A quick note: our R1 filtration droid finally gave up its wee little electronic ghost this week, so the laser will be unavailable until replacement parts arrive. The L2 and L3 filters apparently took a little more carbon scoring than they could handle. We expect we will once again be vaporizing materials in futuristic fashion within a week or two.
Inspired by Kelly’s experiments with laser-cut sponges, I cut myself a few Menger sponges
Sometimes I blow out transistors. Sometimes they smoke. Sometimes they fizzle. And sometimes, like today, they fail so catastrophically that they blow the face of their encasing epoxy across the room:
(The transistor behind it merely cracked in two.)
I built a fantastically hacky boost converter to light this lovely Soviet nixie tube. One cap, one inductor, one resistor, one mosfet, one diode, and an ATTiny13. Or, as Raph put it, “one of everything”.
Equally tacky, hacky clock coming soon!
I threw together a couple of simple geometric models this weekend on the laser. As it happens, one nested nicely within the other. DXFs after the cut.
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Query: what the hell is this thing I’ve been lugging around for the past three years?
An enigma, wrapped in a mystery, under acrylic
It’s some sort of StrongARM development system. I think it may be related to the Intel “Brutus” eval boards, but I’m not certain. The daughterboard is labelled “SA1110 daughter card”; there’s nothing useful on the larger board. There’s a fairly anonymous StrongARM chip in the ZIF socket. It feels like some sort of demo unit, given how it’s all gussied up and under acrylic.
A profusion of useless geegaws
What’s on the big board?
Intel sold off all its StrongARM/PXA properties years ago, and scrubbed pretty much anything useful from its website. Archive.org hasn’t been too helpful. Anyone have any leads?
