In bringing suitable illustrations to our articles, we Hackaday scribes use a variety of sources that offer images featuring permissive licences. Among the usual free image libraries there is one particularly rich source, the line drawings contained within the huge archives of patents granted by the various countries around the world. These are the illustrations used as part of the patent itself to describe the working of the patent being claimed. We use them because though the items they depict are legally protected from copying by the patents they are part of, they as part of the patents themselves are in the public domain. Thus we can easily find detailed hand drawn pictures of all kinds of technical innovations from the last couple of hundred years or so, and from time to time you as our readers reap the benefit.

If you spend a while browsing old patents through a search engine such as Google Patents, you can quickly become engrossed in these beautiful images of inventions past. Though their purpose is a functional one to convey the workings of an invention, the anonymous artists have often poured all of their skill into rendering them as considerably more than mere draughtsmanship. In those dusty Government archives lurk masterpieces, just waiting to be found.

It seems we here at Hackaday are not alone in sharing a fascination with these images, for a US patent agent, [Kevin Prince], wrote a fascinating exploration of the medium in his book, The Art of the Patent.

Finally we are then introduced to the design patent, protecting the appearance of something rather than its theory of operation. Yet again some famous and instantly recognisable examples are used as illustration.   These represent the most heavily protected commercial design properties on the market, and no effort has been spared to present their tiniest detail in their patents.

The next chapter explores the tools of the patent draughtsman’s art form to represent textures, movement, transparency, and colour through stippling and shading. We are shown the standard textures for representing materials and surfaces, and the different techniques such as exploded and sectional views for conveying the operation of complex mechanisms. We begin to see the level to which the rigidly applied rules for patent drawings can be subverted by the talented artists to convey real artistic expression instead of lifeless diagrams.

Within the patent archive lies a historical record of the defining inventions that have created our modern world. From [Eli Whitney]’s cotton gin of 1794 to an Apple iPod Mini from 2007, the next chapter takes us through a timeline of American history as portrayed through the medium of invention. We are shown [Samuel Morse]’s telegraph, [Elisha Otis]’s elevator, and [Richard Gatling]’s hand-cranked machine gun, the [Edison] phonograph, and in intricate detail, the [Burroughs] mechanical calculating machine. These 19th century inventions form part of the technological bedrock upon which our modern-day society has been built, and the book continues with some iconic images from the 20th century. The Monopoly board is shown complete with money, property cards, and game counters, then the Lego brick, and [Walt Disney]’s animation table. The defining technology of mid-to-late 20th century world events then makes an appearance, with [Enrico Fermi]’s 1955 patent for a nuclear reactor.

The final chapter of the book is simply a gallery of what must be the author’s favourite patent images, a glorious cross-section of centuries of invention in rich detail. We see industrial machinery, clothing, engines, clocks, and domestic equipment. Not all the inventions shown are familiar, but among them we have the Etch-a-Sketch toy, and [László Bíró]’s ballpoint pen. While the other chapters provide a wealth of fascinating information and background about the patent, it is this chapter for us that encapsulates the engrossing nature of the patent archive more than any other. Images with the same level of detail and interest can be found at every turn in almost all fields, so it must have been a nearly impossible process for the author to whittle down a huge pile of images to those that fit in the space available.

The Art Of The Patent, by [Kevin Prince], started life as a Kickstarter-funded project in 2011, and is now available through your well-known online bookseller. If you have an interest in patents, inventions, or technology history, then we suggest you find a copy for yourself as you are unlikely to be disappointed by it.

Isaac Asimov described the business of rocket fuel research as “playing footsie with liquids from Hell.” If that piques your interest even a little, even if you do nothing else today, read the first few pages of IGNITION! which is available online for free. I bet you won’t want to stop reading.

IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants is about how modern liquid rocket fuel came to be. Written by John D. Clark and published in 1972, the title might at first glance make the book sound terribly dry — it’s not. Liquid rocket fuel made modern rocketry possible. But most of us have no involvement with it at all besides an awareness that it exists, and that makes it easy to take for granted.

Most of us lack any understanding of the fact that its development was the result of a whole lot of hard scientific work, and that work required brilliance (and bravery) and had many frustrating dead ends. It was also an amazingly dangerous business to be in. Isaac Asimov put it this way in the introduction:

“[A]nyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.

There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.”

At the time that the book was written and published, most of the work on liquid rocket fuels had been done in the 40’s, 50’s, and first half of the 60’s. There was plenty written about rocketry, but very little about the propellants themselves, and nothing at all written about why these specific substances and not something else were being used. John Clark — having run a laboratory doing propellant research for seventeen years — had a unique perspective of the whole business and took the time to write IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants.

Liquid rocket propellant was in two parts: a fuel and an oxidizer. The combination is hypergolic; that is, the two spontaneously ignite and burn upon contact with each other. As an example of the kinds of details that mattered (i.e. all of them), the combustion process had to be rapid and complete. If the two liquids flow into the combustion chamber and ignite immediately, that’s good. If they form a small puddle and then ignite, that’s bad. There are myriad other considerations as well; the fuel must burn at a manageable temperature (so as not to destroy the motor), the energy density of the fuel must be high enough to be a practical fuel in the first place, and so on.

The actual process of discovering exactly what materials to use and how precisely to make them work in a rocket motor was the very essence of the phrase “the devil is in the details.” For every potential solution, there was a mountain of dead-end possibilities that tantalizingly, infuriatingly, almost worked.

