Good electronics videos and articles

My buddy Rob Bowers over at Brocade told me about this video channel for home made (aka Maker) electronics projects. It’s produced by Alan “W2AEW” Wolke. You can see by his nickname and video channel name, he is a Ham radio enthusiast. I never got that bug, my projects were more like a wire wrapped around a nail to make an electromagnet.

The video above is what got my buddy Rob excited. He enthused, “Wow electronics for everybody! There may be hope for me. I watched the one on completing the noise source on the Ham It Up! convertor. He builds it, tests the basics, and the shows a simple use case. I feel .031% less stupid. I wanted to know if I should purchase the noise source parts. ‘Yes’ is the answer, after watching this.”

This is the cool thing about the Maker Movement. Rob is not an engineer. He did software QA in the past and now works at Brocade in the IT department. He is technical, but not formally trained. But the Maker movement is about the fun stuff, and the dreary classrooms and boring lectures are dispensed with in favor of learning with a specific objective in mind. It’s all the fun of engineering without the tedium. We invented computers. They can do the tedium, and the math, for that matter.

Electronics enthusiast Alan Wolke at his bench.

You can see from Alan’s bench the passion he has for radio and electronics in general. Any person with a Metcal soldering iron and a Simpson 260 analog voltmeter is OK by me. The extended CRT (cathode ray tube) housing on that scope makes me think it is the 400MHz Tek 2467B, the fast glitch capture version of the Tektronix 2465B. The CRT is longer to add the plates needed for persistence.

Another cool tip from Rob was about Brocade where he works. He told me the labs have vending machines with cables and mice and other day-to-day engineering essentials. The engineers can just swipe their badge into the vending machine, pick out the cable and be on their way, no requisition forms or hassle. What a class outfit.

The good electronics article tip comes from a fellow eFlea attendee. I saw him at the Roasted Bean in Cupertino and he showed me the latest issue of Nuts and Volts magazine.

Nuts and Volts magazine has a ton of good articles about electronics.

Knowing I worked at Atmel, my pal wanted to point out the above article about Arduino by Joe Pardue. Nuts and Volts is a subscription magazine, so you have pay 27 bucks a year for print and digital, or only 20 bucks a year if you don’t want the print magazine.

Even without subscribing, you can download the code samples for the Arduino 101 article, and if you upgrade to the mysterious un-priced “preferred subscriber network” you get access to all the old issues of Nuts and Volts. This is a great complement to Circuit Cellar magazine, which is also a subscription magazine, but for $250 they can also give you a memory stick with every single article they have ever done. I recommend both these magazines since they are aimed at system design. The trade press, where I have worked, is fine to learn about the latest chip or test method. But Circuit Cellar and Nuts and Volts both show you how to hook up the chips, and do the code and everything else to get a working product. They even touch on 3-D printing and the stuff to put your gizmo in an enclosure. No wonder they can charge for a subscription. All they lack is articles about FCC, CE, and UL approvals, and those might happen one day for all I know.

So keep watching those YouTube videos and reading articles, but more importantly, keep hacking on circuits and code. That is the fun stuff that gives real satisfaction and happiness.

The June 2013 Silicon Valley eFlea electronics flea market

I wrote about the Silicon Valley electronic flea market my pals and I go to, as well as our breakfast. I also wanted to showcase the one I attended in June, so you can see all the cool gizmos that were there. This was a quite a well-attended eFlea, as my buddy Dave Ruigh calls it.

Attendance was good. The eFlea is now under the solar cell arrays at the DeAnza College parking lot. Do pay the 3-dollar parking or you will get a $35 ticket. Just ask audio guru Joe Curcio.

I got excited when I saw this original Zenith radio……

…..Until I saw all these other radios…..

…And then I came across this crystal unit from 1916.

I came across Google’s Eric Schlaepfer checking out a memory board from an old computer. Eric has been playing with home-made core memory so he has an inherent interest in memory these days.

Don’t think the eFlea is all about old stuff—there is always a nice selection of things for your lab.

How about this crate full of gold? You can get SMA connectors for a dime, and they are not the cheap ones that don’t have consistent 50-ohm impedance, these tend to be mil-spec units.

You can get great books dirt cheap. Then send them to that place in San Jose that scans them for 1 dollar (http://1dollarscan.com/). Now they all fit inside your tablet.

OK, I have a weakness for old stuff- two phones that would be really cool on your wall.

And here is an old phonograph that would look good on a table next to your phones.

The eFlea always has a nice selection of tools. There are dealers, but you want to be on the lookout for someone clearing out his garage.

My buddy Richard King has a dozen tube testers. Then again, he is the guy that buys eFlea books on thoriated tungsten. Don’t think high-tech was invented by the semiconductor industry. Vacuum tubes have every bit as much physics and material science going on. And they glow in the dark.

