[Steve Hoefer] is not a huge fan of traditional table lamps, so he set off to build a reading light of his own that was more aesthetically pleasing than the standard fare. He thought it would be pretty appropriate to construct his reading lamp out of a book, and we’re inclined to agree.
He stripped the pages from an old book he found at the thrift store, then built a plywood frame to fill in the recently vacated area. A second frame was built inside the first to support the installation of some warm LED strips as well as the acrylic sheet he used to diffuse the light. A whisker switch was installed in the corner of the frame, which turns the lights on when the book is opened. The lamp puts out about the light equivalent of a 40W bulb, and can be “dimmed” by simply adjusting how far the cover is opened.
So you don’t have any secret passageways in your house, but if you’ve got a bookshelf this secret switch can add some fun to your routine. [Brandon] saw a commercially available version which was out of stock when he went to order so he set out to build his own.
He’s using the switch to operate a lamp. The donor part for the hack is a lamp dimmer which you’ll find at the big box store. This is really just a pass-through wall plug with an extension cord. By cutting the dimmer module off of the extension a push button can be used to connect and disconnect one of the conductors in the line. Make sure you use a push button rated or mains voltage!
To make the push switch work with a book [Brandon] bend a bracket which will slide into the spine of a hardcover. We love his homemade press brake (angle iron, a sturdy hinge, and a chunk of 2×4) used when shaping the bracket. Once everything’s in place nobody will ever know there’s anything special about those books.
[Bill] is back with another fantastic video explaining a piece of intriguing hardware. This time, he’s explaining how a CCD works. For many of us, these things are part of our daily life, but aside from the fact that they capture an image, we don’t put much thought into them. [Bill] breaks things down in a way that we really enjoy. Fast paced and detailed, yet simple enough for even non-engineers to follow. This time, however, he’s also promoting his companion book which includes tons more information, not only on the construction and function of these ideas, but the underlying scientific principles.
We’re big fans of [Bill Hammack], aka the Engineer Guy. His series of engineering videos dredge up pleasant memories of watching Mr. Wizard but spin to the adult science enthusiast. The most resent season (he calls it series #4) scratches the surface of the topics covered in his book Eight Amazing Engineering Stories, which was written with fellow authors [Patrick Ryan] and [Nick Ziech]. They provided us with a complimentary digital copy of the book to use for this review.
The conversational style found in the videos translates perfectly to the book, but as with comparing a novel to a movie, the written word allows for much more depth. For instance, we loved learning about how Apple uses anodization to dye the aluminum used for iPod cases. The same presentation style makes the topic easily understandable for anyone who took some chemistry and math in High School. But primers a sidebars offer an optional trip through the looking-glass, explaining the history behind the process, how it compares to natural materials, and what trade-offs are made in choosing this process.
Some of the other topics included are how CCD camera sensors, lead-acid batteries, mems accelerometers, and atomic clocks work. As the book progresses through all eight topics general concepts the complexity of the items being explained advances quickly. By the seventh story — which covers the magentron in a microwave oven — we’d bet the concepts challenge most readers’ cognition. But we still enjoyed every page. The book would make a great pool-side read. It would make a great graduation gift (too bad we missed that time of year) but keep it in mind for any science minded friends or relatives. You can see [Bill's] own description of the book and all its formats in the clip after the break.
[Jeremy Blum] and [Jason Wright] pose with their project at the end of a 24 hour hackathon. The Facebook headquarters in New York City held the event as part of their Summer of Hack program. As an homage to the hosts, the hacking duo decided to create a physical book and populate it with the virtual Facebook. And what do you call such a creation? The Face(book)^2.
The video after the break gives the best overview of the hardware, but here’s the gist of it: They started with the largest hardcover book they could find, hollowing out its pages to house their own hardware. When you open the book it calls back to a computer over an Xbee link with a request for data. The python script on the computer pulls the newest from a Facebook feed, sending it back to the book to be displayed. There is a graphic LCD and four character LCDs built in for this purpose. There’s also an accelerometer which is used for detecting page turns when the cover is jostled. The rest of the interactivity is provided by a few tactile switches mounted next to the smaller LCD screens for navigation and the ‘like’ feature.
It’s no secret that Google has been scanning hundreds of thousands of books in the hope of recreating the Library of Alexandria. Publishers and authors really didn’t like that idea, so the Google books team is doing the next best thing: they’re releasing the plans for a very clever book scanner in the hope others will pick up the torch of creating a digital library of every book ever written.
Unlike some other book scanners we’ve seen that rely on an operator manually flipping pages, this linear book scanner turns the pages automatically with the help of a vacuum cleaner and a cleverly designed sheet metal structure after passing them over two image sensors taken from a desktop scanner.
The bill of materials comes in at around $1500, but according to the official design documents this includes a very expensive scanner, something that could be replaced in true hacker style with a few salvaged flatbed scanners.
After the break you can check out a Google Tech Talk presented by [Dany Qumsiyeh] going over the design and function of his DIY book scanner. There’s also a relatively thorough design document over on a Google code page.
