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Jim Williams’ App Notes Are Getting Hard To Find

If you are an electrical engineer and haven’t checked out any of the app notes written by Jim Williams you are missing out!

Unfortunately, Linear Technology was bought out by Analog Devices in the last year or two and his app notes are much harder to find! The old Linear Technology website had a page with links to every app note written by Jim, the Analog Devices website has no such page. They still appear to be available on Google though, and Kent Lundberg has compiled a bibliography of his works.

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Mapping Radiation with a Raspberry Pi GPS Scintillation Detector

I just posted a new YouTube video about I project I’ve been working on for some time. It’s a scintillation detector coupled to a Raspberry Pi that lets you make maps of background radiation levels. You can leave it in your car as you drive around town and then upload the data over WiFi when you get home.

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How Gas Regulators Work

I just posted a new video to YouTube that talks about how gas regulators work.

I’m still figuring out the whole process of making a video. In particular, I’m trying to figure out the best way of doing the audio. I tried using a microphone that connects to my phone and lets me record my voice, but if the phone’s screen turns on while recording it starts picking up a lot of electronic noise.

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Bob Wildar’s Introduction to Semiconductor Devices

I recently came across the PDFs of Bob Wildar’s Introduction to Semiconductor Devices in the Computer History Museum’s digital archive. I haven’t read them yet, but from glancing through chapters 1 and 2 I’m really excited. I’ve been looking for a text that explains how transistors work, not just how to use a model to predict their behavior. While having a model is important for designing circuits, I really want to have an intuitive understanding of what happens inside of a transistor that allows it to act as an amplifier. I love “The Art of Electronics”, and while it tells you pretty much everything you need to use a transistor, it doesn’t really get into what is happening inside of a transistor (other than the famous transistor man).

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Shaving Safety

Or, how not to cut your face off…
I love watching the YouTube channel “This Old Tony”. I could (and have) spent hours watching him making an espresso pot on the lathe, filing a hole from round to square, or talking about carbide inserts. Recently, on his 500k subscriber special video he talked about his favorite brand of blade for “safety razors”. I was taken aback, aren’t safety razors some outdated thing that went out with beehive hairdos? Well apparently beehives are back (and safety razors never went away).

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