Solder & Desoldering
Step-by-step instructions for making (and unmaking) the perfect solder joint
Joe Grand | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Solder & Desoldering
Solder & Desoldering
Step-by-step instructions for making (and unmaking) the perfect solder joint
Joe Grand | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Sensor Interface
Sensor Interface
Tom Igoe | Make Vol. 05- 2006 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 3 mb
How circuits communicate with the outside world.
A typical home appliance contains several sensors, from the switches and dials you interact with to the temperature sensors and limit switches that keep your coffee pot from overflowing or setting the house on fire when the last cup is gone and the heater's left on. Sensors are central to a hardware hacker's vocabulary. The more of them you know about, the more responsive your devices can be.
What follows is an introduction to the characteristics of most sensors, so you know the range of possibilities. Later, I'll show how to use a few specific sensors.
This article assumes you've got a basic understanding of how electricity works. If you don't. check out Forrest M. Mims' book, Getting Started in Electronics.
Microcontroller Programming
Microcontroller Programming
Sparkle Labs | Make Vol. 04 - 2005 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb
Easy-to-program chips tell circuitry to do what you want.
Press a button and a light flashes a pattern. What makes it flash? It seerns like there's a tiny monkey in there flipping the switch. If so, many household iterns contain these tiny monkeys. They're what send the infrared (IR) codes out of our remote controls and then decode them in our televisions. They run our washing machines and toasters. These tiny monkeys are rnicrocontrollers, and you can train them to help you with your own projects.
Homemade Strobe Photography
Homemade Strobe Photography
Tom Anderson & Wendell Anderson | Make Vol. 04 - 2005 | Pdf | 15 pgs | 3 mb
Pictures of high-speed events such as popping balloons, breaking glass,
and splashing liquids reveal interesting structures not visible to the naked eye. You
can take your own high-speed photos to capture these ephemeral events.
An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography
An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography
Hoffstein, Pipher, Silverman | ISBN 978-0-387-77993-5 | Pdf | 533 pgs | 8 mb
The security of communications and commerce in a digital age relies on the modern incarnation of the ancient art of codes and ciphers. Underlying the birth of modern cryptography is a great deal of fascinating mathematics, some of which has been developed for cryptographic applications, but much of which is taken from the classical mathematical canon. The principal goal of this book is to introduce the reader to a variety of mathematical topics while simultaneously integrating the mathematics into a description of modern public key cryptography.
Public key cryptography draws on many areas of mathematics, including number theory, abstract algebra, probability, and information theory. Each of these topics is introduced and developed in sufficient detail so that this book provides a self-contained course for the beginning student. The only prerequisite is a first course in linear algebra. On the other hand, students with stronger mathematical backgrounds can move directly to cryptographic applications and still have time for advanced topics such as elliptic curve pairings and lattice-reduction algorithms.
Cigar Box Guitar
Cigar Box Guitar
Ed Vogel | Make Vol. 04 - 2005 | Pdf | 13 pgs | 3 mb
Use a cigar box and twine to build a sweet-singin' three-string guitar. For something
completely different, warp an innocent toy musical keyboard into an irresistibly
twisted electronic noise factory. For dessert. savor the hidden intricacies of
flash-frozen reality with ultra-fast strobe photography.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Eye Movements
Eye Movements:
A window on mind and brain
Van Gompel, Fischer, Murray, Hill | ISBN-10: 0-08-044980-8 | Pdf | 755 pgs | 15 mb
This book documents much of the state of the art in current eye-movement research by bringing together work from a wide variety of disciplines. The book grew out of ECEM 12, the very successful 12th European Conference on Eye Movements that was held at the University of Dundee in August 2003. This biennial conference attracts attendants with very diverse backgrounds who present the latest findings in eye-movement research, and it is probably unique in the way that it fosters interactions between specialists from quite different backgrounds, but all of whom work with eye movements in one form or another. The format of this book is similar in that it aims to provide an overview of the latest research in a wide variety of eye-movement disciplines and intends to encourage cross-fertilisation between these different areas. Thus, this book is intended to be an authoritative reference for everyone with an interest in eye-movement research.
The book is not merely a collection of research presented at ECEM 12. Because there is always a necessary delay between the time that findings are presented at a conference and subsequent publication, we asked conference attendees to report their latest research. In addition, we asked a number of authors who did not attend ECEM 12 to write a chapter related to aspects of eye-movement research that were not in fact presented at ECEM 12. The chapters were carefully selected from abstracts that the authors sent us and each chapter was peer-reviewed.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Acting for Film
Acting for Film
Cathy Haase | ISBN 1-58115-252-3 | Pdf | 210 pgs | 2 mb
Being an actor, I have a very practical, yet personal approach to things. Whatever the technique or philosophy is, it has to work for me in the field; it has to work when the camera is rolling. Every actor is a unique instrument that only he or she knows how to play, so my advice to you is, take everything in, keep what works for you, and leave the rest for later.
Many people think that film acting is simply a portrayal of a strong personality, that the actor, who possesses a strong ego and a love of performing, just memorizes the lines and jumps before the camera. People think that it takes a certain type of personality to do this, and it does, but what they don’t consider are the intricate techniques of craft that the actor practices and the depth of self-knowledge that she must strive for in developing her instrument. ...