You’ll find this used book vending machine at The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto, Canada. For two Loonies you can buy a random book from the machine’s hopper. Silly? Absolutely. But as you can see from the video after the break, the act of buying a book this way is a lot of fun, and we always like to see the insides of a machine like this.
[Craig Small's] creation looks vintage, and the chugga-chugga and mechanical bell that accompany each sale go along well with that appearance. Of course the machine is new. A trio of hoppers behind the façade hold stacks of books at a forty-five degree angle. Each stack is raised one at a time by a winch and pulley. Once the top book on the stack is high enough to slide into the dispenser chute the winch stops and the bell rings. A simple solution to dispensing something that is not a standard size.
Because the Biblio-Mat is meant to clear out the discount books, slight damage caused by falling down the chute won’t even be noticed. And if you end up really loving the book you can digitize it by running it through one of these.
This popup book contains several interactive electronic elements. It’s the creation of [Antonella Nonnis] using mostly scrap materials she had on hand. Of course there are some familiar players behind the scenes that take care of the electronic elements.
Her photo album of the build process sheds light on how she pulled everything together. Instead of adding switches for interactivity she built capacitive touch sensors on the backs of the pages. Strips of copper foil serve as flexibly traces, moving the connections past the binding and allowing them to be jumpered to the pair of Arduino boards which control the show. That’s right, there’s two of them. One is dedicated to running the pop-up piano keyboard seen above. The other deals with Art, Math, and Science elements on other pages.
This continues some of the multimedia work we saw popping up in popups a few years back.
Yes, Kindles are wonderful, a computer full of PDFs are awesome, and [Tim Berners-Lee] will probably go down in history as more important than [Gutenberg]. That doesn’t mean there’s not something intangible about books that brings out the affections of so many bibliophiles. Even a book filled with blank pages can be a work of art unto itself, and most of the time these volumes are handmade.
This video of a hardbound volume made by Smith Settle bookbinders covers the entire process from words on a page to a finished book. No, they’re not using movable type; the folios are created using lithography, but sorting, gluing, sewing and binding the folios is done in much the same way as it was done in the middle ages.
Next up is a wonderful film from 1968 by Iowa state university on creating the gold tooling on fine leather-bound volumes. You’ll be hard pressed to find a book with gold tooling nowadays, but it’s still a technique accessible to the industrious amateur bookbinder.
First, gold leaf is applied to the leather spine of a book. Then, custom-made tools are heated to a few hundred degrees and pressed into the leaf. The heat bonds the gold with the leather, and with custom-designed tools designs are burnt into the leather. After that, the excess leaf is simply wiped off, and a fine tooled leather book is born.
What’s really cool about bookbinding is the fact that just about anyone can do it. Go to a craft store, pick up some hardboard and paper, and bind yourself a book. You could make a blank journal, or for the nerds out there (myself included), make a hard bound volume of the NASA wiring standards.
Ah, the movies are an inspiration for so many projects. How many times have you seen a spy movie where a cutout in the pages of a book are hiding something? This was the inspiration which led [Paul] and his crew to try using a laser cutter to remove a handgun-shaped cutout from the pages. The fail began before the project even got started. The sacrificial book they had chosen was too thick to cut directly so they tore it in thirds for the cutting process.
The hijinks are portrayed well in the clip after the break. The infectious giggling as this first trace of the laser cuts the outline makes the video worth watching. As they try to go deeper, the success falls off rapidly. This makes for a great Fail of the Week discussion: Why can’t you cut through multiple layers of a book with a laser cutter? Is this merely a focal length issue that would be solved with a higher-end cutter or is there something else at play here. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.
[Thanks Bob]
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story – or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.
For any technical domain, there is usually one book held up above all others as the definitive guide. For anyone learning compilers, it’s the dragon book. For general computer science, it’s the first half of [Knuth]’s The Art of Computer Programming. For anyone beginning their studies of electrons and silicon, it’s [Horowitz & Hill]’s The Art of Electronics. This heady tome has graced workbenches and labs the world over and is the definitive resource for anything electronica. The first edition was published in 1980, and the second edition was published in 1989. Now, finally, the third edition is on its way.
The new edition will be released on April 30, 2015 through Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and Adafruit. In fact, [PT] over at Adafruit first announced the new edition on last night’s Ask An Engineer show. [Ladyada] was actually asked to provide a quote for the cover of the new edition, an incredible honor that she is far too humble about.
The latest edition is about 300 pages longer than the second edition. It is thoroughly revised and updated, but still retains the casual charm of the original. Real copies do not exist yet, and the only critical review we have so far is from [Ladyada]. There will be few surprises or disappointments.
Consistent contributor [Ken] has cooked up another contraption with his directional booklight. Combining an LED strip and privacy screen filter inside a wooden enclosure, this handy tool is made for someone who wants to read in bed without disturbing anyone else. The booklight sits on top of the page, the LEDs light up just the given area, and because the privacy screen only allows light to come straight off the page, only the reader can see any light and any other viewing angle is obscured.