The first reliable, workable propellant combination was Aniline and Red Fuming Nitric Acid (RFNA). “It had the one – but magnificent – virtue that it worked,” writes Clark. “Otherwise it was an abomination.” Aniline was difficult to procure, ferociously poisonous and rapidly absorbed through skin, and froze at an inconvenient -6.2 Celsius which limited it to warm weather only. RFNA was fantastically corrosive, and this alone went on to cause no end of problems. It couldn’t be left sitting in a rocket tank waiting to be used for too long, because after a while you wouldn’t have a tank left. It needed to be periodically vented while in storage. Pouring it gave off dense clouds of remarkably toxic gas. This propellant would go on to cause incredibly costly and dangerous problems, but it worked. Still, no one wanted to put up with any of it one moment longer than they absolutely had to. As a result, that combination was not much more than a first step in the whole process; there was plenty of work left to do.

By the mid-sixties, liquid rocket propellant was a solved problem and the propellant community had pretty much worked themselves out of a job. Happily, a result of that work was this book; it captures history and detail that otherwise would simply have disappeared.

Clark has a gift for writing, and the book is easy to read and full of amusing (and eye-widening) anecdotes. Clark doesn’t skimp on the scientific background, but always in an accessible way. It’s interesting, it’s relevant, it’s relatable, and there is plenty to learn about how hard scientific and engineering development actually gets done. Download the PDF onto your favorite device. You’ll find it well worth the handful of evenings it takes to read through it.

You enter a study and see a lightbulb hanging on the bookshelf. You try all the switches in the room — nothing is turning it on. Remembering you’re in [lonesoulsurfer]’s home, you realize that you’re going to have to start yanking on every book in sight.

While often associated with the likes of Bat-caves and other complicated hidden passageways, turning a shelved book into a secret switch isn’t complex in its own right. [lonesoulsurfer] is basing their build on one by B.Light Design revolving around a fan switch, some aluminium strips, a block terminal, fishing line, a hinge, and — of course — a book with a dust jacket and something to trigger.

Bend the aluminium into an angle bracket and drill a hole to attach the fan switch — ensuring the whole is small enough to fit behind and not distinguish the book you’re using. Cutting the hinge to the size of the book and screwing a strip of aluminium to it, both this lever and the fan switch’s bracket are then mounted on the shelf. Once a length of fishing twine is tethered to the lever and fitted through the book’s pages to the fan switch — ensuring the line is taut — sliding the dust jacket back onto the book completes the disguised switch!

[lonesoulsurfer] is using this switch to trigger a battery powered light as messing with mains power is a whole other beast. Since the fan switch has enough spring to pull the book back into place, all that’s left is to befuddle and impress your friends next time they come ’round.

Don’t like this method? Here’s a slightly different rendition, as well as a version inspired by Batman.

[Via Instructables.]

Who’s the better programmer? The guy that knows 10 different languages, or someone who knows just one? It depends. Programming is akin to math, or perhaps it is that we treat some topics differently than others which leads to misconceptions about what makes a good programmer, mathematician, or engineer. We submit that to be a great programmer is less about the languages you know and more about the algorithms and data structures you understand. If you know how to solve the problem, mapping it to a particular computer language should be almost an afterthought. While there are many places that you can learn those things, there is a lot more focus on how to write the languages,  C++ or Java or Python or whatever. We were excited, then, to see [Jeff Erickson] is publishing his algorithms book distilled from teaching at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for a number of years. The best part? You can read the preprint version online now and it will remain online even after the book goes to print.

When you were in school, you probably learned math in two ways: there was the mechanics (4×4=16) and then there were the word problems (Johnny has 10 candy bars and eats 4, how many are left?). Word problems are usually the bane of the student’s existence, yet they are much more realistic. Your boss has (probably) never come in your office and asked you what 147 divided by 12 is. If she did, you could hand her a calculator. The real value comes in being able to synthesize the right math for the right problem and — if you are lucky — gaining intuition about it (doubling the price will only increase profit by 10%). Software is pretty much the same, for example no one rushes into your cubicle and says “Quick! We need a for loop written!” You get a hazy set of requirements if you are lucky, and you then need to map that into something that computers can do. For that reason, we’ve always been more of a fan of learning about algorithms and data structures rather than specific language features.

It could be a fundamental issue with how normal people view our strange and exotic fields. After all, no one would think a guy working the grill at a burger joint could plan a Michelin-worthy menu. We don’t expect a bricklayer to be an architect. We also don’t think the executive chef and the architect are going to flip burgers or lay bricks even if they can.

The main corpus contains several interesting chapters including:

• Recursion
• Backtracking
• Dynamic Programming
• Greedy Algorithms
• Basic Graph Algorithms
• Depth-First Search
• Minimum Spanning Trees
• Shortest Paths
• All-Pairs Shortest Paths
• Maximum Flows & Minimum Cuts
• Applications of Flows and Cuts
• NP-Hardness

In addition, there are additional sections on topics ranging from string matching and Fourier transforms to Turing machines and estimation. It looks like good stuff.

There are worse places to learn about algorithms than UIUC; they have a long history in both real and fictional computing. If you like watching animation over reading, may we suggest this?

Who says there’s no such thing as magic? Not anyone who knows what a Unix pipe is, that’s for sure. If you do some of your best incantations at a blinking cursor, this scratch-built Raspberry Pi Zero “Spellbook” laptop created by [Calvin] might be just what the apothecary ordered. Lucky for us, he was kind enough to document the design and construction of this penguin-powered tome for anyone else who wishes to dabble in the GNU Dark Arts.

