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This device is a simple timer, allowing to keep on the headlights of your vehicle for about 1min. and 30sec., e.g. when accessing some dark place, without the necessity of coming back to switch-off the lights. Pushing on P1 allows C1 charging to full 12V battery supply. Therefore Q1 is driven hard-on, driving in turn Q2 and its Relay load. The headlights are thus activated by means of the Relay contact wired in parallel to the vehicle's headlights switch. RL1 remains activated until C1 is almost fully discharged, i.e.... [read more]

This preamplifier was designed to cope with CD players, tuners, tape recorders etc., providing an ac voltage gain of 4, in order to drive less sensitive power amplifiers. As modern Hi-Fi home equipment is frequently fitted with small loudspeaker cabinets, the bass frequency range is rather sacrificed. This circuit features also a bass-boost, in order to overcome this problem. You can use a variable resistor to set the bass-boost from 0 to a maximum of +16dB @ 30Hz. If a fixed, maximum boost value is needed, the variable resistor can be omitted and substituted by a switch.... [read more]

There are not many AM transmitters that are easier to build than this one because the inductor is not tapped and has a single winding. There is no need to wind the inductor as it is a readily available RF choke (eg, Jaycar Cat LF-1536). To make the circuit as small as possible, the conventional tuning capacitor has been dispensed with and fixed 220pF capacitors used instead. To tune it to a particular frequency, reduce one or both of the 220pF capacitors to raise the frequency or add capacitance in parallel to lower the frequency. Q1 is biased with a 1MO resistor to give a high input impedance and this allows the use of a crystal ear piece as a low cost microphone.... [read more]

The high current regulator below uses an additional winding or a separate transformer to supply power for the LM317 regulator so that the pass transistors can operate closer to saturation and improve efficiency. For good efficiency the voltage at the collectors of the two parallel 2N3055 pass transistors should be close to the output voltage. The LM317 requires a couple extra volts on the input side, plus the emitter/base drop of the 3055s, plus whatever is lost across the (0.1 ohm) equalizing resistors (1volt at 10 amps), so a separate transformer and rectifier/filter circuit is used that is a few volts higher than the output voltage.... [read more]

A simple and convenient way to interface 2 relays for switching application in your project. This relay driver boosts the input impedance with a regular BC547 NPN transistor (or equivalent). Very common driver. It can drive a variety of relays, including a reed-relay. Transistor Q1and Q2 are a simple common-emitter amplifier that increases the effective sensitivity of the 12 volt relay coil about a 100 times, or in other words, the current gain for this circuit is 100. Using this setup reduces the relay sensitivity to a few volts. R3 and R4 restricts the input current to Q1 and Q2 to a safe limit. Diodes D3 and D4 are EMF dampers and filter off any sparking when the relay de-energizes.... [read more]

This circuit runs a fast battery test without the need of power supply or expensive moving-coil voltmeters. It has two ranges: when SW1 is set as shown in the circuit diagram, the device can test 3V to 15V batteries. When SW1 is switched to the other position, only 1.5V cells can be tested.... [read more]