Recent content by KalTorak

  1. K

    Normal gun underwater.

    You guys must've all come in at the end of that episode of Mythbusters... Supersonic rounds disintegrated within a foot or two of the surface. Subsonic rounds, as I recall, made it 5 or 10 feet.
  2. K

    make your own PC? **Nastalgia**

    I've designed three motherboards and built systems around them... that should count...
  3. K

    What is a laser

    And what's the worry there, really? I mean, wouldn't a cheap polarized film on cockpit windows clear that right up?
  4. K

    Is Heavy Water Poisonous?

    If you've got a centrifuge at home, sure - you could separate it from light water that way... Boil it and use gaseous diffusion - that would work, too...
  5. K

    separate 12v rails better than one?

    Hrm. I'm not sure how to answer that. :) Seriously - there's a safety requirement that says any power supply with a rail that can source >240W has to be in an unopenable cage with warning stickers and stuff. And since the power supply cable comes out of its box, the "unopenable cage" would...
  6. K

    separate 12v rails better than one?

    None of the above, and it's very very doubtful you'll ever find a power supply that sources over 20A on any 12V rail. There's a UL requirement that any power supply which can source more than 240W (for DC; I think the requirement's really 240VA, but for DC supplies, same thing) has to be in...
  7. K

    The rectifier problem, backwards...

    okay, that makes sense. I hadn't considered that 120VDC would be sufficient, but I should have - that saves me the trouble of doing the 555 timer, but I'd still have to do one hell of a charge pump. As for actually building the thing, no problem - I do know how to do that sorta stuff. :) 3A...
  8. K

    The rectifier problem, backwards...

    I've got the opposite problem of the guy with the homework problem to take 120VAC and get 6VDC. I've got a lovely Christmas wreath with some lights. It's got a power cord, which implies it wants 120VAC. I wish to hang it on my front door, where there's no convenient outlet, so I'd really...
  9. K

    Needed: Hosptial technicians,signal processers.

    You could just use the RNG in the Firmware Hub, if you're on an Intel chipset with an FWH...
  10. K

    Product need: External PCI Express breakout box

    $800 to $1500? How many units would you expect to build/sell?
  11. K

    Need an electricity formula

    A bunch of AAs in parallel would kinda work; only concern is if they don't have exactly the same voltage - you'd want small resistors in series with each. With a 9V, you'd want to do some sort of a high-efficiency stepdown voltage regulator to get it to 1.2V (or whatever your target is)...
  12. K

    Need to reduce voltage using as few and as small components as possible

    Be careful doing it this way... what everyone's describing here is a linear regulator from 12V to 1.5V, and you're gonna be burning 7 watts as heat in your pass element (the resistor or LM317, depending on what ya pick) for every watt you deliver to your device. I realize that's probably the...
  13. K

    OPAMP troubles

    Uhm, someone did figure out that's a 10k potentiometer, and not a fixed resistor, RIGHT?
  14. K

    Mulitple PCI-Express 16 slots

    There's another way to do it; if you're willing to share bandwidth, you could use a PCI-E fanout switch (analogous to a PCI-to-PCI bridge) to hook multiple x16 devices to a single x16 interface...
  15. K

    Electrical/Electronics wiring circuit HELP! Need to convert 0-150Vdc 10 ~15vdc

    Something screams "perpetual motion machine" here, it seems. The alternator's rectified output creates the electric field that the alternator needs to provide a rectified output?? Anyway, if I black-box that out of the way, the rest is how to step an unregulated high-voltage DC input down to...