In the series of videos after the break, viewers have the opportunity to watch a project go from idea to final product. The first video was uploaded nearly a month before the project was completed, and goes over some of the design elements of the project as well as different ideas [Calvin] had in terms of things like component placement. Throughout the video, he illustrates his ideas in TinkerCAD, which might not have been our first choice for a project this complex, but it does go to show what’s possible in the free web-based CAD package.

By the second video, [Calvin] has printed some parts and now has the hardware coming together. The general idea is that the outside panels of the “book” are made out of steel cut from the side panel of an old computer, with the 3D printed components taking the form of spacers between the electronic components. These plastic “pages” are not only easier and faster to print than a complete case, but help sell the appearance of the book when viewed from the sides.

[Calvin] has shared his TinkerCAD design so that others can print out the necessary components for the book, though you’ll have to source your own steel plates. He also breaks down all the principle components he used and gives links to where you can buy them, from the display and keyboard down to the screws and standoffs. He went with the Pi Zero and sticks to mainly console work, but if you want something with enough power to throw around a graphical environment, he says there’s room in the case for a Pi 3.

Hackers seem to enjoy hiding hardware inside of books, PLA or otherwise. We’ve recently seen an iPad nestled snugly into a notebook, and of course no house would be complete without a book doubling as a hidden switch.

When you think of the Unix and C revolution that grew out of Bell Labs, there are a few famous names. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan come to mind. After all, the K in both K&R C and in AWK stand for Kernighan. While Kernighan is no stranger to book authorship — he’s written several classics including “the white book” for C and Unix — he has a new book out that is part historical record and part memoir about the birth of Unix.

Usually, when a famous person writes a retrospective like this, it is full of salacious details, but we don’t expect much of that here. The book talks about Bell Labs and Multics, of course. There’s serious coverage of the first, sixth, and seventh editions with biographies of people integral to those releases.

The final part of the book deals with the explosive growth and commercialization of the operating system along with its many descendants. Yes, Linux is in there, of course, as is BSD and others. In broad strokes, this probably doesn’t add a lot to what we all know about the history of Unix, but the personal details and just hearing it from a primary source is worth the price of admission.

The books doesn’t sugar coat anything. Imagining someone who has had such an impact on the industry as a “below average intern” struggling with the infamous McCracken FORTRAN book to write a program is difficult, but you can also imagine how he felt and what that young Kernighan would have thought if he could see how his work is considered today. In his words: “I didn’t really know how to program.”

There were some technical surprises. We always thought AWK was influenced by Snobol, but according to the book, it borrowed from RPG. We don’t see it, but who are we to argue with the K in AWK?

We do wonder how many other Kindle Direct paperback books were typeset using groff. We are betting not many. We were a bit surprised there isn’t an electronic version, and at $18, the book isn’t an impulse buy. But for the insights into historical computing, it is priceless.

We feel sorry for youth of today. If you spend a few hours playing a modern video game and decide you want to write your own, there’s a big job ahead of you. Games now are as much performances as programs, with cinematic 3D renderings, polyphonic sound and music tracks, and detailed storylines. That wasn’t true 40 years ago, when you could play Pong and then think about writing your own version. The Raspberry Pi people must agree as they are taking preorders for a book called “Code the Classics.” In it, they interview designers of several classic arcade games and then show Python versions of the games you can run — and hack — yourself. You can see their video about the title, below.

The code is from Raspberry Pi founder [Eben Upton] and as you might expect the games aren’t necessarily faithful reproductions but inspired by the old arcade standards.

The 224-page book is listed as volume one and apparently, between the two volumes, the book will tackle different genres of classic games ranging from Pong to Sensible Soccer. From the video, we think the other games are Centipede, Frogger, and Bubble Bobble.

If you are interested in retrogaming, this should be a good read. We don’t know how much is in volume 1 and when volume 2 will be around, though.

If you don’t want to play games written in Python, you can always write Python programs to play games for you. If your favorite programming language is solder, you can still play Pong.

For many of us, our passion for electronics and science originated with curiosity about some device, a computer, radio, or even a car. The subject of this book has just such an origin. However, how many of us made this discovery and pursued this path during times of hunger or outright famine?

That’s the remarkable story of William Kamkwamba that’s told in the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Remarkable because it culminates with his building a windmill (more correctly called a wind turbine) that powered lights in his family’s house all by the young age of fifteen. As you’ll see, it’s also the story of an unyielding thirst for knowledge in the face of famine and doubt by others.

Learning By Taking Apart Radios

Many things make this hack impressive. One is the hack itself but we’ll get to that later. The other is that it was made by a boy who was self-taught and only fifteen at the time. Another was his circumstances.

William Kamkwambe was born in Malawi, in southeast Africa on August 5th, 1987 in what most would call poverty. His family grew tobacco as a cash crop and maize, which many would know as corn, for food and for sale. They made just enough cash and maize to live off of, some years being bountiful and some years harvesting barely enough.

His thirst for knowledge and interest in science and electronics started in a way many readers will find very familiar. The first time he heard a radio he immediately wanted to know how it worked. This type of curiosity is the mark of an engineer and a scientist and from there his heart was set on getting an education to become a scientist, breaking out of the pattern of growing up to be a subsistence farmer.

And so at the age of thirteen, William and his friend Geoffrey began taking apart radios. They used trial and error to learn how they worked. For example, by disconnecting a transistor they learned where the amplification happens. To make repairs, in lieu of a soldering iron, they’d heat up a thick wire over the kitchen fire. For a while, they even repaired radios for others.

Bad Weather And a Dynamo

December 2000 brought heavy flooding followed by drought but a bit of rain in March saved their crop from total disaster. The events meant the family had less food than normal but just enough.

