The quest for an ideal light source. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. —Not Plato What exactly is an electron…

What color are your eyes? There are many ways to answer that question. Statistically speaking, they’re probably brown. Unless you’re from northern Europe, in which case they’re probably blue. But what…

tl;dr: download Rob’s source code In October 2015 I signed up as a beta tester for Arivale, a Seattle-based “scientific wellness” company. The service is something like nutritional-coach-meets-quantif…

Remember the hockey puck of doom that powers the Tesla Gun? It’s a ZVS driver (also called a Royer oscillator) that drives a flyback transformer using an 18V drill battery. I used to make them as…

Back in 2009, I was one of several folks that built the coin shrinker at Hackerbot Labs. After several hundred firings and sitting in a closet for months, it badly needed some love. We moved it to my …

Last year I signed up for Arivale’s beta program. They’re attempting to quantify participants’ state of health through DNA sequencing, gut microbiome sequencing, FitBit tracking, interviews,…

I designed a 3D-printable eyepiece holder that mates a Raspberry Pi camera to a popular inexpensive stereo inspection scope. This lets me send 5MP images from my AmScope straight t…

Back in business. What should I look at next?<img decoding=”async” loading=”lazy” class=”aligncenter size-large wp-image-1557” src=”uploads/2015/12/pollen-annotat…

A couple of months ago, Milly started having beam issues. At the time it seemed like emitter trouble. New emitter modules run about $3k, so I took the opportunity to look into manufacturing …

I recently picked up an AmScope SE400Z inspection scope. It’s a handy desktop microscope that sells for under $200. The large area under the objective lens leaves plenty of room to work, and the 10-20…