- Video shows florescence, showing how electrical signals move down the leaves of sensitive plant Mimosa pudica
- Reenacting wear patterns on recreations of medieval book illustrations
- E-ZPass reduced the rate of premature births to mothers who live near toll booths by 9.1%
- How to understand cough medicines, including why some cough syrups don’t really have active ingredients
- Python 3.14 Will be Faster than C++
- OpenRCT2 an open-source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2
- The Peking Duck Exemption
- How shaders render bottles in the game Half-Life: Alyx (YouTube)
- How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
- About the “baseline” scene in Blade Runner 2049
- Fast line hiding with a WebGL shader for pen plots
- A linear stepper motor PCB racetrack
Open Circuits: Now available
Earlier this year, I wrote about my then-forthcoming book, Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, co-written with our regular collaborator Eric Schlaepfer.
Open Circuits is a coffee table book full of close-up and cross-section photographs of everyday electronic components. And, it’s now shipping! As of today, it’s available in hardcover from your local bookstore, as well as to purchase online and in electronic versions.
We also just launched a new website for the book, with links of where you can purchase it as well as lengthy galleries of images from the book and of outake photos.
We put up a list of sellers on the website, including direct from No Starch and our own store, where signed copies are available.
Flickery Halloween Fun
Shane from Dark Illusion Studios shared this video using our candle flicker LEDs to make skull sconces. Our flickering LEDs are great for lots of different Halloween projects.
If you still need some inspiration, check out our Halloween Project Archives:
Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and … we’ve organized dozens of our Halloween projects into categories: costumes, pumpkins, decor and food.
Windell and Eric talk about Open Circuits on Embedded.fm
Windell, along with Eric Schlaepfer, was recently on the Embedded.fm podcast talking about their book, Open Circuits. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript. You can still sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win a copy of Open Circuits or a Three Fives Soldering Kit.
Linkdump: July 2022
- Reversible sequin clock
- How a man discovered that his wife was world’s best Tetris player
- Origami Cafe is a virtual meeting spot for folders
- A youtube playlist of Calculating Device Demonstrations
- Animations embedded in 3D printing
- Big Clive tells us about the “Most deadly project on the internet“, high-voltage art, made with microwave oven transformers.
- Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? Preprint
- Fossil crinoid with its tracks
- Edible tape for your burrito
- Open source design for a magnet and piezo based stick and slip micropositioner
- Robocop on set and getting suited up for the 1987 film.
- Spigot: A command-line streaming exact real calculator.
- The Julia Roberts paradox of Ocean’s Twelve
- Weaving book with integrated loom
- History of salt production in the South Bay and the current state of wetlands reclamation
Open Circuits
I’m very pleased to announce my forthcoming new book, Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, co-written with Eric Schlaepfer.
Open Circuits is a coffee table book full of cross-section photographs of electronic components, along with photos of those components in context, and descriptions of how they work. It’s coming this fall from No Starch Press, and is available now to pre-order.
From the rear cover:
Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the surprisingly beautiful design waiting to be discovered inside everyday electronic devices. Through painstakingly prepared cross-sections and stunningly vivid close-up images, the book reveals a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder. From simple resistors and capacitors, to cutting-edge circuit boards and retro Nixie tubes, the authors’ arresting imagery transforms more than 130 electronic components into awe-inspiring works of art that will delight engineers, artists, designers, and photography enthusiasts alike.
My co-author Eric Schlaepfer has been our regular collaborator on projects such as the Three Fives and XL741 soldering kits, as well as the MOnSter 6502 and our Uncovering the Silicon project.
Open Circuits is coming this fall in hardcover, and is available now with a pre-order discount and early-access PDF from No Starch Press.
It’s also available to pre-order at your local bookstore — who we sincerely encourage you to support — as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major booksellers.
Three Fives Kit in DIYODE Magazine
DIYODE Magazine is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 555 and used our Three Fives Kit for an accompanying build.
It’s awesome to see this workhorse of a chip getting well-deserved attention, and we love seeing our kit included in the festivities.AxiDraw used for developing techniques for bioprinting
Scientists working on developing techniques for bioprinting used the AxiDraw with a syringe in place of a pen as part of their experimental setup. They recently published an article they shared with us, saying,
We finally achieved what we planned with the Axidraw. It worked well! We made small patterns of hydrogel, millimetric, that we intend to use for seeding living cells.
It is always exciting for us to see people finding new uses for the AxiDraw. Thank you to Dr. Fitremann for sharing your results with us!
Linkdump: March 2022
- Signal Strength: NYC subway musicians collaborating via wifi
- Okuda Hiroko: The Casio Employee Behind the “Sleng Teng” Riddim that Revolutionized Reggae. (Supplementary music)
- A preprint of an academic overview of Culinary Fluid Dynamics
- Sponge communities thriving by consuming an extinct ecosystem on the peak of a dead underwater Arctic volcano
- A new KIM-1 simulator
- Bunnie Studios Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain
- metalnes: Transistor level Nintendo simulator
- Dumping firmware with a 555
- DIY cryogenic Multi-Layer Insulation
- Parasnailing (Reddit): Aquarium snails, “falling with style”
- How does a player piano work? (YouTube), via the Ironic Sans newsletter
- Have you ever wondered how manhole covers are tested for endurance?
Linkdump: December 2021
- Inkarnate: RPG-oriented map building tool. (Via Elecia White)
- Unisexual salamanders perform kleptogenesis, stealing other species sperm packets
- Larson Camouflage is a pioneer in cell tower disguises
- Fossilized reefs in the Nevada Desert
- Ten years after the original, a new 555 Contest from Hackaday
- Dekay King’s Innovative Shop Furniture
- TinyNES: Classic NES games on open source hardware
- Animated Reconstruction of the 1915 Ford Model T Assembly Line
- Was NASA’s Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot?