Recent updates:

Step 8: Past 750 hours of use 1 month ago
This covers the aftermath of ... actually quite a lot of printing. The prior update covered 2024's Maker Faire. This one covers all of the printing for the 2025 OpenSauce and 2025 Maker Faire as well as a bunch of other random projects around the house. Purge and blob macros I hate purge stripes…

Perceptual illusions of brightness 2 months ago
That which melts your retina might not be that bright The perceived brightness of a light source might mislead you to think that a light that doesn't put out that much light is brighter than it is. Allow me to illuminate this for you. Consider a laser, which is a very focused columated beam. A…

An introduction to switching DC/DC converters 2 months ago
AC circuitry has been able to use transformers for a long long time to magically go from one voltage to another. But that gives you these giant hunks of metal and wire. The transformer is smaller and more compact if it's passing a higher frequency. Regular old mains power uses 50 or 60 Hz because…

Using multiple power supplies, maybe some of them USB 2 months ago
A lot of times, it really helps to have multiple power supplies. Pretty much, unless you are making something that's small enough to be powered from the same USB port your microcontroller is programmed from, you already have multiple power rails. I hope to get you all... well... trained up, on the…

PWM Speeds and why you should care 2 months ago
Incandescent bulbs make things easy. Because they work by making a material hot, even if you feed them with 50 Hz AC power, they'll stay mostly lit. The first set of LED Christmas lights, however, were massive eyesores for a lot of people. Flicker fusion There's a few important things to…