Analog Aficionado and San Jose State graduate student Felipe Jimenez was the eFlea and scored a nice meter.

These folks had bought a Pac-Man arcade game and were strategizing how to get it into their truck.

The General Electric Tungar battery charger. Every engineer needs one of these on her desk.

Ever since I was a kid I have loved air-core variable capacitors. Also note the coil-winders. Phil Sittner picked up one of these for his antenna matching experiments.

Speaking of Phil, a guy that manages an electrical distribution business can appreciate this box full of circuit breakers and contactors.

And audio guru Steve Williams was sure to check out this Sears 8mm projector. We had to do an on-the-spot intervention to keep him from buying it; he loves old projectors and old phonographs.

I love old equipment. The Wikipedia on Stratagene says: “It has been involved with the fields of cellular analysis, cloning, cytogenomics, DNA Methylation and DNA Sizing and Quantification and food testing.” They must have done something right, Agilent bought them in 2007. Buy this a RoboCycler and start your own Frankenstein project.

The Silicon Valley eFlea electronic flea market breakfast

So after the Silicon Valley electronic flea market, we go over to Bobbies breakfast bistro and compare purchases and catch up on the scuttlebutt. We get there about 9:30AM. Here are a few snaps of recent items. Note that the eFlea closes in the winter, from October to February, but we all still go to the breakfasts, just to keep up on recent happenings.

When Hans Camenzine died several of my pals gave tribute to the inventor of the 555 timer chip, the biggest selling IC in history. Here is Kenneth Finnegan with Han’s book, and a T-shirt David L. Jones did to honor him.

My buddy Eric Schlaepfer built a 555 out if discrete transistors in honor of Hans. It also honors Jim Williams, who did similar functioning electronic art.

Here is our pal Richard King, who is over at power storage startup STEM. At the bottom you can see the 1862 telegraph pole wire anchor, something he inherited from his grandpa. We always bring some show-and-tell to the eFlea breakfast.

Brocade employee Rob Bowers brought a series of Ham radios he has owned over the years, to highlight the enormous cost reductions and size improvements.

Audio guru Steve Williams often snags early publications, like this Sam’s photofact.

Here is some radio craft magazines that Steve found last year at the eFlea.

And crack mechanical engineer Dave Ruigh shows off his admittedly half-$#%ed antenna kludge so he can better download Top-Gear episodes over his 4-G hot spot. He says it even works in his glove box. He has gone on to design something a bit less unsightly, but you folks know how prototypes look, so don’t give him any guff.

Here pro photographer Vini Carter looks at a mystery gizmo that Richard King found on eBay. Eric Schlaepfer is in the background, doing what Google employees love to do, fiddle with their Android. Vini is the guy that restored a sulfur dioxide refrigerator. His wife makes him keep it on the back porch, and Vini agrees that is probably for the best. If you see the haz-mat trucks in his neighborhood, you will know the deicing went all wrong.

So see what I mean about a fun time for all on the second Saturday of the month here in Silicon Valley? If you can’t drag yourself out of bed at 5:00AM, feel free to just show up for the breakfast. There are usually 12 or so people that make the breakfast, but there is always room for more.

The May 2013 Silicon Valley eFlea electronic flea market

The Silicon Valley electronic flea market, dubbed the eFlea by my pal and long-time attendee Dave Ruigh is this Saturday, May 11, 2013. My buddies and I try to get the eFlea by 6:00AM. Then around 9:30 we go over to Bobbies breakfast bistro and compare purchases and catch up on the scuttlebutt. We are often still gabbing by 1:00PM. There is a 3-dollar parking fee at the eFlea—you have to get a ticket out of one of the machines or you get a real ticket for 35 bucks. If you want to sell it’s still only 20 dollars for two parking spaces inside the market.

Be sure to get to the eFlea at the crack of dawn if you want to scoop up the really good stuff. Many attendees carry powerful LED flashlights to help pierce the darkness.

Because I go to the eFlea with my totally cool pals, they tip me off about toally cool gear like these Blonder-Tongue units.

My EE buddies are always looking for test equipment. Here is a nice HP signal generator. That is why you used to see Jim Williams and Bob Pease at the eFlea. Bob Dobkin, the founder of Linear Tech is there most months, as is Dennis Monticelli from TI.

Here is a nice Tek scope. There are scads of test equipment every month. Hey, something has to compensate us for living in this over-priced hell-hole called California.

There is a fellow who deals Metcals and every other type of soldering equipment you can think of. The eFlea is where you get that 0.010 lead solder.

Ya can’t design it if ya can’t see it. All my pals have an assortment of visual acuity enhancers, everything from eye loupes to these zoom inspection microscopes.

And here is a modest selection of power tools.

Well, you get the idea and see why it’s a good thing to show up early. Next post I will talk about our breakfasts at Bobbies and the cool gizmos we find.