Elizabeth and I have an interest in nuclear tourism. We are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we made a trip to see the decommissioned Nike-Hercules missile site SF-88 located near the Golden Gate Bridge, which is run by the National Park Service as a museum.
Author Archives: Ryan
Pictures from the Scanning Electron Microscope
A few nights back, Brian and I took some images from the SEM. We exported them into TIF format, and then copied them via Sneakernet, a.k.a. using 3.5″ floppy disks and a portable USB floppy reader. I converted them into .png files. Click them for full 1024×768 resolution, the limit of the Leica image capture board. I’m very happy with how they turned out.
This is the top of a metallic pin or electronic contact, showing what appear to be machining marks as well as what looks like a good deal of surface contamination. Note the scale showing 100 microns.
Scanning Electron Microscope
On Monday the 18th, I learn that yes, the donation was approved, but with a catch: It had to be moved on Saturday the 23rd!
Tube Amp
Several years ago, I acquired an Epiphone Genesis electric guitar. It was free, but needed repair. The neck had snapped, but the amazing people at Specimen Products did an even more amazing job restoring it for far less than what that guitar was worth. So I figured it was a sign that I need to learn to play. (Now the cats knocking over my guitar stand and snapping the neck a second time, that might have been a sign too….)
Being an electronics geek, and having an interest in retro technology, of course the only way to go would be a tube amp. And a friend moving out of town conveniently had a tube amp kit she built, but it didn’t work. She’d part with it for the sum of $20. Sold! The chassis was clearly homemade, but I figured that if I could get it to work, I could always rebuild the amp on a new chassis at a later date. And Pumping Station: One recently acquired a finger brake for bending sheet metal, which will be ideal.
First, about the circuit design. Most normal single-ended amps work by having a power transformer that takes 120V on the primary winding, and at least two secondary windings. One provides a low AC voltage to powers the tube heater filaments. The other steps the voltage up so it can be rectified into DC, which becomes the B+ voltage that the tubes use to amplify signals.
Blacksmithing Class
Pun intended. The very talented Adrianna McKinley taught a blacksmithing class at Pumping Station: One last weekend. The topic: making fire pokers. I’d played with blacksmithing many years ago at a Boy Scout camp, but never done anything with it since. Well, Pumping Station: One has a forge, and this class was also certification for it, so based on my life philosophy of “whoever dies with the most hobbies wins”, I signed up. My partner Elizabeth did as well.
Chillmon Board
A first for me: designing a circuit board!
One of the more noble uses of electronics: enabling the production of beer. Chillmon is a concept originally created by Eric Stein to use a Raspberry Pi to control the fermentation temperature of beer at Pumping Station:One. It began life as a breadboard that used TMP36 sensors to record the temperature in the cabinet where we ferment, with Python code that graphed the output on a web page and responded to IRC queries with the beer temperature.