Tag: electronics
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A brief post to catch everyone up while I'm at work:
Project Byzantium has been hard at work building a PTT (push-to-talk) circuit to support the third milestone of the ISC grant. What we're trying to do, in a nutshell, is this:
We have a couple of Baofeng UV-?R radios that we're trying to interface with laptops running Byzantium Linux. This is a known technology - ham radio operators have been doing datacomm over amateur radio frequencies for a couple of decades but this is a first for the three of us. What is posing a problem for us is …
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Regular readers of my blog (when I post... I'll write about what's been going on soon, promise) know that I keep a sensor net focused on the field of microfacture - personal manufacturing and rapid prototyping. Most of the time I natter on about 3D printing, but depositing layers of material to make something isn't the end-all-be-all of small scale manufacture. The other end of the spectrum - milling, or carving feedstock - is just as useful, and for many applications it's a preferable technique for making things. The thing about automills is that they're not yet as common as 3D printers. People …
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Last week there was a cluster of outbreaks of the future (thanks, Warren Ellis, for the term) in the field of 3D printing that caught me by surprise, not by their appearance but how they appeared in rapid succession to one another.
The first is an industrial grade 3D printer called the Objet1000, which is marketed for the production of full-scale prototypes and industrial models. It has a fabrication platform 39 inches by 31 inches in size (a little bigger, actually, but I'm deliberately dropping decimals today), and can print with any of 120 different substances, of which 14 at …
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Last Friday evening brought with a second attempt at the Chaos in DC meetup in Silver Spring, Maryland. I'd driven out there straight from work because I wound up leaving the office late, and when you factor in travel time it really wasn't a good idea to to do too much driving that night. In other words, there was no way I was going to drive two hours home through rush hour traffic on the DC Beltway, get there when the meetup began to pick up a few things and meet up with Jason, and then drive two hours back …
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In the early 1970's an electrical component was hypothesized by Leon Chua, who was working at the University of California at Berkeley as an electrical engineer. Chua was said to be working on a mathematically rigorous foundation for the science of electronics, and during the course of his work he concluded that a fundamental component was missing. A memristor is essentially a component which remembers how much current has passed through it for a duration of time (technically, there is a relationship between the integrals over time t between current and voltage). While that doesn't seem all that interesting it …
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During my daily morning mainline injection of news on the Net this week, a couple of electronics projects caught my eye that I hadn't seen before. The first is a project from SparkFun Electronics that uses higher voltage than I'm used to working with - a Geiger counter kit with a USB interface. The kit is constructed around the popular ATmega 168 microcontroller, which means that the basic Arduino development kit can be used to write code that pulls samples from the Geiger-Muller tube (powered by a tiny high voltage power supply) and outputs numerical values over USB, where the 'counter …
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A man named Howard Pounds was considered by some in Australia to be a master horologist, or watchmaker. Possessing a surgeon's touch and the patience of the mountains he was one of the rare few knowledgeable enough to repair ladies' watch movements. His talent with clockwork mechanisms was so sought after that he was not permitted to fight in World War II because the Toowoomba Foundry required his abilities far more. Sadly, this master of the most arcane of mechanical arts went beyond in the year 2005. Four years after his passing, Howard's grandson Paul constructed a fitting tribute: a …
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Taking one of Elliott's noisemaker classes at HacDC is a lot like practicing chaos magick: you're never sure what you're going to have to work with at any given time, you don't know what sort of result you're going to get until you're halfway through the process, a large part of your instructions will consist of "Let's try this and see what happens," and you're guaranteed lots of funny noises (often modulated with different kinds of light).
Scaring the neighbors is completely optional.
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Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
A …
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