William was just 13 and during this time he discovered another electrical device, one that would eventually have an even bigger impact on his life than the radio. That was a bicycle dynamo, a small generator whose shaft was turned by contact with one of the bicycle’s wheels. The bicycle powered a light but he wanted to know if it could power a radio. He and Geoffrey connected the dynamo’s wires to where the radio’s battery went but that didn’t work. Pushing the wires into the radio’s AC input socket, however, did work. They took turns spinning the wheel by hand while the other danced to the music.

This started him wondering if there was some way to spin the dynamo automatically to power lights in his family’s home. The answer would come, but only near the end of a famine.

Famine And Discovering Windmills

If the previous season’s crop was bad, by September of 2001 it was clear the next would be worse. This time the drought stuck and plunged Malawi into a famine lasting around seven months and killing many through starvation and cholera. William’s family was among those affected. By early December they were down to one meal a day consisting of around seven mouthfuls. That was reduced to only one mouthful in the lead up to the time their crop of maize ripened, breaking the famine in March 2002.

William began secondary school a few months before harvest, during Christmas of 2001. But he soon had to drop out as all of the family’s money had to go toward paying for what little food they could afford. That didn’t stop his yearning to learn, though. In February, still in the middle of the famine, he made up for his lack of schooling by spend time in, and borrow books from a small library in Wimbe Primary School stocked with books donated by the American government.

He read books titled Explaining Physics and Integrated Science, using an English-Malawi dictionary to look up words. But it was from a textbook called Using Energy that he first discovered windmills. Finally, he’d found a way to keep the bicycle wheel turning to run the dynamo. He decided to build one.

Windmill From Scraps Lighting His House

As any engineer knows, it’s best to start with a prototype. His first turbine used blades carved from a bottle but it was too small.

To get longer blades for his second one, he came up with an ingenious solution which he’d continue to use for later versions. He and his friend Geoffery dug up a PVC pipe from an aunt’s collapsed house and cut it in half lengthwise. Then to flatten it, he heated it over his mother’s kitchen fire. He cut 20cm long blades from that. To make holes in the PVC he came up with another clever and simple technique. He took a nail and stuck half a maize cob onto one end to act as a handle. He then heated the nail red hot and poked it into the PVC blades to make holes. For the generator, he took a motor from a junk cassette player. Skipping the details of how he coupled the generator shaft to the wind turbine (tease: this included carving rubber from shoes for a high friction contact) they managed to power a small Panasonic radio.

The famine ended and with his windmill successes so far, he started gathering parts for his third windmill, the one that’d power lights in his home. From a scrapyard, he found a tractor fan on which to attach long PVC blades. To make the corresponding holes in the metal tractor fan blades he got a quick job loading wood, earning enough money to pay a local welder to drill the holes in the fan metal.

At the same time, he had a shock absorber, also from the scrapyard, welded to the pedal shaft of a broken bicycle that his father let him have. Using nuts and bolts purchased by his friend Gilbert, he bolted the PVC blades to the fan blades. He then attached this to the other end of the shock absorber. Thus, turning the blades turned the central sprocket of the bicycle as pedals would. The dynamo (also purchased by Gilbert) was the last piece of the puzzle and turned via the rear wheel of the bike being chain driven as normal by the pedal shaft.

William mounted it to the top of a six-inch diameter bamboo pole. The blades turned in the wind. In the first test powering his father’s radio, two things happened: there was a brief sound from the radio and black smoke began to pour out of the speakers. The problem was that the dynamo put out 12 volts AC while the radio was rated for half that. Referring back to a library book, Explaining Physics, he took wire from an old motor he’d had in his junk pile and wrapped it around a stick, forming a choke. With that in the circuit, the radio played without emitting smoke.

William, Geoffery, and Gilbert then cut three trees and dug holes to make a sixteen-foot tall tower behind his house. In the presence of a skeptical crowd, William removed a spoke that had been keeping it from rotating and with a gust of wind, the blades rotated and a light came to life.

In the coming months, William put lights in his home, eliminating the need to burn kerosene, and even created a homemade circuit breaker which we’d previously covered.

Rewarded With More Than Just Light

The towering windmill naturally attracted attention and the word got passed on from there. The final chapters in the book talk about how by November 2006 word reached outside his village resulting in visits from school officials, then reporters and eventually to William being given an all-expenses-paid trip to give a TED talk at TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania.

This led to funding from wealthy venture capitalists and other individuals for his projects and education, partly to stimulate homegrown leaders who could go on to make positive contributions to Malawi and the rest of Africa. Funding through a non-profit group called the Moving Windmills Project went to improvements for his village and education. And together with buildOn.org, they rebuilt the Wimbe Primary school.

In December 2007 he got to visit Southern California to see the wind farm that he’d seen in the book, Using Energy. In June 2008 he participated in the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, South Africa. He also received a scholarship to attend the African Leadership Academy, a high school in Johannesburg where he met other young people also destined to make a difference in Africa.

In the book’s postscript, we learn how a TV interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart led to invitations to visit colleges in the US and he eventually settled on Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 2014.

Takeaways

It’s difficult in an article to give every impression and interesting event that’s encountered in reading this book. One thing that surprised me time and again while reading is that William had next to nothing, suffered hunger, had some idea through radio and other means of the abundance and relative ease of parts of the world elsewhere, and yet showed not one inkling of frustration at his life. He shows just the opposite. You may say it was because of his young age but he exhibits wisdom beyond his years. Throughout the book, his enthusiasm, determination, and his hunger for knowledge never falter.

