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Author: Ed

  • Creating a Financial Foundation for Shared Infrastructure

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    Ed
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    Over a decade ago, I was one of the founding members of the Dallas Makerspace. My major contribution was designing the financial models that allowed the group to have a solid financial footing for renting it’s first dedicated space. The other founders were more involved in all the growing pains of starting an organization like…

  • Comparing Engineering and Design

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    Ed
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    In an earlier post I wrote about the similarities between engineering and design. After discussing the concepts with a few engineers and designers, I thought it would be helpful to explore the differences between the two disciplines. Known solution versus unknown solution In the introductory chapter of Designing Your Life, the authors point out the…

  • Building a small team

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    Ed
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    When starting a new venture, your team is often small due to timing, budget, or uncertainty. Growing a team from a small starting point takes careful thought about both the current needs and the future. When only a handful of people are on the team, each hire has a dramatic increase in the communication costs…

  • The Overlap of Engineering and UX Design

    The Overlap of Engineering and UX Design

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    Ed
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    While simultaneously working in software engineering and completing my masters degree in HCDE, I started to notice a few overlaps in both the practice and conceptualization of engineering and design. Both involve solving the problem of what to build. Both rely on a set of heuristics built by experience in the individual practitioners. Both are…

  • Timing concerns of delay line style memory

    Timing concerns of delay line style memory

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    Ed
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    I was getting bent out of shape that I needed to somehow reconstruct the system clock out of the data stored inside a delay line. But fooling around with an old discrete delay line simulation in a circuit simulator by replacing the giant stack of flip flops with a proper length delay line shows that…

  • Audio Digital Delay with DRAM and Arduino

    Audio Digital Delay with DRAM and Arduino

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    Ed
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    Aka “ADDDA” or “AuDiDeDrAr” or “aww dee dee drawer” or “A3DA” I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head that you could use 1-bit wide DRAM as a delay line if you simply counted up through it’s addresses, reading and writing as you go. 1-bit wide DRAM like the M3764 have separate pins for…

  • National Semiconductor 4510 Mathematician

    National Semiconductor 4510 Mathematician

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    Ed
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    I have a small collection of vintage calculators that I stumbled into collecting. I found one at a garage sale, and then one was given to me, then I found a neat one on eBay for a good price… Before I knew it, I was a calculator collector. I actually use most of them despite…

  • From the notebook: Tape Transports

    From the notebook: Tape Transports

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    Todays notebook sketch is some ideas for building a tape “transport” – the mechanical bits that move the tape around in the right way and at the right tension. I have a weird fascination with magnetic storage media and tape in particular. It was a key technology in computing for decades and it has more…

  • Prototype Game of Life Synth Module

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    Conway’s Game of Life (CGoL)has always fascinated me. It is probably the most well known of all cellular automata and also probably the most intuitive. Yet even simple patterns can turn into complex sequences of shapes, patterns, and noise. Years ago, when learning about the HTML5 WebAudio API, I came across a fun little demo…

  • Book recommendation: Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson

    Book recommendation: Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson

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    If you’re interested in the early history of computing, check out Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson. It covers an interesting middle phase between the original electronic digital computers and the wide commercialization of computers in the late 50s. Specifically it examines the people and development around “the IAS machine” at the Institute for Advanced Study…