[Ken] thought of everything. Rather than have the light stay on while the booklight is lifted to turn the page and possibly flash an unsuspecting slumberer, a tactile switch on the underside turns the light on only when it is pressed against the page, allowing very little light to escape.
Future upgrades include another switch on top to detect when the book is closed, and an accelerometer to detect when the reader may have fallen asleep.
In 2013 the dean of an Ethiopian university addressed Maker Faire Hannover and outlined one of his concerns; that the high price of developed-world textbooks was holding back the cause of education for universities such as his own in developing countries. He was there to ask for help from the maker community to solve his problem, and a group of his audience took up the challenge to create an affordable and accessible automatic book scanner.
Their scanner builds on the work of Google engineer [Dany Qumsiyeh], whose open source linear book scanner turns pages by traversing the opened book over a triangular prismic former such that pages are turned by vacuum as they pass over carefully designed slots in its surface. Their modification replaces the vacuum with the Coandă effect, to more gently tease open each page and it is hoped reduce the chance of damaging the volumes being scanned.
The whole machine is controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and the scanning is performed by linear scanning optics, sensors, and electronics taken from flatbed scanners.
An important design goal of the project was to ensure that the scanner could be built without special tools or expertise that might be difficult to find in a developing country, as well as that it should be as inexpensive as possible. The frame of the machine is off-the-shelf extruded aluminium, and the body is acrylic sheet which can be cut to shape with a hand saw if necessary. It is estimated that the device will cost in the region of 500 Euros (about $568) to build.
More information can be found at the project’s web site (German language, Google translate link), including a selection of videos such as the one below the break showing the device in operation.
Writing from the perspective of having been peripherally involved in a professional book scanning operation at a large publisher the benefits of this machine are immediately apparent. Removing the binding and automatically scanning each page as an individual sheet produces a very fast and high quality result, but by its very nature damages the volume being scanned. This machine promises to deliver a solution to the problem of book scanning that is considerably less intrusive.
It is also worth noting that the project does not address any copyright issues that might arise from scanning commercially published textbooks, though this is more of a concern for the end user in terms of what they scan with it than it is for the maker.
I just had my car in for an inspection and an oil change. The garage I take my car to is generally okay, they’re more honest than a stealership, but they don’t cross all their t’s and dot all their lowercase j’s. A few days after I picked up my car, low and behold, I noticed the garage didn’t do a complete oil change. The oil life indicator wasn’t reset, which means every time I turn my car on, I’ll have to press a button to clear an ominous glowing warning on my dash.
For my car, resetting the oil life indicator is a simple fix – I just need to push the button on the dash until the oil life indicator starts to blink, release, then hold it again for ten seconds. I’m at least partially competent when it comes to tech and embedded systems, but even for me, resetting the oil life sensor in my car is a bit obtuse. For the majority of the population, I can easily see this being a reason to take a car back to the shop; the mechanic either didn’t know how to do it, or didn’t know how to use Google.
The two most technically complex things I own are my car and my computer, and there is much more information available on how to fix or modify any part of my computer. If I had a desire to modify my car so I could read the value of the tire pressure monitors, instead of only being notified when one of them is too low, there’s nowhere for me to turn.
2015 was the year of car hacks, ranging from hacking ECUs to pass California emissions control standards, Google and Tesla’s self-driving cars, to hacking infotainment systems to drive reporters off the road. The lessons learned from these hacks are a hodge-podge of forum threads, conference talks, and articles scattered around the web. While you’ll never find a single volume filled with how to exploit the computers in every make and model of automobile, there is space for a reference guide on how to go about this sort of car hacking.
I was given the opportunity to review The Car Hacker’s Handbook by Craig Smith (259p, No Starch Press). Is it a guide on how to plug a dongle into my car and clear the oil life monitor the hard way? No, but you wouldn’t want that anyway. Instead, it’s a much more informative tome on penetration testing and reverse engineering, using cars as the backdrop, not the focus.
Craig Smith is one of the founders of Open Garages, one of the best repositories for vehicle documentation that you won’t find in a Haynes manual. He’s been in the car hacking game for a long time, too. One of his first car hacks, back when the extent of car hacking was modifying an ECU, was a complete teardown of the navigation system in his 2009 Civic. There’s depth and breadth to Craig’s knowledge, a necessity when it comes to reverse engineering a car.
Reverse Engineering. Also, Cars.
Were it not for vehicle-specific communications protocols and mentions of ECUs, The Car Hacker’s Handbook could easily lose the word ‘Car’ from the title. I don’t think this is a bad thing. This is an introduction to pen testing, finding exploits, and futzing around with embedded electronics. It’s not a guide on tuning a Miata or making your nav system work after you’ve decided OnStar isn’t worth $250 a year.
The clearest example of this focus on reverse engineering, instead of modifying cars, is Chapter 8, Attacking ECUs and Other Embedded Systems. This is quite literally a tutorial on reverse engineering anything. The chapter begins with the sub-heading, ‘Analyzing Circuit Boards’, with the simple instruction, “When reversing a circuit board, first look at the model number of the microcontroller chips on the board.” This is how you begin to break down every bit of electronics, from cheap WiFi routers to broken Internet of Things devices.
