Electronics on the Internet: All Action, No Talk?
by Brian McGinty

As my colleague Lee Goldberg pointed out earlier this month, there is still plenty of hardware creativity going on. He's also much too modest to mention this himself, but he is the first person I know who has been slashdotted! Way to go, Lee!

A lot of people are having some goofy good fun, and putting some aspect of electronics to use:

• Roger Arrick was looking for a comfortable computer chair. After realizing the most comfortable chair he knew of was in his BMW, he scrounged a motorized seat from a junkyard late model BMW. The final installation was witnessed with "much fanfare from on-looking neighbors."
• Karl Williams is really serious about smoke rings, so he assembled a "vortex cannon" out of cardboard. A capacitor, charged to 400 V, drives a solenoid which shoots "a circular shaped vortex of air up to 20 yards before breaking down." He attests, "It's great for annoying the pets."
• Bert Hickman shrinks quarters. The kind found in your pocket. Me neither¹. Bert specializes in Tesla Coils. Wrap the quarter in 10 turns of wire, then shoot a million amps through it. As they say on TV, "Don't try this at home, kids."
• While surfing the Internet, a person interested in electronics might find a lot of things, such as an RF Transmitter with only 5 components, or a truck that can paint the street like a dot-matrix printer, or a guy who thinks he can destroy nuclear waste in his bathtub.

What this person doesn't find is much discussion. Where is all the idle chat?

We are missing out on the hyperinflationary age of the blogospere. There are 490,000 blogs and only one of them is an electronics blog. And that one hasn't been updated since May.

Or how about this: Here is an Electronics Technician Bulletin Board that hasn't had a post since 1998, when it had...one. (I resisted the urge to add the second one...whoever reads this, it's all yours.)

While there are several electronics forums and USENET newsgroups, we all know what the average post is:
I'm looking for a part...
I'm looking for a data sheet...
I'm looking for a schematic...

If you have a fun story, I'd like to hear it. Click on my e-mail link at the bottom of the page.

Or could it be that we are just loners?

¹Know you could shrink a quarter.

Contact the author

• Brian McGinty