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You are here: Home / Radio Show / #609 – Open Circuits with Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay

#609 – Open Circuits with Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay

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Welcome Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay. They are Co-Authors of “Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components“.

  • Windell’s background is in physics, he worked on some very sensitive experiments at NIST. He has been running Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (EMSL) with Lenore since 2006.
  • Eric has worked at large software and semiconductor companies throughout the bay area.
  • Eric and Windell started collaborating together on the “three fives kit”, which allows people to build their own 555 timer out of discrete components.
  • The first prototype was breadboard that is still in the EMSL library.
  • The 555 Footstool
  • They went on to collaborate on the 741 discrete op amp kit, which comes in through hole and surface mount.
  • Eric made a fake datasheet on an ideal op amp
  • The MOnSter6502 was a discrete version of the MOS 6502. It had additional LEDs that showed the state.
  • Chris was thinking about it when he saw the Hackaday Supercon 2022 badge.
  • The meetup after Bay Area Maker Faire was where it was conceived when Bunnie (past guest) asked what the largest discrete version of a part could be. The meetup was also the basis for Hackaday Superconference (“what if we could make that meetup be the entire weekend?”)
  • The creator of the 6502, Chuck Peddle, was on the show back in 2015
  • Open Circuits is a book they have been working on for a few years together that was recently released.
  • Focused on components, not devices
  • Chris just finished Kathy Joseph’s book The Lightning Tamers and was amazed at the comparison of modern electronics with how things started in the field of electronics.
  • Natural vs synthetic materials
  • The Way Things Work (McCaulay) was another formative “coffee table” book, albeit with more Mastadons on the cover. The book Eric was trying to remember was … also called The Way Things Work
  • Why not use CTs?
    • Loses texture and color
    • Flattens the image
  • What are the slogs of writing a book?
    • The time process
    • Took 9 months to get inital material
    • Took another 9 months for editing and getting things right (explaining to a wide audience)
  • No Starch Press provided a great editor.
  • Describing complex topics like “multiplexing” is tricky to a wide audience.
  • “Up Goer Five” (XKCD) is an example of simple language trying to explain complex topics.
  • Windell works on the AxiDraw on a daily basis, which is a pen plotter (and associated software)
  • #PlotterTwitter is a hashtag on Twitter to follow digital artists
  • TubeTime is Eric’s experiments on Vintage computing. He also does long tweet threads on many of his projects.
  • He’s currently making a replica Apple I computer
  • There is a large community; AppleFritter is a site that documents a lot of idiosyncrasies of the original computer
  • Many early computers has async logic to cut down on required circuits. HDL solves clocking for you.
  • Eric troubleshoots using a Saleae Logic Pro 16
  • Stringy floppy
  • How to preserve data in an era of “using other peoples’ computers” (Cloud). The Internet Archive maintains a lot of data.
  • Twitter is hopefully not shutting down anytime soon, but :shrug:.
  • Get your copy of the Open Circuits Book at any of the vendors listed on the book website.
  • Evil Mad Scientist has signed copies! (be sure to click “yes”)
  • Find Windell online at evilmadscientist.com
  • Find Eric on Twitter at @tubetimeus, his website tubetime.us, and (if needed) tubetime@mastadon.social

Comments

  1. Sergey says

    December 15, 2022 at 10:52 am

    Thanks, I’ve ordered the book

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