The chapter on Attacking Embedded Systems goes through the usual tools – the JTAGulator, using an STM32 Discovery board for its SWD functionality, to side channel analysis with the ChipWhisperer. The only thing missing from this book is dropping acid and looking at the layers of metal and polysilicon in a chip, a subject that could fill several volumes.
Of course, this focus on the tools and techniques of reverse engineering is not at the expense of proper, traditional car hacking. The classic car hack – removing the 27-series ROM from an engine control unit tuning a car with a pattern of bits and bytes is still covered. Hacking infotainment displays is there, and there’s even a chapter dedicated to Vehicle to Vehicle communications, the next great advancement of our interstate highway system that’s been around for 20 years. This is, after all, a book on car hacking.
The Ethics of Car Hacking
There are bigger names than Craig Smith in the world of car hacking. Before last year’s Def Con, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek made a name for themselves by taking a Wired writer out for a spin on a public highway. This was widely regarded as a bad move, even if it was great for publicity. You simply don’t remotely commandeer a vehicle while someone is driving it on a highway. Charlie and Chris had the opportunity to use a closed track for this demo for a tech journo, but didn’t. I can’t say I blame them; the press they got from that stunt was incredible.
George Hotz pulled a similar stunt with Bloomberg putting a self-driving car on I-280 in San Francisco. Yes, the self-made self-driving car worked as intended, but George did put a relatively untested system on the open road, with idiots texting and driving in the next lane.
The most important trait a person can have is the ability to differentiate between what is legal and what is ethical. The car hacks that have received the most attention are neither. Charlie Miller’s exploit is simply awesome, and George Hotz’ self-driving car is easily several PhD theses, but test tracks exist. There is no reason to put these cars on the road until sufficient testing is done.
Craig Smith falls on the safer side of garnering media attention. All of his modifications are on a test bench. From a Reddit AMA, he avoids demonstrating his exploits on real cars at all costs. This, by the way, is the standard way of doing things. No, vehicle exploits done in a controlled, non-public environment are not the most widely reported – that’s just a function of how much attention illegal and unethical vehicle exploits receive.
This focus on safety extends to Craig’s introduction of threat models before introducing the reader to the CAN bus. The Car Hacker’s Handbook is not a book telling the reader how to control everything in three thousand pounds of rolling steel. It’s a book telling the reader how to control a ton and a half of rolling death safely.
Takeaway
This is first and foremost a book about hacking the electronics in cars. The skills required to modify an ECU, snoop the CAN bus, or update your sat nav maps without shelling out hundreds are the same skills required to install OpenWRT on a weird router and install Linux on a hard drive the hard way. Craig provides an excellent introduction to what can be done to hack a car, but presents it under the banner of hacking, without cars involved at all.
The full title of this book is, The Car Hacker’s Handbook: A Guide for the Penetration Tester. The heading and subheading should be swapped, and that’s a good thing. This is a guide on how to reverse engineer, exploit, and modify any kind of embedded system; cars are just the example. Craig presents this in a way that is eminently comprehensible and spends enough time reinforcing the idea of hacking a car safely, legally, and ethically. It’s a great read, an excellent introduction to fiddling with embedded bits, and truly owning the devices you’ve already purchased.
Psst… Wanna make a canning jar diode? A tennis ball triode? How about a semiconductor transistor? Or do you just enjoy sitting back and following along an interesting narrative of something being made, while picking up a wealth of background, tips and sparking all sorts of ideas? In my case I wanted to make a cuprous oxide semiconductor diode and that lead me to H.P. Friedrichs’ wonderful book Instruments of Amplification. It includes such a huge collection of amplifier knowledge and is a delight to read thanks to a narrative style and frequent hands-on experiments.
Friedrichs first authored another very popular book, The Voice of the Crystal, about making crystal radios, and wanted to write a second one. For those not familiar with crystal radios, they’re fun to make radios that are powered solely by the incoming radio waves; there are no batteries. But that also means the volume is low.
Readers of that book suggested a good follow-up would be one about amplifier circuits, to amplify the crystal radio’s volume. However, there were already an abundance of such books. Friedrichs realized the best follow-up would be one on how to make the amplifying components from scratch, the “instruments of amplification”. It would be unique and in the made-from-scratch spirit of crystal radios. The book, Instruments of Amplification was born.
The book includes just the right amount of a history, giving background on what an amplifier is and how they first came in the electrical world. Telegraph operators wanted to send signals over greater and greater distances and the solution was to use the mix of electronics and mechanics found in the telegraph relay. This is the springboard for his first project and narrative: the microphonic relay.
The microphonic relay example shown on the right places a speaker facing a microphone; the speaker is the input with the microphone amplifying the output. He uses a carbon microphone salvaged from an old telephone headset, housing everything in an enclosure of copper pipe caps, steel bar stock, nuts and bolts mounted on an elegant looking wood base. All the projects are made with simple parts, with care, and they end up looking great.
