[Jeri] uses light bulbs in an oscillator

wein

Way back when [Ms Ellsworth] was a kid, she kept seeing the same circuit over and over again in her various op-amp books. It was a Wien bridge oscillator, a small circuit that outputs a sine wave with the help of a light bulb. Now that [Jeri] is much wiser, she decided to play around with this strange oscillator and found it's actually pretty impressive for, you know, a light bulb. The … [Read more...]

[Jeri] shows off a delta sigma ADC

DeltaSigma

[Jeri] has had a bear of a time moving up to Valve Software, but electron microscope is safely in her garage (!) and her electronics lab is slowly taking shape. Since she can't bring out the real-life gravity gun she's working on, she decided to show off a one-bit ADC that uses just a flip-flop to sample an analog waveform  into digital data. By toggling the clock input of a 74xx74 (or any … [Read more...]

An in depth interview with [Jeri Ellsworth] about everything

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Here's an interesting interview with [Jeri Ellsworth] over at the Jenessee Network. Usually the interviews I see popup with people are fairly short and sweet but this one really delves into many subjects and takes its time to explore. They start off talking about how [Jeri] began with hacking, which was literally smashing toys "with rocks" to see what was inside. They move on to discuss her … [Read more...]

[Jeri Ellsworth] on making her c64 bass keytar

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[Jeri Ellsworth] finally set aside some time to talk about the build process for her Commodore 64 bass keytar. We think what started by taking a band saw to the guitar body ended up as a fantastic new instrument. When she was showing off the project at Maker Faire we really only got a cursory look at what it could do. Her most recent video covers all that went into pulling off the project. Once … [Read more...]

[Jeri] builds a c64 bass Keytar

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[Jeri] built this really cool C64 bass Keytar from a commodore64 and a cheap bass guitar. She's using an FPGA to do the string detection and the key scanning, it then sends everything to the original 8bit sound chips. The reason that she is using a bass guitar is that the commodore sound chip only has 3 channels. There's an interview with her from the maker faire, and if you keep watching, there … [Read more...]

Pick up that can, [Jeri]

crowbar

We all need an excuse to play Half-Life 2 sometimes. [Jeri Ellsworth] put together a My First Crowbar controller to throw a few headcrabs across the room. It's pretty much Half-Life 2 for the Wii. The build is very simple - just a tilt switch hot glued to the underside of a childs-size crowbar. Two leads go from the tilt switch to the contacts on a (PS3?) controller. All you need to do to … [Read more...]

[Jeri Ellsworth] builds a software radio

pencilcrystal

[Jeri Ellsworth] has been working on a direct conversion receiver using an FPGA as an oscillator and a PC sound card DSP. Being the excellent presenter she is, she first goes through the history and theory of radio reception (fast forward to 1:30), before digging into the meat of the build (parts 2 and 3 are also available). … [Read more...]