Interlude #9: Making a Power Breakout Box | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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 make a power breakout box. This is for use in testing my new multimeter, but it will be good to have for other uses in future too.

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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!

Maxitronix Electronic Metal Detector Kit Electronics ProjectThis is an image of the product.notes

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Interlude #8: Making My Maker Faire ‘Here There Be Makers’ Badge | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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 fix up and reassemble my Here There Be Makers badge which I received from Maker Shed in California.

John's Makers PCB badge

This electrified badge was made by lectrify.it and PCBWay.

Previously I had installed a single 3mm LED in the top of this thing, but in this video I remove that (so I can use the hole to hang it) and install two 3mm LEDs on the front instead, which is my best guess as to what I was supposed to do with this thing, which didn’t come with instructions.

There is some information about their Maker Faire event on in San Fransisco later this year over here: https://make.co/welcome/

And also, yes, I should have combed my hair before making this video. :P

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!

JST XH2.54 Connector KitThis is an image of the product.

Let’s go shopping!

Mail Call #7: Books from Amazon, Cables from AliExpress, and a Fluke Meter from eBay! | In The Lab

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 some new books and equipment which has arrived in the mail:

I mention in the video that I recently organized my USB cables.

There’s some more information about where I found and purchased my Fluke multimeter over here: Fluke 17B+ Multimeter. Shoutout to my mate @ElectrArc240! When I release the unboxing video for this meter I will update this page with the link.

At the end of this video I put together my “Maker Faire: Here There Be Makers” swag but I actually revisit this and do it better in another video released as an interlude on the channel, so stand by for that (it will come out tomorrow, I will update this link when it’s out).

John's Makers PCB badge

This electrified badge was made by lectrify.it and PCBWay and it was sent to me by Maker Shed.

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 3pcs Drill Scrub BrushThis is an image of the product.notes

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Subversion @ GitHub

I wanted to use Subversion to checkout one of my GitHub repo branches, because an svn checkout only downloads the files it needs, not a full copy of every file ever added. But I discovered that GitHub sunset Subversion integration earlier this year. Sad face. Still, I suppose the economics justify that decision. As a consequence of my research, which was a bit sketchy because there is still heaps of documentation out there referring to the GitHub features which no longer exist, I did happen to learn about:

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

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

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

Kubuntu 24.04

I want to install some software to check it out (MySQL and MySQL Workbench) but I’m having trouble making it work on Debian. So I decided to spin up an Ubuntu instance for this job. I picked Kubuntu 24.04 (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop) and this is my first go at using Ubuntu 24.04. Figured I should document the installation experience, which I have done here.