Category Archives: Book

Old Book Teardown #10: Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design (1973) | In The Lab

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Silly Job Title: Component Wrangler

In this video I take a look at Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design by Fredrick J. Hill and Gerald R. Peterson published in 1973:

Here is the laundry list of links to things which came up during this video, including a few duplicates:

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Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Rigol PLA2216 Compatible Logic ProbeThis is an image of the product.notes

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Mail Call #9: Tools and Equipment from Jaycar, Amazon, and AliExpress | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I go through what arrived in the mail recently.

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Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha Multifunction Hook ToolsThis is an image of the product.

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Jan Axelson on USB (and Serial)

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This week I discovered Jan Axelson. She’s a tech writer and her website is here: http://janaxelson.com/.

I have ordered four of her books:

Old Book Teardown #9: Basic Electronics – Volumes 1 through 6 (1955) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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I mostly published this ten hour long video just to exasperate Dave Jones. ;)

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Silly Job Title: Buzz Boss.

In this video I take a good long hard look at the entirety of this book.

The book is Basic Electronics – Volumes 1 through 6 written by Van Valkenburgh, Nooger and Neville, Inc. and published in 1955.

The book is about the state of electronics at the time it was written. It was commissioned by the United States Navy, who used it to train their technicians. Later, it was released for civilian use.

In the book there is lots of material on vacuum tubes, which were state of the art at the time. The sixth volume adds material on transistors and frequency modulation, which were bleeding edge technology at the time.

I learned heaps from reading this book, particularly about the various types of vacuum tubes (also known as “valves” by the British): diode, triode, tetrode, pentode, and Klystron, among others.

Also I learned that the name “transistor” is a contraction of “transfer resistor”, I didn’t know that!

If you would like to watch this video but don’t have ten hours to spare, you can find out how to increase the playback speed more than 2x on my YouTube hacks page.

The links to archive.org I mention in the video are these:

Also I found PDFs for Volumes 1 through 5 here:

Oh, and the link for Make: magazine is here: https://makezine.com/

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

RV77 4K HDMI USB 2.0 4-Port HDMI KVMThis is an image of the product.

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Tools for IoT Hacking

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I’m reading Practical IoT Hacking: The Definitive Guide to Attacking the Internet of Things and it mentioned some equipment I’m interested in:

New Book Teardown #5: Electrical Engineering 101 3rd Edition (2011) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I take a look at Electrical Engineering 101: Everything You Should Have Learned in School…but Probably Didn’t 3rd Edition written by Darren Ashby and published in 2011.

In the book the author mentioned that they used to write for chipcenter.com which appears to have since been taken over by EE Times. ChatGPT provided more information.

The author also mentioned Mathcad. I’m planning to check that out over here: https://www.mathcad.com/

And some terms which came up (ChatGPT explains further):

Vcc
Voltage at the collector
Vee
Voltage at the emitter
Vdd
Voltage at the drain
Vss
Voltage at the source

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha 100pcs Releasable Cable OrganizerThis is an image of the product.

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Old Book Teardown #8: Radio Engineering 3rd Edition (1947) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Silly Job Title: Amp Alchemist

Note: this video is nearly five hours long! If you’re interested but don’t have 5 spare hours (and who does??) you might like to listen at 2x speed or more. The standard YouTube interface only supports playback up to 2x speed but I have some notes about YouTube hacks you can use to set the playback at 3x speed… or more!

In this video I teardown “Radio Engineering” (3rd edition) by Frederick Terman published 1947.

Frederick Terman was a Doctor of Science which is what the Sc.D. after his name stands for. It’s like a Ph.D. He is remembered as a father of Silicon Valley.

In the book there is much talk of diodes, but of course that is in reference to the old thermionic diodes which were vacuum tubes. These days diodes are semiconductors made from something like silicon or germanium.

The book talks a lot about power amplifier classes. Today the same classes are still used, it’s just that anything other than class AB and class D are very uncommon.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Scotch Titanium ScissorsThis is an image of the product.notes

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