480: Surprises Early In The Game

Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components.

Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons. His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site.

Here is a 30-day trial for the O’Reilly Learning System. You can take a look at Jerry’s Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami. 

Transcript

478: The Map Is Not the Territory

Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.

Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database, 

You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Transcript

448: Little Squiggles All Around

Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. 

First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io

Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja

Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja

Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.

Transcript

314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space? (Repeat)

Mohit Bhoite makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art.

Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite

Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables.

Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics.

Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow).

Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers

Mohit can be found on twitter as @MohitBhoite

Transcript

419: Fission Chips

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns.

You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits

Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects:

Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes:

Transcript

A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.


412: Inductors Don't Have Feelings

Tom Anderson returned to the show to describe how transistors and passives work. We discuss everything from vacuum tubes to diodes to transistors (PNP and NPN) to resistors and capacitors. We search for synonyms among the confusing terminology of cathodes, plates, emitters, anodes, grids, bases, and collectors. 

This was a tech heavy episode so little bit of brushing up on terms may be useful before (or after):

Transcript.

398: Clocks Get Into Everything

Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics.

One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts.

Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (wiki). (We also talked about Bode plots (wiki).)

Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds.

The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic.

Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.

358: Woodturning Influencer

Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online) spoke with us about artistic projects, retro-future aesthetics, and scientific communication. 

She shows and describes the projects on YouTube: Emily’s Electric Oddities including the Optical Sound Decoder, Port-A-Vid, Hairy Cacti, and the Lissajukebox.

Many of Emily’s professional writings can be found on Wevolver, usually redirected to sites where they are published.

314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space?

Mohit Bhoite (@MohitBhoite) makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art.

Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite

Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables.

Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics.

Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow).

Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers

Donate to DigitalNest by the end of 2019 and get your donation matched! Thank you to the listener who is doing the match!