Channel News #3: Announcing Mini Projects | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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Silly Job Title: Amp Alchemist

In this video I announce the new Mini Projects. These are a new feature of Silicon Chip magazine sponsored by Jaycar. Each month two or three Mini Projects get published in Silicon Chip, and we will be building those projects together on the channel each month!

If you’re interested in Silicon Chip magazine (it’s really good!) then I would certainly encourage you to subscribe.

In this video I misspoke and said this was the “May 2004” issue of the magazine, but of course it is the “May 2024” issue of the magazine! Unfortunately I missed that errata during editing and didn’t include a title clip correction.

I don’t understand what happened that caused that video corruption we saw earlier in the video. I suspect the workstation I was using to record the video had some other processing task which interfered with its recording speed or something? Hopefully this is not an ongoing problem. It’s not a problem I have seen before.

Update: ElectroneX has now been and gone and my write up about the day is over here: My day at ElectroneX with my friend. I got my photo with Dave Jones!

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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!

Kaisi Soldering Tools With Desoldering PumpThis is an image of the product.notes

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New Book Teardown #4: Beginner’s Guide to Reading Schematics 4th Edition (2018) | In The Lab

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

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

Silly Job Title: Electron Enchanter

This video is part of the New Book Teardown feature of my video blog.

In this video I take a look at Beginner’s Guide to Reading Schematics, Fourth Edition by Stan Gibilisco published in 2018. The book has 209 pages.

Some things which came up during the video:

From the Wikipedia article on Bifilar coil: A bifilar coil is an electromagnetic coil that contains two closely spaced, parallel windings. In electrical engineering, the word bifilar describes wire which is made of two filaments or strands. It is commonly used to denote special types of winding wire for transformers. Wire can be purchased in bifilar form, usually as different colored enameled wire bonded together. For three strands, the term trifilar coil is used.

From the Wikipedia article on Power dividers and directional couplers: Power dividers (also power splitters and, when used in reverse, power combiners) and directional couplers are passive devices used mostly in the field of radio technology. They couple a defined amount of the electromagnetic power in a transmission line to a port enabling the signal to be used in another circuit. An essential feature of directional couplers is that they only couple power flowing in one direction. Power entering the output port is coupled to the isolated port but not to the coupled port. A directional coupler designed to split power equally between two ports is called a hybrid coupler.

From the Wikipedia article on Waveguide: A waveguide is a structure that guides waves by restricting the transmission of energy to one direction. Common types of waveguides include acoustic waveguides which direct sound, optical waveguides which direct light, and radio-frequency waveguides which direct electromagnetic waves other than light like radio waves.

The list of parts suppliers from the back of the book (some have closed down):

The books from the suggested additional reading:

The author’s website is here: https://www.sciencewriter.net/

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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 Telescopic Magnetic Pickup With LightThis is an image of the product.

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Learning Clojure

I thought I might start with some of Paul Graham’s famous papers which aren’t about Clojure per se, but are about Lisp:

Also his book On Lisp is of interest and is available free online these days.

And then the Arc language tutorial, which is also not Clojure, but looks like an interesting Lisp.

Then I will read the following books, in this order:

This is, of course, a silly amount of reading. Let’s see how I go.

Old Book Teardown #7: Engineering Electronics with Industrial Applications and Control (1957)

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

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

Silly Job Title: Electron Enchanter

This video is part of the Old Book Teardown feature of my video blog.

In this video I tear down Engineering Electronics with Industrial Applications and Control by John D. Ryder. This book was published in the USA in 1957. The book comprises 666 pages and is chock full of schematics with old vacuum tubes and photos from old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes (CROs).

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 Orange Telescopic Magnetic Pickup ToolThis is an image of the product.

Let’s go shopping!