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A Nixie Clock, the Hard Way
Notice: no vintage Hewlett Packard test equipment was harmed in the making of this overly complicated Nixie clock. In fact, if anything, the HP 5245L electronic counter came out better off than it went...
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Rŏ̽ta: Counting, With Style
Rǒta counts things. That’s it, really — what a cheap little mechanical counter does with a thumb press, or what you can do by counting on your fingers and toes, that’s pretty much all that Rǒta does....
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Empty Spools Make Useful Tools, Like Counters
What’s the deal with getting things done? There’s a Seinfeld anecdote that boils down to this: get a calendar, do a thing, and make a big X on each day that you do the thing. Pretty soon, you’ll thirst...
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To Turn an ATtiny817 into a 150MHz Counter, First Throw Out the Spec Sheet
One generally reads a data sheet in one of two ways. The first is to take every spec at face value, figuring that the engineers have taken everything into account and presented each number as the...
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Automatic Coin Sorter Brings Order to Your Coin Jar
Few things hold as much promise as the old coin jar. Unfortunately, what’s generally promised is tedium, as one faces the prospect of manually sorting, counting, and rolling the accumulated change of...
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Op-Amp Challenge: A Logic-Free BCD
Of digital electronics, a wise man once said that “Every idiot can count to one.” Truer words have rarely been spoken, because at the end of the day, every digital circuit is really just an analog...
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This Block of Rubber Can Count To Ten
Complex behaviors can arise from simple mechanics, and that’s demonstrated by a block of rubber that acts as a counter. The block contains beams, and by controlling how the block is compressed, the...
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