Micromachining with a Laser
[Breaking Taps] has a nice pulsed fiber laser and decided to try it to micromachine with silicon. You can see the results in the video below. Silicon absorbs the IR …read more Continue reading Micromachining with a Laser
Author Archives: Al Williams
Arm Pumps Up the Volume with Mbed and a Potentiometer
Last time, I told you how to get started with the “Black Pill” STM32F411 board using the Mbed OS. The example program, admittedly, didn’t use many of the features of …read more Continue reading Arm Pumps Up the Volume with Mbed and a Potentiometer
Honey, Did you Feed the Lamp? Company Wants to Create Living Light Bulbs
The BBC’s [Peter Yeung] had an interesting post about a small French town experimenting with using bioluminescent organisms to provide lighting. A firm called Glowee is spearheading the effort in …read more Continue reading Honey, Did you Feed the Lamp? Company Wants to Create Living Light Bulbs
Solaris might be Free If You Want It
There was a time when “real” engineering workstations ran Linux. Apollo and Sun were big names and Sun’s version was Solaris. Solaris has been an iffy proposition since Oracle acquired …read more Continue reading Solaris might be Free If You Want It
KiCAD Plugin Gives Your PCBs that Handmade Look
The first PCBs we built involved a draftsman laying out large pieces of tape. The finished artwork would be photographically reduced to produce the board. This solved a few problems. …read more Continue reading KiCAD Plugin Gives Your PCBs that Handmade Look
Taking a Close Look at Parallel Plate Capacitors
Of course, we all know that capacitors are conceptually two conductors separated by a dielectric of some sort. But outside of air-variable capacitors you normally don’t see them looking like …read more Continue reading Taking a Close Look at Parallel Plate Capacitors
Javascript is Everywhere. Even MSDOS
Although pundits have joked that Java’s “write once, run everywhere” slogan might be better expressed as “write once, debug everywhere,” a relative of Java — JavaScript — has delivered on …read more Continue reading Javascript is Everywhere. Even MSDOS
Printable Carbide Opens Up Interesting Possibilities
Sandvik, a large company headquartered in Sweden, has apparently been producing cemented carbide for a long time — according to them, since 1932. The material is known for being highly …read more Continue reading Printable Carbide Opens Up Interesting Possibilities
We’ve Heard of Bricking a Hard Drive, But…
Mass storage has come a long way since the introduction of the personal computer. [Tech Time Traveller] has an interesting video about the dawn of PC hard drives focusing on …read more Continue reading We’ve Heard of Bricking a Hard Drive, But…
A Nitrogen Soldering Iron Review
If you’ve ever welded, you know that some welders blow a shield gas over the work for different reasons. For example, you often use a gas to displace oxygen from …read more Continue reading A Nitrogen Soldering Iron Review