brainwagon

Nyle Steiner, of the Spark Bang Buzz blog has been at it again, demonstrating cool electrical/electronic devices that are homebrewed. This time he constructed his own memristor. If you aren’t up on electronics, you might not have heard of memristors before. While Leon Chua proposed that such a circuit element was possible, they weren’t actually […]

I was inspired by some Haskell code written by keegan, so I had to write a version of it in C. I didn’t do any animation, but I did have a lot of fun playing around with the parameters. For instance, check out the code, and how changing the value of N from 5, 7, […]

I really like the Arduino, but even I must admit that performance-wise, it can be a little, well, disappointing. A 16Mhz 8 bit processor can do a lot, but there is also a lot of applications where having something a bit beefier makes a lot of sense. Something with support for a richer peripheral set, […]

Happy Halloween everyone! I’ve kind of got zombies on the brain, which is better I suppose than having zombies munching your brain. I blame it all on the crew for the Zombie Tech podcast, despite their excellent taste in guests. Luckily, there is all sorts of good information on what to do in a Zombie […]

While tinkering with my ATtiny13 Pumpkin Project, I ended up using a fairly inefficient circuit: the same amount of power is dissipated in the current limiting resistor as in the LED itself, which mean that at best, the efficiency would turn out to be around 50%. In reality, some power is consumed by the switching […]

Happy Halloween! Here’s a little project I’ve been working on for Halloween… I’ve created a separate page with the details: it’s pretty rough right now, but I’ll try to tidy it up as time goes on. Feel free to mail me with any direct questions to serve as incentives to documenting the project better. brainwagon […]

I’m not much of a contester (not any kind, in fact) but this weekend is one of the biggest: the CQWW SSB Contest. Expect the bands to be completely awash with chatter from 0:00 UTC October 29th through 23:59UTC October 30th. I doubt I’ll do much, other than maybe hookup my SDR-IQ to scan around […]

I was standing in Tom’s office, and asked him a simple probability question (and a timely one, given the World Series): If the odds of a particular team winning against their opponent is some probability p, what are the odds that they will win a 7 game series? If you had any probability at all, […]

Absolutely the most amazing World Series Game I’ve seen. I’m speechless. My words aren’t sufficient: I’ll post some links when I find someone better than me to put the game in perspective. Amazing.

The other day, I was watching The Hunt For Red October on TV. Through some odd coincidence, today I found a link to an article that was published in Popular Science back in 1966 on a silent electromagnetic drive for submarines, just like the “caterpillar drive” of the Red October. I didn’t realize that this […]

My electronics experimentation has brought a couple of comments from people I’ve met who have much greater experience and knowledge than I. For instance, in response to my posting of a schematic for flashing a rather large, powerful LED yesterday, I drew the attention of Mike Colishaw on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/MikeCowlishaw/status/129464059937554432 And of course, Mike is […]

This morning, I consulted the little revolving map over there in the left column, and found that I had passed 99,000 views. I reset that counter back in February, and since then nearly 100K people (or more realistically, 99K robots and maybe 1K people) have viewed a page here on brainwagon. I’d like to thank […]

For some reason, I never do much reading about baseball during the season itself. But as the World Series approaches its end (still hoping for a game seven) I have started to dust off some of my reading materials. A couple years ago, I mentioned this work by Lawrence Brown on this blog, but the […]

Nothing is quite so humbling as someone coming in and showing you that you are making your problem way more complicated than it really is. Lee pointed out that I was overthinking it: that a simple 2N2222 would work just fine, and indeed, I went back over it, and realized he was right. I entered […]

This posting begins with a caveat: while I’m pretty experienced as a programmer and software engineer, I’m actually a bit of newbie when it comes to electronics. I’m entirely self-taught, and because of my inherent laziness, I find it hard to learn anything before I actually need to know it. This means that I often […]