The other pleasure in reading this book was made possible by those same circumstances, his need to make do with what he had. Missing from this article are details of his homemade knives, a simple hack for trapping birds, and many other simple but brilliant and effective techniques for making things, causing this already inspiring tale to be all the more enjoyable a read.

Reading is big in Québec, and [pepelepoisson]’s young children have access to a free mini library nook that had seen better days and was in dire need of maintenance and refurbishing. In the process of repairing and repainting the little outdoor book nook, he took the opportunity to install a few experimental upgrades (link in French, English translation here.)

The mini library pods are called Croque-Livres, part of a program of free little book nooks for children across Québec (the name is a bit tricky to translate into English, but think of it as “snack shack, but for books” because books are things to be happily devoured.)

After sanding and repairs and a few coats of new paint, the Croque-Livres was enhanced with a strip of WS2812B LEDs, rechargeable battery with solar panel, magnet and reed switch as door sensor, and a 3.3 V Arduino to drive it all. [pepelepoisson]’s GitHub repository for the project contains the code and CAD files for the 3D printed pieces.

The WS2812B LED strip technically requires 5 V, but as [pepelepoisson] found in his earlier project Stecchino, the LED strip works fine when driven directly from a 3.7 V lithium-polymer cell. It’s not until around 3 V that it starts to get unreliable, so a single 3.7 V cell powers everything nicely.

When the door is opened, the LED strip lights up with a brief animation, then displays the battery voltage as a bar graph. After that, the number of times the door as been opened is shown on the LED strip in binary. It’s highly visual, interactive, and there’s even a small cheat sheet explaining how binary works for anyone interested in translating the light pattern into a number. How well does it all hold up? So far so good, but it’s an experiment that doesn’t interfere at all with the operation of the little box, so it’s all good fun.

[Jean-Francois Debroux] spent 35 years designing analog ASICs. He’s started a book and while it isn’t finished — indeed he says it may never be — the 180 pages he posted on LinkedIn are a pretty good read.

The 46 sections are well organized, although some are placeholders. There are sections on design flow and the technical aspects of design. Examples range from a square root circuit to a sigma-delta modulator, although some of them are not complete yet. There are also sections on math, physics, common electronics, materials, and tools.

The text is decidedly practical. For example, there’s a succinct summary of what a MOSFET channel width and length do to parameters such as capacitance, noise, and saturated resistance.

If you prefer a PDF copy, here’s a tip. When viewing the document, click on the full-screen button. Then at the top, you’ll see a download button. The link there looks as though it isn’t a static link, so you’ll need to visit the post yourself to do the download.

It is a lot of work to put a book together and even though this isn’t complete, it is a great start and already useful. If you want some more book recommendations, check out ours. We never fail to recommend The Art of Electronics, too.

Regular readers will know that Hackaday generally steers clear of active crowdfunding campaigns. But occasionally we do run across a project that’s unique enough that we feel compelled to dust off our stamp of approval. Especially if the campaign has already blasted past its funding goal, and we don’t have to feel bad about getting you fine folks excited over vaporware.

It’s with these caveats in mind that we present to you Computer Engineering for Babies, by [Chase Roberts]. The product of five years of research and development, this board book utilizes an internal microcontroller to help illustrate the functions of boolean logic operations like AND, OR, and XOR in an engaging way. Intended for toddlers but suitable for curious minds of all ages, the book has already surpassed 500% of its funding goal on Kickstarter at the time of this writing with no signs of slowing down.

Technical details are light on the Kickstarter page to keep things simple, but [Chase] was happy to talk specifics when we reached out to him. He explained that the original plan was to use discreet components, with early prototypes simply routing the button through the gates specified on the given page. This worked, but wasn’t quite as robust a solution as he’d like. So eventually the decision was made to move the book over to the low-power ATmega328PB microcontroller and leverage the MiniCore project so the books could be programmed with the Arduino IDE.

Obviously battery life was a major concern with the project, as a book that would go dead after sitting on the shelf for a couple weeks simply wouldn’t do. To that end, [Chase] says his code makes extensive use of the Arduino LowPower library. Essentially the firmware wakes up the ATmega every 15 ms to see if a button has been pressed or the page turned, and updates the LED state accordingly. If no changes have been observed after roughly two minutes, the chip will go into a deep sleep and won’t wake up again until an interrupt has been fired by the yellow button being pressed. He says there are some edge cases where this setup might misbehave, but in general, the book should be able to run for about a year on a coin cell.

[Chase] tells us the biggest problem was finding a reliable way to determine which page the book was currently turned to. In fact, he expects to keep tinkering with this aspect of the design until the books actually ship. The current solution uses five phototransistors attached to the the MCU’s ADC pins, which receive progressively more light as fewer pages are laying on top of them. The first sensor is exposed when the second page of the book is opened, so for example, if three of the sensors are seeing elevated light levels the code would assume the user is on page four.

The books and PCBs are being manufactured separately, since as you might expect, finding a single company that had experience with both proved difficult. [Chase] plans on doing the final assembly and programming of each copy in-house with the help of family members; given how many have already been sold this early in the campaign, we hope he’s got a lot of cousins.

So what do you do with an Arduino-compatible book when Junior gets tired of it? That’s what we’re particularly interested in finding out. [Chase] says he’s open to releasing the firmware as an open source project after the dust settles from the Kickstarter campaign, which would give owners a base to build from should they want to roll their own custom firmware. Obviously the peripheral hardware of the book is fairly limited, but nothing is stopping you from hanging some sensors on the I2C bus or hijacking the unused GPIO pins.

If you end up teaching your copy of Computer Engineering for Babies some new tricks, we’ve love to hear about it.

