statistical analysis.

I use the Google Adsense program to display ads in this site, their own privacy policy is listed on their site.

Please note that I cannot control over other people's use of your private information on other sites, so if you leave this site you may want to check their own policies about the information they collect about you.

This site may use cookies, you can disable or delete them if you want.

Any questions please leave a comment and I'll answer it if I can.