In this video from The Toymakers, Addie makes a capacitor. It’s great to see more people rolling their own components! Neat!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!
Join over 38,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord
CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org
New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — New Products 11/15/2024 Featuring Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Charger with 3.3V Buck Board! (Video)
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Select Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: PyCon AU 2024 Talks, New Raspberry Pi Gear Available and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
Adafruit IoT Monthly — Halloween, WiLo, and more!
Maker Business – Adafruit Daily — Checking in on Intel
Electronics – Adafruit Daily — Are you grounded?
Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !
5 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
There was an issue of Popular Electronics back in the day that had a reprint of a “what hams did in the 20s and 30s or parts” that described rolling your own caps.
They also made their own resistors out out graphite, but more useful were test-tubes full of water with leads submerged in them. Which also made an interesting variable resistor that might reach the boiling point during heavy use.
That DIY water resistor sounds neat, John. It sounds a lot like an electrolysis tube, which may account for the bubbles.
@John
Open measuring flask full of salt water with one fixed electrode. Depth of the other electrode in the solution varies the resistance. Amount of salt varies the conductivity.
One of the Boy’s Book of Experimentation projects that would have most politically correct, everything must be safe people running in terror involved a board, two carbon rods from the old Eveready/Rayovac 6 and 9 volt batteries. One set had 1/4" carbon rods, the other 1/2", some sort of glass flask to hold the salt solution and instructions to build a framework to hold another set of the carbon rods. You were building a carbon arc lamp with instructions to start with the electrolyte rheostat having its rods no more than a half inch into the salt solution when you first tried to draw an arc. They also showed you how to make an electric furnace using an iteration of the carbon arc under an inverted flower pot.
Funny that none of my friends and I died of this stuff. We knew it was dangerous, but most of us build careers on what we learned.
Addition to the above. You were running this off of 120VAC.
And distilled water isn’t a very good conductor, hence the addition of salt to get the ion flow going.
This would’ve been much better delivered as text. There was about 30 seconds of informational content, and 7:36 of filling time. I’m also very disappointed by the lack of discussion of any theory at all.