[Hunter Scott] who has graced these pages a fair few times, has been working on electronics startups for the past ten years or so, and has picked up a fair bit of experience with designing and building hardware. Those of us in this business seem to learn the same lessons, quite often the hard way; we call it experience. Wouldn’t it be nice to get up that learning curve a little quicker, get our hardware out there working sooner with less pain, due to not falling into the same old traps those before us already know about? The problem with the less experienced engineer is not their lack of talent, how quickly they can learn, nor how much work they can get done in a day, but simply that they don’t know what they don’t know. There’s no shame in that, it’s just a fact of life. [Hunter] presents for us, the Guide to Designing Electronics that Work.

The book starts at the beginning. The beginning of the engineering process that is; requirements capturing, specifications, test planning and schedule prediction. This part is hard to do right, and this is where the real experience shows. The next section moves onto component selection and prototyping advice, with some great practical advice to sidestep some annoying production issues. Next there’s the obvious section on schematic and layout with plenty of handy tips to help you to that all important final layout. Do not underestimate how hard this latter part is, there is plenty of difficulty in getting a good performing, minimal sized layout, especially if RF applications are involved.

The last few sections cover costing, fabrication and testing. These are difficult topics to learn, if up till now all you’ve done is build prototypes and one-offs. These are the areas where many a kickstarter engineer has fallen flat.

Designing Electronics That Work doesn’t profess to be totally complete, nor have the answer to everything, but as the basis for deeper learning and getting the young engineer on their way to a manufacturable product, it is a very good starting point in our opinion.

The book has been around a little while, and the latest version is available for download right now, on a pay what-you-want basis, so give it a read and you might learn a thing or two, we’re pretty confident it won’t be time wasted!

Updates from the enigmatic [NODE] are unfortunately few and far between these days. In fact his latest post is only the second time we’ve heard from the hacker in 2021. But as we’ve come to expect from his white-on-sorta-black releases, it certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Just in time to ring in whatever holiday you may celebrate, [NODE] has unveiled The Pinouts Book. A project he’s been working on for some time now with colleague [Baptiste], the free PDF download contains over 300 pages of high-contrast hardware diagrams and their respective pinouts. It’s about as straightforward as you can get, beyond the dedication page in the beginning, there’s not a word of fluff in the entire document. This is a work of hacker minimalism at its best, and we’re all about it.

From audio/video connectors all the way to development boards and single-board computers, The Pinouts Book sticks to the same format of a diagram and accompanying chart, making it exceptionally easy to find what you’re looking for. If you need more information than this streamlined layout can provide, each entry includes a link to a dedicated page on the book’s companion website. This will redirect you to supplemental data such as the manufacturer’s website, the part’s full datasheet, etc.

According to [NODE], the original plan for the Creative Commons BY-SA licensed work was to release it as a physical book, but the project ballooned up to such a scale that they realized it would be much easier to navigate and use as a digital document. While we don’t disagree, a physical release would certainly look lovely on our bookshelf. In the meantime, those who want to support the effort financially can purchase shirts emblazoned with diagrams pulled straight from the book’s pages.

We’ve long believed that a large-format electronic paper device would be an ideal gadget for the hacker’s workbench, as it allows for browsing through schematics and datasheets with a minimum of eye strain. Now we can also add a copy of The Pinouts Book to the list of things we’d install on our hacker-friendly e-ink compendium.

Thanks to [karnathe] on the Hackaday Discord server for tipping us off to this one.

Ever wondered what, exactly, goes into creating a technical book? If you’d like to know the steps that bring a book from idea to publication, [Sara Robinson] tells all about it as she explains what went into co-authoring O’Reilly’s Machine Learning Design Patterns.

Her post was written in 2020, but don’t let that worry you, because her writeup isn’t about the book itself so much as it is about the whole book-writing process, and her experiences in going through it. (By the way, every O’Reilly book has a distinctive animal on the cover, and we learned from [Sara] that choosing the cover animal is a slightly mysterious process, and is not done by the authors.)

It turns out that there are quite a few steps that need to happen — like proposals and approvals — before the real writing even starts. The book writing itself is a process, and like most processes to which one is new, things start out slow and inefficient before they improve.

[Sara] also talks a bit about burnout, and her advice on dealing with it is as insightful as it is practical: begin by communicating honestly how you are feeling to the people involved.

Over the years I’ve learned that people will very rarely guess how you’re feeling and it’s almost always better to tell them […] I decided to tell my co-authors and my manager that I was burnt out. This went better than expected.

There is a lot of code in the book, and it has its own associated GitHub repository should you wish to check some of it out.

By the way, [Sara] celebrated publication by making a custom cake, which you can see near the bottom of her blog post. This comes as no surprise seeing as she has previously managed to combine machine learning with her love of making cakes!

If we knew how much math goes into writing a video game, we might have paid more attention in math class. If you need a refresher, [Fletcher Dunn] and [Ian Parbery] have their book “3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development” available free online. The book was originally a paper book from 2011 with a 2002 first edition but those are out of print now. However, math is math, so regardless of the age of the book, it is worth a look. For now, the online version is a bunch of web pages, but we hear a PDF or E-reader version is forthcoming.

There’s quite a bit of discussion about vectors, matrices, linear transformations, and 3D graphics. The last part of the book covers calculus, kinematics, and parametric curves. Some of these topics will be of interest even if you don’t care about graphics but do want to learn some math with practical examples.

The writing in this book is more accessible than in your standard math class. You still probably need a little basic math background to tackle the topic, especially algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. There isn’t much about specific programming here, it is all about the math.

