Tinkering with electron optics simulation this evening, came up with a little test software for boundary element method simulation and particle tracing. So far so good, and I think it has potential as an educational & low-complexity pro design tool. Would you want to use this?
Darn, this specific post is making rounds on the fediverse for some reason, totally unexpected!
Hi hello there, I think I make some cool stuff myself, check out my posts.
Neat paper I missed in 2024 - these guys took an ultrasonic wedge wire bonder - the kind that's used to attach wires to chips - scaled it up by 15x, and used it to 3D print aluminium! Pretty cheap to implement, not much to it. Pretty cool. Open access, DOI: 10.3390/ma17102188
One of the more unusual workplaces for an engineer to be. Plugging something you designed and built into an obsolete avionics system that would cost more than your entire net worth to replace is... one of the feelings of all time, for sure. The jet is a Cessna Citation Bravo.
Built a small optical coordinate measurement machine and wrote a basic but mostly feature-complete software for it. Telecentric optics, so no perspective error. Resolution ended up at ~4µm for this ~30mm FOV. Would you want a nicer version of this(housing, lights) for ~2.5k?
They did warn me that with Windows the USB3 driver is a little unstable and can't quite reach 400MB/s(stops at 396MB/s), but so far it's been... fine? For a price of $69(nice) it's very good either way, and it should be stable on Linux/Mac.
Sipeed sent me their new SLogic16U3 USB3 logic analyzer to review(free, no obligation). Inside is just a tiny Gowin GW5AT-LV15 FPGA doing softcore USB3(!!!), which is how they made it so cheap. 800MHz@4ch is quite impressive. My verdict? Definitely going in the tool box.
Have you ever wanted to see a 90 second abridged explanation of how diode lasers work? Here it is.
I took some pictures of a laser under my SEM, and it kind of just scope crept into a whole video. Not perfectly accurate, but it's hard to squeeze 100 books of info into 90 seconds.
Ever wondered how infrared thermometers work? By connecting over 100 thermocouples in series, all on a MEMS chip, floating in a vacuum! The cold side is connected to the base, thermal radiation is focused onto the hot side, and the Seebeck effect gives us a proportional voltage.
First handheld laser welds, cuts, some cleaning. What the internet says is true this time - compared to regular welding(MMA/MIG), this is, no exaggeration, a point&click tool. 10 minute learning curve. Some nuances like penetration and fillet size, but overall just spectacular.
