Elektor @ 60: The Engineering Continues

All year, we're celebrating Elektor's 60th anniversary. In the May/June 2021 edition of Elektor, we highlight some of the most exciting projects and articles from the past 60 years. Many of the articles are freely available until June 30, 2021, for non-members. (Of course, if you are a member, you can access all the back editions available in the languages of your choice.) Take a look.

Edwin Amplifier (1975) 

From its early years, Elektor was known for its unusual homebrew audio projects, and that has remained true even to the present day. A “pioneering” design in 1970 was the Edwin Amplifier, which was a very simple audio amplifier by today’s standards that featured a quiescent output stage. It became a classic and is one of the most copied audio amplifiers of the last century. Read on
 

The Story of Valves (1984)

Who isn’t fascinated by valves — you know, those “fragile glass things with all sorts of complicated-looking bits and pieces inside”? This article is classic Elektor. Whether you are an old-school electronics buff or you are a sucker for contemporary designs that mix high-end electronics with cool-looking retro tubes, you’ll love this article. Read on

Plotter (1988) 

In a time when plotters could only be found in laboratories and engineering offices, Elektuur published the design of a very simple self-built plotter. The parts for the plotter cost a pittance compared with a real plotter, and felt pens were used for the drawing pens. Later, an HP-GL driver for the plotter even appeared. Read on  
 

EPROM Simulator (1989)

When Elektor engineer Clemens Valens started in what is now called embedded system design, he quickly discovered that reprogramming EPROMs was rather time
consuming. Therefore, when Elektor published the 1989 EPROM simulator, he immediately built one. Uploading firmware to a target board became as simple as copying a file to the PC’s parallel printer port. Much faster than Arduino today and not involving bootloaders, Clemens and his colleagues used it for years. Until the PC’s parallel port disappeared and microcontrollers with built-in flash memory took over… Read on

Surround Sound Processor (1995) 

In a time when surround-sound devices were just appearing on the market, Elektor came up with a homebrew circuit. The circuit worked without special Dolby ICs, because they were not available for homebrew, but the Elektor lab still managed to design a decoder with conventional means that expanded the existing stereo sound with a mid and surround channel. The PCBs were in short supply. Read on

GBDSO Gameboy Digital Sampling Oscilloscope (2000)

The Nintendo Gameboy Digital Sampling Oscilloscope (GBDSO) presented in the October 2000 issue was another smashing hit and was one of the first completely assembled modules available in the Elektor Store. Initially, we were only going to have one batch produced, but in the end, the demand turned out to be much greater than we had expected. I lost count of the numbers of “very, very last batches” we were ordering. Apparently, there were many readers who still had an unused Gameboy lying around and wanted to give it a second life as a portable measuring instrument. Read on 

E-Lock: The First Elektor Chip (2014)

Elektor produced its own chip. In 2014, the E-Lock chip showed up, integrated wired Ethernet, ADC, I²C, DAC and some GPIO with secure communication and encryption. Equipped with hardware encryption and security elements, it was meant to be used for the upcoming IoT. This is one of the curious Elektor projects, as some internals of
this chip remained a mystery. We may never know what core they used and how the internal registeres worked. Newer chips like the ESP8266 or some from WIZnet have taken its place. Wired Ethernet has still its place but users now demand more and more IoT wireless solutions. Read on 

More Engineering

Want more classic Elektor projects and engineering tutorials? In July 2021, we'll highlight some of the most interesting articles from past summers. Don't miss it. The engineering never stops!