We miss real books. But it is great to be able to just make a few clicks and read about just about any topic. If your math interests are more binary, check this out. If math isn’t your thing, maybe you’d rather read about software defined radio.

We always like to call out a commercial success stemming from projects that got their start on Hackaday.io, and so we’re proud to announce the release of MAKE: Calculus by Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, a book that takes a decidedly different approach to teaching calculus than traditional courses. Geared to makers and hackers, who generally tend to have a visual style of learning, the book makes heavy use of 3D-printed models to illustrate the relationships between functions. The project started five years ago as a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, and resulted in a talk at the 2019 Supercon. Their book is now available for preorder, and might be a great way to reacquaint themselves with calc, or perhaps even to learn it for the first time.

So what were you doing at 11:15 UTC on Friday, July 8? Whatever it was, chances are excellent that you were doing it under at least partial sunlight. That’s because at that moment, an estimated 99% of the world’s 8 billion or so people are somewhere between dawn and dusk. A glimpse at the day-night map for that moment shows what happened — with the Sun directly above northern Niger, the only populous continent (sorry, Antarctica) in the dark is Australia. The curve of the terminator almost exactly matches the outline of the other continents, from Japan where the Sun was just setting to the west coasts of the Americas, where it was just coming up. This bit of trivia is almost certainly of zero practical use to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less cool or worth thinking about.

It seems like we might need to talk about RadioShack. Depending on how old you are, you’ll either recall a Radio Shack (notice the space) which was a one-stop shop for everything from rebadged stereo gear to individual resistors, or later as the camel-cased place where your parents bought their cell phones. We’ve been tracking the storied retailer’s downward spiral since at least 2011, including a few head-fakes that seemed to promise its return to brick-and-mortar or at least as an online entity. But now were hear that RadioShack has transmogrified itself yet again, this time into a mean-tweeting crypto exchange. Somewhere along the way, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, the private equity firm that bought RadioShack in 2020 along with such dying retailers as Pier 1 Imports and Modell’s Sports, launched crypto exchange RadioShack Swap, and started blasting out some pretty raunchy tweets for some reason. It’s… really weird.

If you’re looking for a palate cleanser after that, you could do worse than listening to the dulcet tones of WWV, the Colorado-based “all time, all the time” radio station. WWV has been on the air pretty much since there’s been air to be on, transmitting time signals from their atomic clocks. Trouble is, their signals are on the shortwave and HF bands, so unless you’ve got a radio to receive them, you’re out of luck. Or are you? Turns out that if all you’re interested in is the sounds of WWV, there’s an app for that. The WWV Simulator plays the unique combinations of tones, clicks, and voice announcements that WWV listeners have come to love. It’s not clear whether the simulation includes WWV’s digital time codes; we’d guess no, but it should be easy enough to figure out.

And finally, if you’ve never seen the work of a beaver up close, consider yourself somewhat deficient in your engineering education. What these fur-bearing critters can accomplish in a single night or work is beyond belief, if sometimes beyond the pale, as their infrastructure projects have the capacity to flood out human structures. And so some clever social engineering by their human neighbors has been required to relocate them, as this gem with footage from 1948 shows. A passel of pesky beavers caught by the Idaho Fish and Game Department was relocated by dropping them from airplanes. Unlike fish-bombing, beavers require a gentler landing, so the Fish and Game people came up with a clever box that keeps each animal contained during its ride to the ground on surplus WWII parachutes. The box opens on touchdown and out pops the critter, no doubt confused by his new surroundings and the wicked strange thing that just happened to him.

Looks like there’s trouble out at L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope suffered a mechanical anomaly back in August. The issue, which was just announced this week, involves only one of the six imaging instruments at the heart of the space observatory, known as MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument. MIRI is the instrument on Webb that needs the coldest temperatures to work correctly, down to six Kelvins — we’ve talked about the cryocooler needed to do this in some detail. The problem has to do with unexpectedly high friction during the rotation of a wheel holding different diffraction gratings. These gratings are rotated into the optical path for different measurements, but apparently the motor started drawing excessive current during its move, and was shut down. NASA says that this only affects one of the four observation modes of MIRI, and the rest of the instruments are just fine at this time. So they’ve got some troubleshooting to do before Webb returns to a full program of scientific observations.

There’s an old saying that, “To err is human, but to really screw things up takes a computer.” But in Russia, to really screw things up it takes a computer and a human with a really poor grasp on just how delicately balanced most infrastructure systems are. The story comes from Moscow, where someone allegedly spoofed a massive number of fake orders for taxi rides (story in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well) through the aggregator Yandex.Taxi on the morning of September 1. The taxi drivers all dutifully converged on the designated spot, but instead of finding their fares, they just found a bunch of other taxis milling about and mucking up traffic. Yandex reports it has already added protection against such attacks to its algorithm, so there’s that at least. It’s all fun and games until someone causes a traffic jam.

It may be hard for the normies out there to imagine a coffee table book of electronic components, but if you’ve followed along here much, you’ll no doubt have seen some of the beautiful cross-sections that Eric Schlaepfer, aka TubeTime, has come up with. Eric has teamed up with Windell Oskay from the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog and created “Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components.” You’ll definitely want to check out the first chapter, which is available as a PDF for download. Bunnie also did a glowing review, which you’ll want to check out at least for the coupon code — Christmas is coming, after all. Windell and Eric talked about the book on the Embedded.fm podcast too, if you’d rather hear them talk about the book.