Monday, September 07, 2009
Advanced Automotive Fault Diagnosis
Advanced Automotive Fault Diagnosis
Tom Denton | ISBN-10: 0-75-066991-8 | Pdf | 288 pgs | 8 mb
The aspect I still enjoy most about working on vehicles is being able to diagnose a fault that has beaten others! This skill takes a few years to develop but it is worth the effort. Diagnostic work is much like that of a detective solving a difficult crime, all the clues are usually there – if you know where to look. I think it was Sherlock Holmes (a fictional detective if you have never heard of him!) who said:
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This is a great thought for a diagnostic technician to keep in mind.
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Making Biodiesel
Making Biodiesel
Rob Elam | Make Vol. 03 - 2005 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 2 mb
It's easy to make a small batch of biodiesel that will work in any diesel engine. You don't need any special equipment - an old juice bottle wilI serve as the "reactor" vessel - and on such a small scale you can quickly refine your technique and perform further experiments. After a few liters' worth of experience, you'll know if you've been bitten by the biodiesel bug.
The principle behind biodieseling is to take vegetable oil (either new or used), and process it into a fuel that's thin enough to spray from a regular diesel engine's fuel-injection system. This is done chemically, by converting the oil into two types of compounds: biodiesel, which shares the original oil's combustibility, and glycerin, which retains the oil's thick, viscous properties. Drain away the glycerin, and you're left with a fuel that you can pour into any diesel vehicle with no further modification.
Once you get to the far side of the learning curve, making biodiesel is very much like cooking. In fact, a commercial biodiesel production plant shares more in common with a large-scale bakery than a petroleum refinery. There's organic chemistry involved in baking a cake, but most bakers wouIdn't consider themselves organic chemists.
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Resurrecting This Old Amp
Resurrecting This Old Amp
Tom Anderson & Wendell Anderson | Make Vol. 02 - 2005 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb
Vintage guitar amplifiers are available on eBay --- brands like Fender, Vox, Marshall, Acoustic, and Sunn. We'll show you how to restore one of theses old amps and make it sounds as good or better than the day it was made.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Statistics for the Utterly Confused
Statistics for the Utterly Confused
Lloyd R. Jaisingh, PhD | ISBN: 0-07-143094-6 | 337 pgs | 9 mb
For us to have an understanding of what the subject of statistics is all about, we need to introduce some terminology. First we will explain what we mean by the subject of statistics. Explanation of the term-statistics: Statistics is the science of collecting, organizing, summarizing, analyzing, and making inferences from data.
The subject of statistics is divided into two broad areas that incorporate the collecting, organizing, summarizing, analyzing, and making inferences from data. These categories are descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.
In order to obtain information, data are collected from variables used to describe an event. Explanation of the term-data: Data are the values or measurements that variables describing an event can assume.
Variables whose values are determined by chance are called random variables. There are two types of variables: qualitative variables and quantitative variables. Qualitative variables are nonnumeric in nature. Quantitative variables can assume numeric values and can be classified into two groups: discrete variables and continuous variables. A collection of values is called a data set, and each value is called a data value.
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Mousey the Junkbot
Mousey the Junkbot
Gareth Branwyn | Make Vol. 02 - 2005 | Pdf | 14 pgs | 3 mb
THE FINE ART OF MAKING "FRANKENMICE"
This project turns an analog computer mouse into a robot that'll delight friends and wow workmates down on the cube farm. Mousey's behavior is fittingly mouse-like. It scoots quickly across the floor, thanks to lively little motors. And when the critter crashes into anything, it speeds off in the opposite direction.
The robot's "brains" are an ingenious hack based on an audio operational amplifier (op-amp), an 8-pin chip that's normally used to drive answering machine speakers and other lo-fi equipment. Following Randy Sargent's pioneering design (see page 102 , Mousey repurposes this chip to boost light-sensor input to motor-powerable levels. The result is simple, fast-reacting analog circuitry that fits inside a mouse case.
Printed Circuit Board
Printed Circuit Board
Andrew Argyle | Make Vol. 02 - 2005 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb
Making your own printed circuit board (PCB) might seem a daunting task, but once you master the steps, it's easy to attain professional-looking results.
Printed circuit boards, which connect chips and other components, are what make almost all modern electronic devices possible. PCBs are made from sheets of fiberglass clad with copper, usually in multiple layers. Cut a computer motherboard in two, for instance, and you'll often see five or more differently patterned layers. Making boards at home is relatively easy, but limited to one- or two-layer designs. Here's how to create a one-layer board for a blinking LED circuit. For PCBs, this exercise is the equivalent of a beginner's "Hello World" program in software.
Atari 2600 PC
Atari 2600 PC
Joe Grand | Make Vol. 02 - 2005 | Pdf | 37 pgs | 7 mb
UPGRADING NOSTALGIA WITH THE ATARI 2600PC
I'm a historian of retro videogame systems and enjoy playing games on many different systems. I have a personal connection to the Atari 2600, which is probably related to my nostalgia for growing up with one. From an engineering perspective, the design of the Atari 2600 hardware is both simple and complex - yin and yang, so to speak - and it has enticed me for many years.
The goal of this project is to cram a full-featured PC system into a retro Atari 2600 videogame case. Not only is this a real challenge, but it's extremely rewarding.
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