We always enjoy videos from [w2aew]. His recent entry looks at vertical or VFETs, which are, as he puts it, a JFET that thinks it is a triode. He clearly explains how the transistor works as a conductor unless you bias the gate to form a depletion zone. The transistors have a short channel, which […]
There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week with the news that an airliner had been hit by space junk. The plane, a United Airlines 737, was operating at 36,000 feet on a flight between Denver and Los Angeles when the right windscreen was completely shattered by the impact, peppering the arm of one […]
Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a feat since there were only about 20 made, and today we only know where nine of them wound […]
In a recent write-up, [David Delony] explains how he built a Wolfram Mathematica-like engine with Python. Core to the system is SymPy for symbolic math support. [David] said being able to work with symbolic math easily has helped his understanding of calculus and linear algebra. For statistics support he includes NumPy, pandas, and SciPy. NumPy […]
It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their math on note paper or, maybe, an engineering pad. [Christopher Drum] wanted to look at what the state of the art in 1978 spreadsheet technology […]
In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The few things that are still user-upgradable are getting fewer and farther between, but there are still a few things that can be modified and improved […]
It’s something of a shock to be reminded that Microsoft’s Windows 95 is now 30 years old — but the PC operating system that brought 32-bit computing to the masses and left behind a graphical interface legacy which persists to this day, is now old enough that many in the community have never actually seen […]
If you want to work with radioactive material, a cheap Geiger counter isn’t really what you want. According to [Project 326], you need a gamma ray spectrometer. The video below reviews the Radiacode 110. The channel has reviewed other Radiacode products, and they haven’t always been pleased with them, apparently. Is the 110 better? The […]
[Paul McCabe] wrote in to let us know about his $25 robot. This small wheeled robot is based on an ESP32 and made using cardboard and hot glue. You drive the contraption using a Bluetooth game controller thanks to the Bluepad32 library, which boasts a long list of supported hardware. [Paul] provides a Bill of Materials […]
While we use a lot of CAD tools, many of us are fans of Tinkercad — especially for working with kids or just doing something quick. But many people dislike having to work across the Internet with their work stored on someone’s servers. We get it. So does [CommonWealthRobotics], which offers CaDoodle. It is nearly […]