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The Inner Beauty of Basic Electronics
- er4hn 4y agoOpen Circuits is a beautiful book that also explains how things work. One picture I really enjoyed was the cutaway of a barrel jack power plug. The author explained how plugging in a power cable would physically change the power source from an internal battery to something external. For a CS person, this physical elegance blew my mind.
- layer8 4y agoI marvel at the ball-spring design of this switch for some reason (outtake image): https://opencircuitsbook.com/assets/img/gallery/42-big.jpg https://opencircuitsbook.com/assets/img/gallery/42-big.jpg
- photochemsyn 4y agoIncreasing lifetime by greatly reducing frictional wear via allowing rotation, plus the spring eliminates any frictional gap that might arise. Pure genius!
- dtgriscom 4y agoThe spring also provides the "snap" effect; the switch snaps to "off" (the shown position) as well as to "on" (with the ball pushed down between the contacts).
- gumby 4y ago> For a CS person, this physical elegance blew my mind. In many cases you can write your code in an analogous way. Sadly, most procedural code I see plods its way through transitions in a manner that allows errors, races etc (the old thermos joke comes to mind). Keep these positive hardware approaches in mind when designing your algorithms.
- wayvey 4y agoNot sure if I know that joke. How does it go?
- gumby 4y agoA physicist is showing their friend the computer scientist a thermos flask. "You can put a cold drink in it and no matter how hot it is outside the drink stays cold". The friend is suitably impressed. "But that's not all: you can put a hot drink in it and no matter how cold it is outside the drink stays hot!" Now the friend is puzzled. "But how does it know?" I long ago became depressed by the amount of code I've read that is written this way. Nowadays I just expect it.
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- sacrosancty 4y ago[dead]
- agumonkey 4y agoFiddling with analog and electromechanical appliances improved my engineering skills more than many software classes. The old world was full of brilliance, it just got normalized into oblivion.
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoThere was a brief moment a decade or so ago when I made jewelry from old iPhone and Nintendo motherboards as a hobby. I would use a dremel tool to expose the intricate patterns hidden under the layers.
- wildzzz 4y agoNewer iphones have some incredible thickness in their circuit boards. They will place components in wells on a board and then glue it to another so you end up with a double thick board.
- sebazzz 4y agoAll these components makes me appreciate on how small we can create something. A CPU seems somehow trivial, because most of these components are composed of multiple and different materials, with moving parts often.
- iancmceachern 4y agoCheck out MEMs like DLP chips...
- jamesgill 4y agoBack in the 80s, when I was early in college and still thought I wanted to be an EE, we did this for a project. It sounds trivial, but it was one of the most educational things I ever did.
- AceJohnny2 4y agoHuh, by Eric Schlaepfer & Windell Oskay! Eric previously designed the MOnSter 6502, built with Windell's help: a 6502 CPU with fully discrete components! https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/ Windell is one half of Evil Mad Scientist Labs: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/ https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/
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- quakeguy 4y agoAnd Eric often appears with Curios Marc on YouTube if i remember it right. Great channel for all things Apollo and analog black magic. https://m.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc https://m.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc
- tooltower 4y agoI have the hardcover version of this book. The photos and descriptions are just excuisite!
- WalterBright 4y ago> As the authors write, everything about these components is deliberately designed to meet specific technical needs, but that design leads to “accidental beauty: the emergent aesthetics of things you were never expected to see.” Many people find beauty in art. I find beauty in engineering perfectly suited to its task. Like the stunning beauty of a gas turbine engine.
- polishdude20 4y agoYeah, every single component, it's shape, material, color, has been deliberately chosen to do it's required job as best as possible. What judges that? The market. Or physics...
- WalterBright 4y agoThink about airplanes. Beautiful airplanes tend to fly well. Ugly ones, not so well. It's hard to believe there isn't a connection.
- taneq 4y agoOur aesthetic sense is a finely tuned heuristic for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of systems. It’s less that beautiful aeroplanes fly well and more that high performance designs are inherently beautiful.
- moloch-hai 4y agoOur esthetic sense evolves along behind designs. What is efficient comes to seem beautiful to the next generation. Once the Ford Edsel was the pinnacle of automotive beauty. The P-51 or Spitfire would lose to a T-28 or F8F, but the former look better to us. We are attuned now to designs like the Su-57 and F-22, so are less sensitive to the merits of systems that work a different regime.
