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An invention as important as the wheel, if you ask me.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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When I was but a lad I was so excited when I bought the transistor radio you could put in your pocket.
Now it would probably be small enough to put in your body/blood stream.
Oh the times they are a changin!
The less you need, the more you have.
Why is there a "Highway to Hell" and only a "Stairway to Heaven"? A prediction of the expected traffic load?
JaxCoder.com
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While at school I found a circuit diagram for a basic transistor radio. It had about 5 components, didn't need a battery. I made one and carried it around in a matchbox; there was enough room left to store the earpiece too!
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Crystal radios, radios that had no (external) power source, were around for at least a century at this point. Antenna to ground is what supplied the power. Often a "diamond" phongraph needle was used for tuning on things like a razor blade (I was told). Earphone essential at such low power.
When I bulit one the ferrite loop antennna had become become available, along with a tuner (adjustable capacitor). Worked better at night if I recall.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I remember way back when the very first battery operated transistor radios started to appear, a mate of mine (he wasn't the brightest light in the harbor) came to me very exited. He had just bought a battery operated valve radio at half the price! He was convinced that he had screwed the shopkeeper. Those battery operated valve radios used a big 90V battery about the size of a brick. The battery also had a 6V output for the valves' cathode elements. These batteries only lasted a few hours and cost an arm and a leg. My friend was very disgusted when he discovered that continually replacing the batteries was going to cost the price of a new transistor radio several times over. And those first transistor radios ran a long time on 4 flashlight batteries.
Very soon after he bought his battery operated valve radio, those 90V batteries disappeared and he had to trash the radio!
It turns out he was not the screwer but the screwee!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
modified 30-Jun-21 11:30am.
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I was given a portable valve radio to experiment with when I was a young teenager. They can be made to work from a stack of 9V batteries for the h.t. and a couple of flashlight batteries for the heaters. They do flatten the batteries quickly though. I ended up fitting a mains power supply to it.
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A 7-transistor radio (with less than 50 components - capacitors, resistors, coil) could today be made too small to see in an optical microscope. The problem would be connecting the external leads.
I'm not sure about the antenna, though; would a less than one-billionth of the wavelength antenna actually pick up anything?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: would a less than one-billionth of the wavelength antenna actually pick up anything?
Probably not a whole lot!
The less you need, the more you have.
Why is there a "Highway to Hell" and only a "Stairway to Heaven"? A prediction of the expected traffic load?
JaxCoder.com
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Yes, but in those days there was something worth listening to, I seem to remember.
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What about the liquid state amplifier?
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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After a contentious consortium meeting, where conservatives, resistant to any name change, nearly came to blows with advocates of "Open Sauce;" and, after forcible ejection of two members dressed in Goth style, who kept shouting "Open Sorcery" ...
A compromise was reached. The OSF is now the "Open Sores Foundation."
An OSF spokesperson, who wishes to remain anonymous, and is now in hiding due to alleged threats, commented:Quote: "Let's face it: we don't heal the walking wounded programmers who crawl, half-drowned, out of labyrinthine frameworks ... we make them."
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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We're the Foundation for Open Source, not the Open Source Foundation. Those are worthless.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Splitters! 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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whoops, didn't see you there before i made my comment.
Real programmers use butterflies
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BUNCHA SPLITTERS
Real programmers use butterflies
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BillWoodruff wrote: "Open Sores Foundation."
Is there no bomb in Gilead?
(Jeremiah 8, 22)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I know open sore software was a punchline on UserFriendly back in the day* but my Googlefu failing me.
- Twice actually. Both times at management type conferences, once where the presenter misread the title of a presentation on OSS that the geeks were giving, and at a similar conference later when they used the open sore term to attack commercial software.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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I'm designing an object in Blender for 3D printing and it's not going so well. It's a cage-like structure, basically made up of numerous cylinders. I can't just group all these objects together and throw that at the printer. The slicer would interpret the overlapping regions of the objects as hollow areas, letting the print fall apart before it's even finished.
Blender allows to join objects, but with so many parts to join, errors accumulate with every part. There are holes in the resulting object, as well as unconnected or duplicate polygons and sooner or later the normal vectors also get messed up. All these errors confuse the slicer as well, so this leads nowhere. Trying to clean the mesh at every step of the way only slows down this degradation, but does not prevent it.
I obviously need another CAD program to get this done. It should be able to import and export .STL files, so that I don't have to start from scratch again. Any suggestions?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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FreeCad! Not sure if importing STL files will save you anytime though, FreeCad can handle them but as they're not parametrically defined they can't be used in the same way as native objects.
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I think this is currently one of the most popular products on the market for this type of stuff. I know you can export/save the cad files to a format for 3d printers, among other file formats.
Fusion 360 | 3D CAD, CAM, CAE & PCB Cloud-Based Software | Autodesk[^]
It is not free, but has a monthly subscription model.
I thought @OriginalGriff used this at one time, not sure if he still does now that they don't offer a free version anymore (trial download is free).
modified 30-Jun-21 7:44am.
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It actually is free unless you make more than 5k a year from it or something like that!
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I second Fusion360, which seems to be quite popular in the printing community
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