The adventure continues with a balance-beam amplifier (using two sewing bobbins to wrap the coils on, carbon from an old flashlight and counterweight from old clock gears), a needle box transformer (necessitating an explanation of Ohm’s law and Thevenin’s Theorem), and arrives at The Vacuum Tube. Of course you can’t understand vac tubes without a discussion of the atom, thermionic emission, and the thermionic diode and triode.
The semiconductor doesn’t get left out in the cold either. Friedrichs takes the time to explain point-contact transistors using germanium crystals taken from old germanium diodes. If that’s not made-from-scratch enough, he has a few chapters experimenting with copper sheets to produce cuprous oxide which is where my interest lies.
Making a Cuprous Oxide Semiconductor Diode
My own cuprous oxide making setup
I originally bought this book, to make a cuprous oxide semiconductor diode. In the photo you can see my setup during one day of experimenting. The jar in the back contains hydrochloric acid, available in hardware and pool stores as muriatic acid, and hence the splash visor and safety gloves.
The process uses borax (a household cleaner) to first clean the copper. Next the stove element is used to heat the copper along with the acid, forming the desired cuprous oxide layer as well as a cupric oxide on top of that which needs to be removed.
Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in producing any diode-like activity. That is certainly not a failing of the book. I spent only two days experimenting and ran out of time. It’s amazing to me that Friedrichs managed to make these rather involved topics so approachable that I could try this with easy to obtain ingredients. And I do hope to return to it someday.
This is a fantastic book for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty actually building vacuum tubes or who wants to try their hand at a semiconductor transistor or experiment with making any old-school amplifier component. But even if you don’t take on the experiments yourself there is a wealth of knowledge to be learned just by reading the background and watching the approach used for each build. I highly recommend this book. On these topics it is indispensable.
Do you have a similarly awesome book to you to recommend? Let us know in the comments below.
I learned some basic electronics in high school physics class: resistors, capacitors, Kirchoff’s law and such, and added only what was required for projects as I did them. Then around 15 years ago I decided to read some books to flesh out what I knew and add to my body of knowledge. It turned out to be hard to find good ones.
The electronics section of my bookcase has a number of what I’d consider duds, but also some gems. Here are the gems. They may not be the electronics-Rosetta-Stone for every hacker, but they are the rock on which I built my church and well worth a spot in your own reading list.
Grob’s Basic Electronics
Grob’s Basic Electronics 12th Edition
Grob’s Basic Electronics by Mitchel E Schultz and Bernard Grob is a textbook, one that is easy to read yet very thorough. I bought mine from a used books store. The 1st Edition was published in 1959 and it’s currently on the 12th edition, published in 2015. Clearly this one has staying power.
I refer back to it frequently, most often to the chapters on resonance, induction and capacitance when working on LC circuits, like the ones in my crystal radios. There are also things in here that I couldn’t find anywhere else, including thoroughly exhaustive online searches. One such example is the correct definitions and formulas for the various magnetic units: ampere turns, field intensity, flux density…
I’d recommend it to a high school student or any adult who’s serious about knowing electronics well. I’d also recommend it to anyone who wants to reduce frustration when designing or debugging circuits.
You can find the table of contents here but briefly it has all the necessary introductory material on Ohm’s and Kirchoff’s laws, parallel and series circuits, and so on but to give you an idea of how deep it goes it also has chapters on network theorems and complex numbers for AC circuits. Interestingly my 1977 4th edition has a chapter on vacuum tubes that’s gone in the current version and in its place is a plethora of new ones devoted to diodes, BJTs, FETs, thyristors and op-amps.
You can also do the practice problems and self-examination, just to make sure you understood it correctly. (I sometimes do them!) But also, being a textbook, the newest edition is expensive. However, a search for older but still recent editions on Amazon turns up some affordable used copies. Most of basic electronics hasn’t changed and my ancient edition is one of my more frequent go-to books. But it’s not the only gem I’ve found. Below are a few more.
Radio Shack Basic Electronics
Radio Shack Basic Electronics
I’d also recommend Radio Shack Basic Electronics by Gene McWhorter and Alvis J. Evans. It’s an intermediate book, one for a high school student or adult new to electronics. It doesn’t have the quantity of material that the much longer Grob’s Basic Electronics has but it is detailed while being easy to understand, if you take your time. I read most of it during free time on a 2 week business trip.
I refer back mostly to its chapter on semiconductors: diodes, bipolar transistors and FETs. Along with the necessary information on how to use them in circuits, there are also very detailed explanations of the science behind how they work. It also covers the expected laws, resistors, capacitors, DC, AC and resonance, as well as amplifier, oscillators and quite a bit of detail on digital circuits.
Getting Started In Electronics
Getting Started in Electronics
And for the person who’s never even connected an LED to a battery there’s Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mimms, III. However, it’s also great for any hacker like me who wants to fill in the gaps, as it’s surprisingly detailed. Anyone who’s bought books at Radio Shack will probably recognize Mimms’ name as that’s where the book was originally sold, along with his equally wonderful Engineer’s Mini-Notebook series, also in my bookcase.
