phooky

Inspired by Kelly’s experiments with laser-cut sponges, I cut myself a few Menger sponges* the other week. They’re handy both for light housecleaning and cosmic conundrums!

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…

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.

Query: what the hell is this thing I’ve been lugging around for the past three years? 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…