I haven’t read the book myself (yet), so this is going to e a book review of a book review, but I very much enjoyed Max Maxfield’s recent article on Electronics for Kids by Oyvind Nydal Dahl.

The book is described by its publisher as a work that “demystifies electricity with a collection of awesome hands-on projects.” Those hands-on projects – 23 in all – are, of course, the key to engaging kids, as most 10 year olds don’t want to read a book that’s all theory. It sounds like it gets kids into things gradually, starting with a simple project (turning a lemon into a battery rather than into lemonade), then moving onto more complex tasks like creating an alarm clock that goes off at sunrise.  It also takes kids into the realm of digital electronics, with projects like one for making an electronic coin flipper. (Logic gates and flip-flops made easy!)

Max notes that the book includes parts lists, detailed instructions, and “super-clear” illustrations (diagrams, photos). He also liked that the book includes troubleshooting info for each project, so that kids (and parents) can easily figure out what went wrong, rather than just throwing up their hands in frustration. (Not that the throwing up of hands in frustration ever happened to me when working on a project, on my own or with my kids.)

I’m a “tweener” here. My kids are, respectively, in the work force, in graduate school, and in college. And there are no grandkids in sight just yet. But I do have a nephew who might find this fun. (Beyond kids, Max writes that it would be a fun guide for an electronics novice of any age who wants “to dip their toes in the electronics waters but has no prior knowledge or background in this area.”)

Anyway, it feels a bit odd to be recommending a book that I haven’t (yet) read, this one sounds like a good one.

I especially like that Electronics for Kids will take its kids behind the scenes. With all the technology that kids are exposed to from such a young age, it’s almost a given that they’ll grow up as savvy tech users. This book will help them understand what’s actually going on with all the toys, games, tablets, and phones they’ve got their hands on. It may even inspire some to grow up to be savvy tech makers. Here’s hoping!

Thought I’d do one more post – maybe I should make that one more for now – based on the looks back in time that EDN has been doing on the occasion of its 60^th anniversary.  This one is based on an article by Martin Rowe, in which he went back through the EDN archives – back to the days when it was Electrical Design News – and unearthed some editions in which the magazine added audio.

Today, we have such instant access to information. Anything we want to know about is pretty much at our fingertips. Actually, it may not even requirie fingertips, given that we can just ask Siri or Cortana to find something for us. And all that information is available in formats that include video. So it’s sometimes hard to appreciate that there was a time when the way engineers learned about new technology was through magazines, books, and conference papers. Not that we still don’t learn that way, it’s just that today there are so many more sources of info – some good, some bad, for plenty of it out there. I just went ahead and googled “how to design an embedded system” and got back nearly 9 million results. I didn’t look through them all, but I already know that that’s a lot of information at your fingertips, or at the tip of your tongue. And much of it’s on YouTube.

As for EDN back in 1960:

The July through October issues contained phonograph records, “an historic first in published communication,” each with an audio lecture for the article.

The audio lectures (and written articles) were the work of a Philco engineer, from back when Philco was a big deal in electronics, and are based on information specific to Philco transistors. In effect, a non-paid for advertorial, but likely not regarded in such a way at that point in time. Instead, it was likely seen as a cutting edge way to provide up to date information on an emerging technology.

The topics covered are:

• High-Frequency Transistors and Their Figures Of Merit
• Optimum Design of Transistor Communications Circuits
• High-Speed Switching Transistors
• Transistorized Video Amplifiers

In addition to the audio recordings, Rowe’s article includes thumbnails of the articles themselves (complete with schematics and graphs).

If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed about engineers over time, it’s that we’re always curious about “stuff”, so I went ahead and listened to one of the lectures. Kind of fun to listen to all those snaps, crackles, and pops.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Last week, I blogged about some technology news from in the 1950’s. That post was based on an article by Steve Taranovich that appeared on EDN a couple of weeks back, as the magazine celebrates its 60^th anniversary. This week will be a second take on Steve’s article, this time taking a look at the “electronics developments and ideas from technical white papers from that era”. The papers cited, which include technical diagrams (mostly hand-drawn) that are worth looking at, were all published in 1956. The technologies covered in these papers include:

