#609 – Open Circuits with Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay

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

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