Links

https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/how-automotive-radar-measures-velocity This is a cool look at how car radar is able to tell what other vehicles are doing.
https://wokwi.com/: This is a cool website that allows you to wire up a microcontroller in a webpage, then write code to run on that virtual microcontroller and see the results, this can save alot of time if you’re waiting for parts to arrive or dont have the circuit sitting in front of you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjMuIxRvygQ Been doing some work with orientation sensing and had question about Quaternions and thought this was a good easy to understand description of a somewhat hard to visualize concept
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N48f4APrhd0 Ever see those gauges in an airplane that show where the horizon is in relation to the plane? It would be easy to assume that it’s just a weighted ball, but that wouldn’t work great if the plane was doing maneuvers so how does it work? this is a cool video going into a surprisingly complex machine.
https://blog.westerndigital.com/race-to-seal-helium/ This is an interesting read about all the challenges that had to be overcome in order to allow for computer hard drives to be filled with helium instead of air.
https://youtu.be/LFGRpzzMAgE?si=mxIq_iCBCc3srhxz Always cool to see the workings of a mechanical clock, and this even more so as it includes the needless complexity of a Rube Goldberg machine in the mix.
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/reverse-engineering-a-shahed-136-drone-air-data-computer/ I thought this was super interesting, in the US our military hardware is held to a very high bar but this shows how some places(in this case Iran) that bar is no where near as high. Much of this design is no doubt influenced by sanctions and cost but even so there are some pretty obvious ways something like this could be made much better(although given it’s country of orgin i’m glad for their shortcomings)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-waste-train-car Nuclear fuel has tremendous energy density and lasts for a long time but at some point it needs to be moved for disposal and there are a lot of considerations for how to do so safely, this is a cool solution for that problem.
https://youtu.be/7dRlDmPR3Gk?si=uNqxIGbbI2TnxOwG Ever notice on a screen door that cylinder that closes it? On the surface easy to think it’s just a spring, but constant force springs are actually a bit more than that and This Old Tony as always does a masterful job at breaking down what’s going on.

Book of the month

“The Art of Electronics” by Horowitz, Paul, Hill, Winfield. This book alone I would value far above the 4yrs I spent in school for a EE degree, and it has well earned it’s reputation as the Bible of electronics circuits, it’s full of useful explanations, example circuits and covers pretty much everything you could ever want to know about circuit design and how components operate. There is also a great YouTube series that works though the examples given in the book: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEngineeringExperienceYT/videos

Cool historical fact

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan The chances of being hit by lighting is roughly 1 in 10,000, Roy Sullivan managed to get hit not once or twice by 7 times, the odds of being hit 7 times are 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000