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Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm.com joins us this week to talk electronics and his new comic book!

 

• Jeff Keyzer and Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren just put out a comic book called “Soldering is easy!”. Great resource for those just starting out and a preview of a book to be published later this year.
• Jeff will be at the Bay Area Maker Faire next month, teaching classes.
• He also will be at the Choas Communication Camp in Germany later this year (the place where the Hackerspace was born).
• Chris found out about all this from the Hackerspaces Mailing List.
• Dave is unabashedly asking people to vote for him in the Tektronix Scope Contest! Dave’s video is about the piezoelectric effect in probes.
• Henrik (@hspalm), one of our WOTW alums, writes in about his new project to characterize DIY shipping costs. Could be a good launchpad for a wiki-type site and drive some change at these organizations.
• Digikey has a new community that seems destined to flop right out of the gate.
• Instead, they should try to be more like AVRfreaks or BeagleBoard, which are more targeted and detached from the company.
• Electric Vehicles
  • Chris had the opportunity to hear Bob Simpson, of EVdrive.com, talk about his conversion and upcoming business venture.
  • New idea is V2G or Vehicle-2-Grid, uses cars as load balancing while they are parked in the garage. Don Tuite has a good rebuttal to the practicality of this in a recent Electronic Design article.
  • Why doesn’t the Toyota Prius have plug-in capability?
• Dave is putting up new lighting in the lab. LED for total lumens needed is still impractical. Dave went with fluorescent to cost and light output.
• And finally, in the WTF column, the US Navy is working on a new  lighting scheme: a laser weapon! Good gravy!