A few weeks ago on a facebook group dealing with electronics appeared a post by a person, Giuliano Fois, reporting the formation of needle-like tin crystals during a chemical tinning process of an electronic board, forming conductive bridges between the tracks. I offered to try to take some micrographs of the crystals using my school’s … Leggi tutto “Chemical tinning of PCBs: some analysis”
Categoria: EN
Banana random number generator part 2: chi-squared, ent, timers, interrupts
Read the first part here. In the previous post we addressed the basic concepts of the generator, leaving open the question of the bad chi-square. Before delving into the reasons for the bad result, it is necessary to understand what this value is and how randomness is “extracted” from a radiation event. Let’s start by … Leggi tutto “Banana random number generator part 2: chi-squared, ent, timers, interrupts”
Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At … Leggi tutto “Generating true random numbers from bananas”
[EN] A nixie autopsy
![[EN] A nixie autopsy](https://www.valerionappi.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DSC_0862-1200x800.jpg)
This article is part of a series concerning my nixie clock, which was my high school graduation project. The full project is presented here (in Italian). This article concerns a series of experiments and analysis, in order to determine the role of sputtering in the light emission of nixie tubes. The operating principle hypothesis from which we start are essentially two: the … Leggi tutto “[EN] A nixie autopsy”