We’ve all likely heard the horror stories of 3D printers catching fire in the middle of the night, and while the relative risk is probably small — it’s definitely non-zero. So a little prudence is probably indicated, which for most of us has some practical limitations. It’s just not easy to organize your day around babysitting a print, especially one that goes 24 hours or more. Utilities like OctoPrint can help, but at the end of the day, if you’re minutes away when seconds count, all a camera is going to do is document the destruction. But here’s an idea that might actually do something about a fire. It uses a product we’d never seen before, which is an automatic fire extinguisher for car interiors. They apparently self-activate above a preset temperature, spewing out some sort of dry chemical to put out the fire. We’ve got our doubts about how well this would work in a car, but inside a 3D printer enclosure, it might actually work. If anyone has experience with these things, sound off in the comments.

And finally, if like us you’re always feeling behind the curve on understanding quantum mechanics, you could be in the market for our friend Jeroen Vleggaar’s latest video on quantum fields. It’s pretty clever — he uses his recent bathroom remodeling project as a launching board for the discussion, which honestly we only got about halfway through before zoning out. That’s a consistent problem for us when dipping a toe into the quantum pool, and honestly getting that far is doing better than average. So hats off to Jeroen for attempting to explain things, and for the sweet bathroom upgrade. Oh, and on a related note, Sabine Hossenfelder just dropped a video on the “Nine Levels of Nothing,” which you might want to check out once your mind is in the proper quantum state.

Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

Enter Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, by Silvia Lindtner. Published in 2020, this book is the hallmark of ten years of research, five of which the author spent in Shenzhen recording field notes, conducting interviews, and participating in the startup and prototyping scene that the city offers.

This book digs deep into the forces at play, unraveling threads between politics, culture, and ripe circumstances to position China as a rising figure in global manufacturing. This book is a must-read for the manufacturing history we just lived through in the last decade and the intermingling relationship of the maker movement between the west and east.

From Copy to Prototype

Lindtner does a spectacular job detailing why Chinese manufacturers will readily duplicate and resell existing designs. The answer is multi-faceted but involves, in part, a culturally distinct approach to designs. Duplication offers a means of reverse engineering, a way of understanding how something works. In fact, a number of designs known as gongban (pg 94) regularly circulate openly across factories as templates. The consequence is not only the means of manufacturing something akin to the original, but a way of producing original designs too via customizations that can freely run wild. Lindtner’s punchline in all of this is that the copy is essentially the prototype.

Of course, bootstrapping manufacturing pipelines for existing products does have the consequence of building a Western perception of Chinese manufacturing as a sort of copycat. Lindtner engages with this idea as well, noting how some Western maker labels devote extra work to qualify their means of production in China as genuine (think Arduino “Genuino”) while others emerging directly from China like Seeed Studio have had to push through this perception to break into Western markets.

With gongban, manufacturing in China has developed under circumstances where unlicensed sharing is the norm. In a way, this culturally distinct approach challenges the Western style of binding designs to terms set by the creator. It’s almost as if the west were to operate with permissive open source licenses being the default, and it begs the question: what kinds of innovation we would see if this kind of relationship to designs existed in the west?

The Politics at Play

None of this manufacturing growth has happened in a vacuum. It turns out that a collection of forces loosely motivate this sort of rapid manufacturing development in China.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somewhat adopted the promise of the maker movement and used it, in part, to spur economic growth by creating a strong connection between making and entrepreneurship. Here, starting off as maker puts you on a path towards happiness by ultimately starting your own business. It’s no coincidence that the west now regularly sees Shenzhen as the “Silicon Valley of Hardware.” Both careful branding and financial investments via recognizing Shenzhen as a “Special Economic Zone” have made this the case.

On the other hand, the capacity to manufacture electronics cheaply has also brought in business from the west. Lindtner notes a number of Western articles comparing manufacturing in China as “going back in time,” and she ties this frontier-like perception to other scholarship that digs into the aftermath of Western colonialism. Overall, the politics between west and east are vastly complicated, and this section of the book makes for an eye-opening read.

And Much More

This article is only teasing you with a few highlights. Fret not, Dear Reader, with just over 220 pages and a thick bibliography to sink your teeth into, there’s plenty left to walk through. If you’ve ever been curious to step into the world of manufacturing in China, this book is a must-read. Give yourself a few afternoons, and let the details of prototyping in China draw you in.

For those who read often, e-readers are a great niche device that can help prevent eye fatigue with their e-ink displays especially when compared to a backlit display like a tablet or smartphone, all while taking up minimal space unlike a stack of real books. But for all their perks, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a library of bound paper volumes. For those who have turned back to books or whose e-readers aren’t getting the attention they once did, there are plenty of things to do with them like this e-book picture frame.

The device started life as a PocketBook Basic Touch, or PocketBook 624, a fairly basic e-reader from 2014, but at its core is a decent ARM chip that can do many more things than display text. It also shipped running a version of Linux, which made it fairly easy to get a shell and start probing around. Unlike modern smart phones this e-reader seems to be fairly open and able to run some custom software, and as a result there are already some C++ programs available for these devices. Armed with some example programs, [Peter] was able to write a piece of custom software that displays images from an on-board directory and mounted the new picture display using an old book.

There were a number of options for this specific device that [Peter] explored that didn’t pan out well, like downloading images from the internet to display instead of images on the device, but in the end he went with a simpler setup to avoid feature creep and get his project up and running for “#inktober”, a fediverse-oriented drawing challenge that happened last month. While not strictly in line with a daily piece of hand-drawn artwork, the project still follows the spirit of the event. And, for those with more locked-down e-readers there’s some hope of unlocking the full functionality of older models with this FOSS operating system.