it is too short, it is irrelevent to the post(mostly) and it doesnt even bash on arduinos!
if you had posted
“jeri is hot but she is a supporter of arduinos which i do not condone at all and therefore her hotness is diminished” it would have been accepted and not deleted

Jeri Ellsworth (born 1974) is an American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer. She is best known for, in 2004, creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. The “computer in a joystick” could run 30 video games from the early 1980s, and was very popular during the 2004 Christmas season, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel.[1]

LOL SHE HAS HER OWN WIKIPEDIA PAGE!

@steve At home. This is her “lab”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeriellsworth/sets/72157607161498665/

While her home workshop might be better equipped than most amateurs, I imagine semiconductor manufacturers probably don’t have the equipment to fab at such a primitive level. They’ve got better toys.

Be very very careful with the HF people if you want to do this… FWIW I think you should by the NMOS for maybe 2 cents. Unless you are going. Then again I do this for a living more or less.

Jeri Ellsworth rules! The whole point is to show that a working transistor can be made by the average hobbyist who doesn’t have access to a modern state of the art commercial lab. I haven’t seen such a clear, experimenter-oriented explanation of this topic anywhere else.

i’m not going to touch H-F with a ten foot pole.

@ mrgoogfan

I’ve handled 6 mol HCL in lab plenty of times. If you’re an idiot, you can get burned. If you pay attention, there is no problem.

Also, NaOH and KOH are just as dangerous (although at the other end of the pH scale) and chances are you have already handled it – the it’s the active ingredient in Draino.

@Natrix

This is HF, not HCL. The problem with HF is that it often will _not_ burn, so you don’t always know if you’ve come in contact with it. Instead, it easily goes through latex gloves and your skin directly in to your body. Then it reacts with the calcium in your blood, and you die of cardiac arrest. HF is really nasty stuff. Don’t confuse it for HCL or you’ll be in trouble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid#Safety

@ Natrix

HCL, NaOH, and KOH only cause external chemical burns, and that damage is mitigated by the fact that you can feel it burning you and wash it off.

Very strong HF can burn too, but it’s generally a weak acid. Skin exposure may be underestimated or even unnoticed, because of the lack of burning sensation. The real damage comes from HF’s ability to pass through skin, where it:

* reacts with the calcium in nerves and bones, forming insoluble fluoride crystals which cause excruciating pain and interferes with healing
* reacts with free calcium ions, causing hypocalcemia which shuts down the heart
* causes general fluoride toxicity

By the time you feel anything, washing is usually insufficient and you’ll need medical treatment, consisting of topical and injectable calcium gluconate. Skin exposures of more than 1 sq. foot may be unavoidably lethal – even with thorough immediate washing and transport to a hospital, your heart may stop before you get proper treatment.

HF deserves special respect.

@ Chris…
your credits, you was faster then me

Can someone explain what this would be used for? It’s late (should probably be in bed) and I’m just not getting it :-\

All I have to say is that Jeri has built racing cars, run a computer company, helped create a Commodore 64 in an FPGA/ASIC, pinball machine and now this. I can’t wait to see what else she has up her sleeve.

HF – It’s not a huge safety hazard in low concentration which you see in off the shelf products. You can use art store glass etchant (source of HF)or Whink which old ladies use to clean rust off tile and sinks.

Why do it? – Surprised to hear that in this forum.

BJT’s – Harder to make at home with furnaces that vary in temperature(emitter diffusion end point problems), no way to make good collector diffusion without epitaxy and boron diffusion rates.

Holy fuming HF Batman, Jeri’s back and i’m still
reverbing over that audio floppy hack.

Good to see the video updates. Hope the published
writeup mentioned in an older video appears.

“Why do it?”, her Flaming Furbies might be one
high power app for this.

This was awesome. The final product looks beautiful! NMOS turns me on, or is it an intelligent hot self-made EE? BTW yall need to stop bitching about the spelling and focus on the facts of the post. Last I checked none of you have a hacker blog thats as popular as HAD, and they seem to be doing fine following their own ways.

Hey Jeri, I appreciate you thinking you have to prove you did what you said you did, but your creds are to the point where you don’t have to break it down for us to believe that you did it. Would you please make your next project the cure for cancer?

To those who asked why? I am so ashamed for you. A transistor, the single most world changing idea to have happened since the wheel, screw, and lever. It changed radio, television, computing, telecommunications, medicine etc.. And to have built one in your own house, amazing. When you next feel the need to ask why, I suggest you stop and think of reasons for why not first. I could understand this on some other forum, but that question should never appear here, at least not for these kinds of demonstrations.

Most people do not even know what a transistor does. If you had to ask why, I am thinking you might be one of them. If you are, go and download your porn, and leave the rest of us alone.

interesting.
wonder if Jeri has tried making a “negative resistance” device yet?

this process could also be useful for making memristors, in this case you start with blank silicon, etch so it becomes porous then implant with silver or gallium ions and install a second porous silicon sheet on top.

@ Totti:
Thank you :-)

the gel is agar-agar and is pronounced aygarr not ahguh
I agree that things like that (silicone/silcon)diminish what is brilliant efforts on Hackaday.

Jeri Ellisworth is a true scientist.