- WalterBright 4y ago
- layer8 4y agoMany images, plus outtake images, on the book’s site: https://opencircuitsbook.com/ https://opencircuitsbook.com/
- meindnoch 4y agoThis is going to be a nice coffee table book in my living room.
- WalterBright 4y ago> Current flowing around the core produces a magnetic field that acts as a sort of flywheel for current The math for a flywheel and an inductor is the same. Springs are capacitors, and dampers are resistors. Math is the same.
- colanderman 4y agoI find flywheels : capacitors :: springs : inductors to be the better analogy. Then you have force : current :: velocity : voltage, which I find works better than the alternative because forces, like currents, sum to zero at nodes; whereas velocities, like voltages, are equal at nodes. (Dampers are still resistors in this model, though you must consider resistance to be how "loose" the damper is, rather than how "tight" it is.)
- dtgriscom 4y agoThat seems a bit backwards to me. You apply a force to a spring, and it moves until the spring's back-force balances it; you apply a voltage to a capacitor and current flows until the capacitor's back-voltage balances it. A flywheel speeds up as long as you apply a force to it; an inductor's current increases as long as you apply a voltage to it. And, current and velocity are both motions, while force and voltage are both pressures.
- colanderman 4y ago> you apply a voltage to a capacitor Applying voltage to a capacitor is an incorrect mental model -- the voltage across a capacitor is a function of its charge [1]; it can't be both that and the voltage you apply to it. In reality, when you apply voltage "to" a capacitor, it's to the series circuit comprising the capacitor and a (hidden or explicit) series resistance, thus causing a current to flow determined by the resistance and the net voltage across it. The correct mental model is that you inject current into a capacitor. So long as you inject current, the voltage across the capacitor rises. viz. a flywheel -- so long as you apply a force, the flywheel speeds up. > A flywheel speeds up as long as you apply a force to it; an inductor's current increases as long as you apply a voltage to it. Likewise, a spring gains tension so long as you keep elongating it. Inductors and capacitors are dual to each other, so -- ignoring the mechanical linkages themselves -- there's no inherent advantage for one mechanical analog or its dual. We are thus free to choose either to make a sound analogy of the physics of linkages: > And, current and velocity are both motions, while force and voltage are both pressures. This grammatical correspondence is not relevant to the mathematics. Kirchoff's laws [2] only hold for mechanical linkages when current is held analogous to force, and voltage is held analogous to velocity. A more grammatically satisfying analogy can be found in hydraulic systems, with current : flow :: voltage : pressure. Flow, unlike motion, sums at nodes; pressure, unlike force, is equal at nodes. If one is insistent on treating springs like capacitors and flywheels like inductors, you can do so, but only if you also take the dual of the full circuit, as seen here [3]. This is then a mathematically correct analogy, but personally I find it much less straightforward than simply swapping springs and flywheels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor#Current%E2%80%93voltage_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor#Current%E2%80%93volt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_circuit_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_circuit_laws [3] https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2019-05 https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2019-05
- csours 4y agoI highly recommend this book! It's very very cool to see the insides of these components and to think about how physical processes are used to create components that can meet engineering specifications and tolerances.
- reality_inspctr 4y agoone of the things I like about the world of analog synthesizers is the celebration of schematics. I have a giant chart of synth designs framed in my living room.
- anodyne33 4y agoHaving never seen the guts of one before I was surprised to see the difference in wire gauge between the high and low sides of the transformer. In my mind the only difference between the two sides was the number of turns. Huh.
- irrelative 4y agoThe low voltage side of a transformer needs to handle more current. You could use the same gauge on both sides and get the same voltage, but you'd experience more losses.
- kragen 4y agoif you used the thin wire on both sides you'd get the same voltage but experience more losses if you used the thick wire on both sides you'd get the same voltage but have a much heavier and more expensive transformer for an almost undetectable performance improvement
- smcameron 4y agoThe latest Electroboom video is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMT1sn1bKRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMT1sn1bKRY
- gumby 4y agoDon't try to save money by getting just the e-book (which is generously included with an order for the hardcopy). The hardcopy is really worth it! The large photos printed in very high resolution blow away what you can see on your screen.
