Prototyping has certainly come a long way since I started my career back in those days of yore that we used to call the 1980s. One of the prototyping techniques we employed was called wire-wrap, which we thought amazing at the time, but which now seems incredibly “clunky” in hindsight.
Wire-wrap was particularly well suited to the sort of designs … Read More → "Is This the Future of IoT Product Development?"
This week my Fish Fry podcast is two parts open source, one part FT8, and one part ham radio! My guest is Colby Gilbert from RadioStack and we dig into the details of Maverick-603 – the first affordable, FT8 receiver with an open source RF chip designed and fabricated using open source chip tools! Also this week, I investigate a new crash avoidance sensor inspired by insects.
… Read More → "The Open Source Chronicles: Maverick-603"
I love learning how logic designers of the past solved tricky problems with innovative solutions. The more I delve into this sort of thing, the more I say to myself, “Wow! I would never have thought of that!” A great example is binary coded decimal (BCD) because there’s a lot more to this topic than one might, at first, suppose.
Read More → "Mysteries of the Ancients: Binary Coded Decimal (BCD)"
I sometimes wonder how many words I’ve written professionally in my lifetime. At least two of my books (search for “Clive Maxfield” on Amazon) have exceeded 850 pages, but I have no idea how this equates to words, and I have no intention of spending any of the precious seconds I still have on this plane of existence counting them. …
Read More → "Yet Another 100 Captivating Columns and Counting!"
It’s common to hear engineers and computer boffins say that digital computers are based on 0s and 1s, but what does this actually mean? On the one hand, this is relatively simple; I mean, 0 and 1, how hard can it be? On the other hand, there are so many layers to this metaphorical onion that, much like a corporeal onion, it can make your eyes water. …
Read More → "Arduino 0s and 1s, LOW and HIGH, False and True, and Other Stuff"