• A sideband-mixing superheterodyne receiver: While superheterodyne receivers had already been in a use for a couple of decades, by the 1950’s, “radio users wanted microwave receivers with bandwidths in the 100s of Megacycles (modern-day MegaHertz), which approached the sensitivities of the superheterodyne receiver.” The paper Steve looked at described a way to achieve this through a sideband mixing system that used “two local oscillators (LO), a microwave, and a VHF combination whose signals were injected on a crystal, producing the outcome of an infinite set of virtual LO signals These LO signals were centered around the microwave LO frequency and were separated from each other by the frequency of the VHF LO. The low-level received signal would mix with one of the virtual LOs producing the desired IF signal.” It worked, demonstrating that “this multiple mixing technique could be implemented when RF coverage needs to dictate receiver BWs far larger than the spectral width of the expected signals.”
• A new numerical indicator tube, Nixie: This one might have made the list based on the fun name alone, but, back in 1956, when Burroughs brought it to market, the Nixie tube was an important development. “The Nixie was a 10 digit gas indicator tube that gave a two-dimensional in-line readout that was readable from a wide viewing angle.” It was less expensive than the incandescent indicator and lasted better (and more predictably) than electroluminescent numbers. So the Nixie tube won out. Fast forward to today’s technology, and, while nixie tubes are still used (largely in the “maker” world), Nixie is more likely to evoke thoughts of the wearable, flyable camera – or will be once, that Nixie comes to market.
• The NY Empire State Building beacons: In 1956, the Empire State Building was already 25 years old, and it was still the world’s tallest building. To top it off, in 1956, they added new beacons “that generated a total of nearly two billion candlepower. At the time they were capable of providing the world’s brightest continuous source of man-made light.” Steve goes into a lot of detail on the Empire State Building beacons, including the fact that the short-arc lamps used in them could reach a surface temperature as high as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and internal pressure that could get up to 300 pounds per square inch. The lamps operated by remote control, so they didn’t need a full-time human to operate them. I’m guessing that when most of us think of Empire State Building lighting, we think of the floodlights that are used to celebrate different holidays and commemorate events. Floodlights, which replaced those 1956 beacons, were first installed in 1964, and are today LED fixtures capable of displaying more than 16 million colors.

The other technologies referenced in the papers cited in the article dealt with a power transistor switching circuit; a high-speed perforated tape reader; and a transistor video amplifier with 80V output. Although it was all before my time, reading about these foundational electronics technologies was certainly very interesting. By the way, here’s what that “high-speed” perforated tape reader looked like. Doesn’t look all that high-speed to me!

Happy Anniversary to EDN. They’ve sure seen a lot of changes during their 60 years!

It was before my time, but I did get a kick out of a great recent article by Steve Taranovich on EDN that talked about the technology that was emerging when EDN was first published in 1956 – back in the day when there was no such thing as online, when EDN was called Electrical Design News, and when the industry was “electrical” rather than “electronics.”n his article, Steve recaps some of the overall news events of the 1950’s, then goes through the major electronics technology designs from the year. I’ll be devotingtwo posts to this article. In this first one, we’ll take a look at what happened in the electric-related world, before my time, back in the 1950’s.

Most of us don’t remember life before television. While the technology was invented in the late 1920’s, it wasn’t until the 1950s’ that TV really took off. Now that we had TV, I guess video tape recorders were inevitable. The VTR was developed in 1951, and first sold in 1956. For $50K. I don’t imagine there were too many of those in living rooms recording The Ed Sullivan Show…

It wasn’t all TV in that prehistoric decade. People may have been watching, but kids were starting to listen to rock and roll on transistor radios, which came to market in 1954.

Also in the 1950’s, the first passenger jets were put into service. And in 1953, the first black box flight recorder was put into one of those jets. Sputnik went higher and further than jets. It was launched in 1957, and the space race was on.

The first solar cell came on the scene in 1954, at Bell Labs. And the first computer hard disk came out in 1956. Its name was a mouthful: the IBM 350 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC).

“… a magnetic disk storage device, [RAMAC] was ready in 1956 and held 5 Mb of data and cost $10,000 per megabyte. The device was the size of two refrigerators, weighed in at over a ton, and employed 50 24-inch platters for storage. This device replaced reams of paper that previously tracked inventory, payroll budgets, and other business-related data crammed into file cabinets.” (Source: EDN)

When we look at the power packed into our smartphones, it’s hard to believe that something the size of two fridges, weighing over a ton, was a revolutionary breakthrough.

But that was then, before my time…

I heard recently  from a friend of Critical Link, who sent me a link to a Google Tech Talk video from the way back: 2008.

To me, Steve Blank’s The Secret History of Silicon Valley is really not so much a secret history as it is a forgotten history. Especially for those of us who think that Silicon Valley began with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Or with Steve Jobs. Or Marc Andreasson. Or Sergey Brin.

The preso spends a lot of time on the importance of the R&D done to win World War II as foundational to the emergence of Silicon Valley. An interesting part dealt with how Stanford became an electronics powerhouse. It started when Stanford Professor Fred Termin was called to work at a top secrete radar research lab at Harvard. After the war, he was determined to build Stanford into a center of excellence for electronics. So he went ahead and did it.

I guess you could say that Stanford was already on its way – two of Fermin’s pre-war students were Hewlett and Packard. But it was Fermin’s during the war that really helped make Stanford the engineering powerhouse it became.

Stanford’s engineering excellence has played an outsized role in Silicon Valley, and it’s interesting to see the ties to the research that enabled our bombers to find their targets, even in cloudy weather!

So, if you have an hour of time to listen to Steve Blank’s interesting presentation, I highly recommend it.