This was actually the first book I read when I started filling in my gaps. I enjoyed its simple explanations with fun, yet complete diagrams, but what I really liked were the 100 sample circuits to try at the end of the book. Actually seeing a working circuit reassured me that I was on the right track. I even later used its light flasher circuit when testing a homemade electrolytic capacitor.
The book starts out with atoms, electrostatics, current, and so on, gently working its way to the components. For that it starts with the simple ones like resistors and capacitors before moving on to the semiconductors such as diodes, transistors and MOSFETs and ending with photonic semiconductors.
And if you’re like me and want to understand the science behind things then it goes into a fair level of detail there too. For example, before going into semiconductors it explains how p-type and n-type silicon doping works.
More Books?
Everyone has their favorite basic electronics books, the ones they grew up with whether at home or in school. Like me you probably even still refer back to them. We’d be delighted if you’d let us know what they are, both for our own interest and for the benefit of other Hackaday readers. And if you have anything to say about the selections above, let us know that too.
One problem with engineering education today is a lack of experimental teaching. Oh sure you may have a project or two, but it’s not the focus of the program because it’s hard to standardize a test around. Typically sections of the field are taught in a highly focused theoretical course by a professor or graduate student with a specialization in that section. Because classes treat individual subject areas, it’s entirely possible to get a really good understanding of two pieces of the same puzzle, but never realize that they fit together to make a picture. It’s only when a freshly minted engineer gets out into the real world that they start to make the connections between seemingly disparate fields of knowledge.
This is why Carroll Smith’s book “Engineer to Win” is so good. He spent a lifetime as a practicing engineer in a field where a small failure could mean the death of a friend. So when he set out to write a book, he wrote a book that related everything needed to properly conceptualize and solve the mechanical engineering problems in his field.
One warning though; the book is not for the faint of heart. If you want to learn something difficult well, then this is book for you. Carroll skips the comforting analogies and gives the information exactly. It can get a little dense, but he makes the assumption that the reader is there to learn and, most importantly, understand. This takes work.
For example, you can’t really understand why a rolled bolt is stronger than a bolt cut on a screw machine until you understand how metal works on a crystalline level. The same goes for metal fatigue, brittle fractures, ductile failures, and all the maladies that metal can suffer. The difference between an engineer and a technician is this deep understanding. Otherwise the equations learned are just parts in a toolbox and not paint on an artist’s palette.
This is why the first half of the book is dominated by all things metallurgical. The book starts with the simple abstractions of the crystalline structures of metal. Unlike my materials class in university, it maintains a practical bend to the presentation of the information throughout the whole process. For example, it moves on to what all this practically means for metals undergoing stresses and failures before it launches into a (short) digression on how metals are made and their history.
However, if racecar plumbing and fasteners are kinda your thing, “Carroll Smith’s Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook” is also a fantastic read.
This first half of the book touches on non-ferrous metals and their proper use as well. After that comes some of the best explanations of metal fatigue, fasteners, and metal bonding I’ve ever read. When the failure of a joint causes a mechanism to fail in a toaster that’s one thing, but when it fails in a racecar people get hurt. Carroll is very exacting in what constitutes a forgivable oversight in engineering, and what does not.
Once the book has finished conveying a working understanding of metals and fasteners it seems to fracture into a pot-luck of different racecar-related topics. During my first reading of the book I resisted this strange turn of events. For example, I didn’t really want to read about racecar plumbing in the eighties, or what kind of springs and aerofoils Carroll likes. However, when I reread those sections in a more focused manner, I realized that many of them were teaching the practical application of the knowledge learned in the previous chapters. How does the metal make a good spring? Why is one kind of plumbing better than another?
Importantly, the anecdotes at the end of the book impart an understanding of the importance of professionalism in engineering. What is the true responsibility of an engineer? He teaches not to take the trust others place in your skills for granted. He teaches to trust in the skills of others. The book teaches humility as an engineer. He shows the kind of person one can become after a lifetime of earnest study in their craft.
Thanks to reader, [Dielectric], for recommending the book to me. Also, from the bit of research I’ve done, the older motorworks edition is generally considered to have better quality reproductions of the diagrams than the newer printings of the book.
This book is scary, and honestly I can’t decide if I should recommend it or not. It’s not a guide, it doesn’t offer solutions, and it’s full of so many cautionary tales and descriptions of tricks and scams that you will wonder how any business gets done in China at all. If you are looking for a reason not to manufacture in China, then this is the book for you.
The author is not involved in the electronics industry. Most of the book describes a single customer in the personal products field (soap, shampoo, lotions, creams, etc.). He does describe other industries, and says that in general most factories in any industry will try the same tricks, and confirms this with experiences from other similar people in his position as local intermediary for foreign importers.
