Electronics

Printing electroluminescent displays

Jeri Ellsworth talks to Jon Beck at Maker Faire about silk-screening EL displays with electroluminescent ink manufactured by Dupont. Jon is from CLUE, the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics. (How great is that name? Their logo is a question mark where the dot is the ground symbol.) The video is a little hard to hear, […]

Homemade transistor demonstration

Here’s a follow-up video to Jeri’s earlier run through of her fabrication of an NMOS (N-channel) transistor. Here, she demonstrates some of the electrical characteristics of a P-channel transistor she fabricated in her home chip lab. Surface-mount it ain’t, but hey, homemade! Homemade Transistor Demonstration More: How-To: Roll your own NMOS transistors

Meet the integrated circuit

Meet the integrated circuit

From Wired’s “This Day in Tech,” the invention of the IC, 1952: The first integrated circuit was fairly crude — it had only a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium. But it did show the potential of the IC, which continues today to get smaller and more complex. Just a few months […]

Growing up RadioShack

Jeff Reifman has written a charming little piece on his blog about “being raised by RadioShack:” At one point, Chuck paid me $10/hr (a fortune) to manually re-type the entire contents of private investigator Gavin De Becker’s client database. Chuck set up two Model II computers side by side and I manually moved his entire […]

Album of electronic components

Album of electronic components

And you thought stamp collecting was geeky! I love this idea. These are cheap coin-collecting albums. What a fabulous teaching aid and way of organizing components so that students of electronics can see the parts families, different varieties of components, different package types, etc. The background labels are even color-coded so that component types are […]