- photochemsyn 4y agoGreat book, previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630740 (43 comments)
- qiqitori 4y agoOh it's the book that wasn't under the Christmas tree and is sold out now lol ;_;
- djmips 4y agooh that's sad... :(
- Jamie9912 4y agocurl: (6) Could not resolve host: spectrum.ieee.org
- Jamie9912 4y agoieee.org and all subdomains DNS seems to fail to resolve globally right now
- peishang 4y agoI absolutely love this - it reminds me of the Monster 6502 project that recreated the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor but at the transistor level. https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/ It looks like something that wouldn't be out of place on the deck of the Discovery One in the movie Space Odyssey.
- skc 4y agoSometimes I imagine an apocalyptic event wiping out humanity for a few million years, replaced by some new intelligent species after a while. When they find deposits of these things, would they be able to figure out what they were used for?
- djmips 4y agoIf it's eons then what I've heard is all they will find is our toilets. :)
- AriedK 4y agoThe process of making these images is quite an accomplishment. Highly recommend the episode of the embedded.fm podcast with the author of the book, where they go jnto detail explaining what it took.
- johnklos 4y agoThe picture of the potentiometer on a circuit board is of an Amiga 3000. These folks have good taste!
- oldgradstudent 4y agoA gorgeous book. They also share a bit about the equipment and process used for making the pictures. Some of the slides should be a part of every electronics course in every school and University.
- ctrlp 4y agoI used to buy jewelry made from old computer parts from a seller on the local arts and crafts circuit. The pieces made fantastic gifts for the right person and neat conversation pieces. The artist's husband had been in military IT for decades and subsequently ran a small electronic parts business, and she would repurpose unused parts for her jewelry. They were an interesting couple. She had a terrific eye for what was beautiful in these old internals and he was deeply knowledgeable about the history of circuit boards and components. Got to talking with them once and they were lamenting the loss of beauty in the new boards and components. The obsolete parts from the 70s and 80s had lovely patterns and peculiarities they hadn't seen in years. Last I saw them she was in decline and I don't think she was making any new pieces. I don't know if the store is still functional but you can get a sense of the art from their remaining catalog. You can see they sorts of thing they were making here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220816124638/https://www.computerchipjewelry.com/ccj-gallery https://web.archive.org/web/20220816124638/https://www.compu... Not sure if the store is still functional (or if they're still alive). (Server probably underpowered for HN attention): https://computerchipjewelry.com/about https://computerchipjewelry.com/about
- kleiba 4y agoI'm really interested in the topic of basic electronics. I've got a CS degree but from a university where CS came from the mathematical school, rather than the engineering school. Hence in four years, there was only one (optional) class where a computer was used, all other lectures where theorems and proofs with pen and paper. But I would really love to be able to tinker with circuits, not necessarily with logic circuits, but being able to get some motors to do something useful or - more likely - fun has been something I've always wanted to learn. Mind you, it wasn't at the top of cool things I'm interested in, so I never really made too much of an effort. But that was also partly because I found it surprisingly difficult to find good resources to get started. Compared to say, programming, or other CS topics. I'm sure this is partly because as a complete novice, it's already challenging to even assess what would constitute a good resource and what not. But I've just always failed to find a book or course that was at the right level of complexity (for me) and caught my interest sufficiently to actually stick to the topic. Either it's quickly over my head or it's something like 45 minutes of youtube videos just to get to Ohm's law, or so. Eventually, I discovered some (older) books from the model train community that I bought for next to nothing from ebay. Those are quite okay, I like that they are quite practical in that they refer to actual electronic parts with the names/IDs that you can go out and buy. The downside, again, is that they're quite light on the theory - the kind of writing that tries very hard not to alienate the reader and thus doesn't dare to properly explain anything of more than trivial complexity. Therefore, if anyone has any good recommendations for books, courses, videos, or other resources that you have found useful and that are tailored to beginners but dare to confront them with the full monty and not just some hand-wavy watered-down version of things AND (ideally) are hands-on so that when you're done, you'd be able to order some parts and be able to actually put something together, I'd very much appreciate some hints. (Is that wish list simply too long?)