No Free Lunch
The gist is this, though: China isn’t as cheap as it sounds, and at every possible chance the manufacturer will do whatever they can to turn a greater profit. This involves raising the prices to the importer at the last minute, cutting corners incessantly, making unilateral decisions on changes to the product, lying about their capabilities and connections, selling extra or rejected product to other markets, and all while not being able to be held accountable or responsible for problems, putting all the cost and risk on the importer. The picture the author paints is of a country of con-men.
If you want to skip the book, the thing you should take away from it is that everyone is trying to make money, and if you are hiring someone to make something for you, you need to accept that they will turn a profit from that. How they turn a profit will either be obvious, and will show up in the amount you pay for your product, or it will be non-obvious, and will show up in quality fade, counterfeit parts, randomly increasing costs and delays and changes. In China, the author believes that the latter is standard practice.
Poorly Made in China is a non-fiction thriller novel. It was published in 2009, so things may be better now. The main character is an American living in China whose job is to help foreign companies navigate the challenges of manufacturing in China. You might think “maybe he is motivated to drive business for himself by painting a picture of all the awful things that can happen,” and though we haven’t asked the author to confirm, you’d probably be right. He does mention, though, that he took on the risk of not being accepted back into the country after saying negative things, so with such risk associated with him publishing the book, maybe there is a stroke of altruism in it.
“Oh No They Didn’t!”
If you’re looking for an afternoon filled with more thoughts like “holy crap,” “WTF?,” and “oh no they didn’t” than an episode of Real House Wives, then go ahead and read this book. If you want to scare yourself into never wanting to so much as look at China on a map, then this is the book for you. If you are resigned to manufacturing in China and you’re looking for tips on how to avoid all the terrible things he describes, the author specifically mentions in the foreword that this book doesn’t have solutions. If you already manufacture overseas, and you’re just looking for someone else to share the same experiences you’ve probably also had, then maybe it would be a good idea to have a few beers and drown some sorrows with this book.
In what might be one of the coolest applications of laser cutting, joinery, puzzles, writing, and bookbinding, [Brady Whitney] has created the Codex Silenda — a literal puzzle book of magnificent proportions.
[Whitney] had originally conceived the idea of the Codex for his senior thesis research project at Iowa State University, and the result is something for almost everyone. On each of the Codex’s five pages lies a mechanical puzzle that must be solved to progress to the next, while an accompanying text weaves a story as you do so. These intricate pages were designed in SolidWorks and painstakingly assembled from laser cut wood. Breaking the fourth wall of storytelling by engaging the reader directly in uncovering the book’s mysteries is a unique feat, and it looks gorgeous to boot.
Our minds are wired for puzzle solving and storytelling, and this coupling of the two is evocative of an almost childlike wonder of both. Truly, the Codex Silenda is a work of art.
There’s no one quite like Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang. His unofficial resume begins with an EE degree from MIT, the author of Hacking the Xbox, creator of the Chumby, developer of the Novena, the first Open Source laptop, and has mentored thousands of people with dozens of essays from his blog.
Above all, Bunnie is a bridge across worlds. He has spent the last decade plying the markets of Shenzhen, working with Chinese manufacturers, and writing about his experiences of taking an idea and turning it into a product with the help of Chinese partners. In short, there is no person better suited to tell the story of how Shenzhen works, what can be done, and how to do it.
Bunnie’s The Hardware Hacker ($29.95, No Starch Press) is the dead tree expression of years of living and working in Shenzhen, taking multiple products to market, and exploring the philosophy that turned a fishing village into a city that produces the world’s electronic baubles.
This is not Bunnie’s first book on Shenzhen. Earlier this year, The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen was released through CrowdSupply, and it’s the perfect book to keep on your carry on for your flight to Hong Kong. It’s a phrase book, designed to help non-Mandarin speakers get off the plane, find a bathroom, buy a SIM card, tell a taxi to drive to the border, and find a reel of 4.7 uF SMD electrolytic capacitors at the sprawling Hua Qiang Bei markets.
The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen is something you want to read before heading to the Chinese consulate to get your visa, and it’s a mandatory item for your carry on, but it’s book-ness is questionable. It’s a guide, really. You’ll be able to find your hotel and a bathroom with The Essential Guide, but you won’t be able to make sense of anything. The Essential Guide doesn’t tell you the sellers in the electronic market stall can turn a 2 GB SD card into one that reports 16 GB of storage with the press of a button. This book doesn’t tell you Open Source doesn’t mean what you think it means. There isn’t a single word on what Design for Manufacture actually means.
Consider The Hardware Hacker the prerequisite for stuffing The Essential Guide into your luggage. Instead of a survival guide, The Hardware Hacker will tell you how to succeed at whatever endeavor brought you to Shenzhen in the first place. It is, at its core, the primer for understanding the culture of making something in China, how to build thousands of things, and why Open Hardware works.
The Shanzhai and Gongkai
The West has a few ideas about Open Source that basically boil down to, ‘everything must be open source’ or ‘everything should be open source’. The former ideology results in GPL, whereas the latter results in the more permissive licenses. Either way, these licenses are derived from a hack of sorts on copyright. The creator of a piece of software, a painting, or a ship hull has an automatic, exclusive rights over the work’s use and distribution. These rights include the right to give the work away, and to give the work away under conditions. All of this is fairly well codified in the legal system, and even though a lot of the thought that has gone into the last few decades of Open Source hasn’t been tested in the courts, it at least makes sense. China does not have anything resembling copyleft; for that, you would need some semblance of copyright.
In China, Open Source is gongkai. It’s a system of Open Source that is completely unlike anything seen in the West. That’s not to say arguments for and against BSD don’t happen in Mandarin; that’s another word, though. For English speakers, the literal translation of Open Source (in capital letters) is kaiyuan. From what Bunnie writes, including a license with your source in China is rare.
Gongkai isn’t so much a license or philosophy, but a way of doing business through sharing. Under this system, if you were to create a design, you would simply give the blueprints away, making sure to add your name and phone number in the corner. Blueprints are traded, improved upon, and constantly remade. The result is a complete lack of version control, but an absolutely democratic system of technological improvement.
This system of open source (lowercase) has led to the rise of the shanzhai, the term for underground or unaffiliated engineers. These shanzhai are the people responsible for Ferrari-shaped cell phones, the infamous $12 cell phone, and bizarre products whose feature set is a word soup. Put some shanzhai in a factory, and they’ll iterate over hundreds of designs, creating smart watches years before the Apple Watch.
Culture
Bunnie is, after all, an expert in the culture of Chinese manufacturing. The stories from The Hardware Hacker wouldn’t be out of place in any Western factory or distributor. Yes, you will find people selling reprogrammed and relabeled SD cards, and you will find counterfeit handbags made on a ghost shift. These are aberrations, or at least that’s the impression I got from The Hardware Hacker.
Not!
Earlier this year, we took a look at another book on Chinese manufacturing culture, Poorly Made In China, and the impression the author gives could not be more different from Bunnie’s description of Shenzhen.
The backdrop of Poorly Made is the author, Paul Midler, acting as middleman between a cosmetics tycoon in Jersey and a shampoo factory somewhere in China. Where Bunnie tells us that a factory needs to get paid, and they’ll only get paid by delivering what they promise, Midler’s China could not be more different. Stories of the manufacturer bottling mint shampoo when a floral scent was ordered were par for the course, thanks to the mint fragrance being a few cents cheaper. Midler’s factories were dirty, and the only way to get the upper hand in a negotiation was to out-scheme the other party.
Bunnie’s China is nothing like this. Yes, you’ll find schemers and shysters, but you’ll find those in New York, London, and Berlin, too. Taken as a whole, Bunnie tells us there’s nothing inherently unscrupulous about manufacturing in China.
Which of these realities is closer to the truth is open to debate. There would obviously be a difference in an electronics manufacturer in Shenzhen and a factory that produces shampoo a few hours outside the city. I think, though, Bunnie may have a better grasp here; contract work requires a contract, after all, and no one gets paid until the work is done. A years-long relationship with a shampoo manufacturer is something I don’t expect the Hackaday reader will ever experience. Building an electronic gizmo in Shenzhen, perhaps. If you’re looking for a look at the manufacturing culture of China, Bunnie’s might be the best.
Roundup
What does The Hardware Hacker bring to the table? The first third of the book is an excellent introduction to building more than one thing. Design for manufacture, testing, cost of goods sold, and everything else you’re required to know before building selling the product you’re working on are covered well in this book. Of course, no book on the business of making things could ever be considered complete. The Hardware Hacker is, however, a great introduction.
Anyone reading The Hardware Hacker is going to get a very good idea of how to make things. Whether that’s a completely Open Source laptop, dealing with fake SD cards, or managing a supply chain, The Hardware Hacker takes the reader from knowing nothing to at least knowing what they don’t know.
Limiting my assessment of this book does it a disservice – the real value here is Bunnie’s take on the culture of Chinese manufacturing. The shining light of this book is Bunnie’s take on how Open Source works in China, how it’s not really Open Source in capital letters, and how the words ‘sharing economy’ have vastly different meanings on either side of the Pacific.
Over the last decade, Bunnie has cemented his position as a bridge between worlds. On one hand, you have an MIT graduate, familiar with signing NDAs and rightfully frustrated by having to pick up a phone to get a price for a component. On the other hand, you have someone who has deftly maneuvered around Shenzhen, managed supply chains, and actually gets why Shenzhen is the manufacturing capital of the world. Bunnie is expert in bridging these two worlds, and for that knowledge alone The Hardware Hacker is worth the price of admission.
Were it not for vehicle-specific communications protocols and mentions of ECUs, The Car Hacker’s Handbook could easily lose the word ‘Car’ from the title. I don’t think this is a bad thing. This is an introduction to pen testing, finding exploits, and futzing around with embedded electronics. It’s not a guide on tuning a Miata or making your nav system work after you’ve decided OnStar isn’t worth $250 a year.
This is first and foremost a book about hacking the electronics in cars. The skills required to modify an ECU, snoop the CAN bus, or update your sat nav maps without shelling out hundreds are the same skills required to install OpenWRT on a weird router and 
