What's New...

February 19 2013: From this wonderful illustrated EE Times article by Clive Maxfield, I learn that there's another reason to love Huntsville, Alabama: Mock Electronics. Looks similar, but somewhat larger than our own Tucson Elliott Electronic Supply. I love this place. But my stories are not as cool as Clive's.

Runner up for Tucson is SWS, which is primarily (well, almost exclusively) computers. We used to have Electronic City, but they switched to business machine repair. I would think Phoenix would have more; I know about Fry's Electronics; there's one on the other side of I-10 (hard to miss) from the Arizona Mills Mall, and I notice another one on the west side of I-17 headed toward Flagstaff, at Thunderbird, but Fry's is a national chain, not an interesting community shop (that deals in salvage). The nearest thing to Elliott in Phoenix looks to be Capital Electronics Supply, but it closed just a few months ago. Very sad.

February 18 2013: Great picture of some marines firing a TOW-2A at 29 Palms earlier this month. At this distance, the wings are still just opening up, so the flight motor hasn't fired yet. The 2A probe is just now extending out from the nose.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Christopher O'Quin/Released)

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Last Friday - 57 years ago - ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer, announced at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally developed on an Army contract to work out artillery solutions, it wasn't finished before the war was over. So then John Von Neumann started using it for atomic bomb work (which is what supercomputers are still largely used for).

Article says parts of ENIAC are at the Smithsonian. Probably in the Museum of Science and Technology, so I'll bet I saw them there, when I was living in Springfield VA, but didn't realize what I was looking at (true of so many little kids).

February 9 2013: I got the Kinnaman book You Lost Me for Christmas... last year... I have finally read it. I was expecting confirmation of the rate of departure of young people from the institutional church as I have read elsewhere, including in the Ham/Beemer book Already Gone. Well, it was there. But there is a lot of rejection of anything from The Barna Group in the evangelical world. See my thoughts about it.

February 8 2013: This article from EE Times reviews some legacy memory technologies, including core memory. I was privileged to work a bit with core memory with the old guidance computer of the Tomahawk cruise missile. But mostly, I grew up with UV-eraseable EPROM. Which, it seems, it not quite obsolete!

From a comment to the above article, this link to memory devices for organ consoles. Relays are fun. Big, custom, elaborate relays are even more fun. Just looking at those pictures, I can smell moldy phenolic!

February 2 2013: Texas Instruments Launchpad eval boards. Three of them. Very affordable. Available from Digikey.

February 2 2013: April 1 is two months away, but these just came out in my engineering rags.

First, I've done my share of letting the "magic smoke" out of electronic devices. Now there's a gadget for putting the smoke back in!

Second, I've heard about engineering school pranks, and I've seen a few at the University of Arizona, but I'd say these Caltech and MIT exploits take the cake.

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Some "global warming" tidbits.

First, even though it follows the general outline of the other "climate researchers" measurements, temperature measurements from Japan buck the trend, suggesting something might be fishy with how they measure temperature.

Second, some evidence that the planet may be greener than it used to be, and that maybe "global warming" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Again, I'm not a "denier", I hold that it is quite possible that the Earth is in a warming trend, and it is possible that human activity is contributing. I disagree that it is categorically an emergency, and I very much disagree that anything governments could do would fix any problems without producing consequences that are MUCH worse than the problems themselves. History is just against it.

January 28 2013: Some evolution topics today.

First, I learn that there's a real honest professional philosopher who agrees with me that Reality is ultimately Personal. Well, sort of agrees with me. Here's what I think about it.

Second, there's a link at EE Times to a cool video that shows the history of the world. Starting at the Big Bang, progressing through Evolution and ending with the Big Crunch. Interesting to me that the Big Bang, Evolution, and Big Crunch are just ideological tack-ons, of insignificant duration to the actual historical content of the video (considering that the actual thousands-of-years duration of history is entirely insignificant to the billions-of-years duration of all that other theoretical stuff).

Third, an article in ECN is interesting mostly for this contrast of lines:

"Much attention is now focusing on natural organisms that have evolved highly efficient light-harvesting capabilities over billions of years."

Stated as true. Even though the idea that the bacteria in question evolved over billions of years is entirely spurious to their usefulness as a model for solar energy generation. Then, in the next paragraph:

"Research teams worldwide are trying to replicate the capabilities of the green sulfur bacterium. But such natural systems are exceedingly complex."

Irreducibly complex, even.

The rest of the article then presents the technology under exploration - without any further mention of the bacterium or evolution. Sounds necessary and foundational, doesn't it? No, I don't think so, either.

January 27 2013: From this ECN article, these researchers have found that mixing nano-size particles of silicon with water produces hydrogen - instantly! A solution to the hydrogen-powered car problem. How can we make hydrogen a safe fuel for automobiles? Fill the tank with water and add silicon powder. Amazing.

This, of course, reminded me of the Munsters episode where Grandpa has developed a pill that turns water into gasoline.

I liked the Munsters show, but better than the weak "Addams Family" concept was the rad cars that apparently Grandpa built. There was a Munster full-length movie where they took this hot rod to England; memory probably mis-serves, but the gasoline pill might have figured in the movie as well.

January 26 2013: Added some stuff to the Arizona page:

• San Xavier Mission (I think restoration of the facade is complete)
• Pima Air & Space Museum
• Titan Missile Museum
• A link to Pima County attractions

Also updated the lists of restaurants we've beene to. Yesterday was a trip downtown to get a tax form at the Federal Building (since that sort of thing is no longer available at libraries), so we had lunch at Cafe 54 - and found that it is a (secular) "ministry" for mentally ill people, to give them jobs and direct the tips toward an art foundation for the mentally ill. That's fine; we were glad to be there, and the sandwiches, hummus, and lemon cake were very good. It just interests me that the segment of society that tends to reject the existence of God and any claim to an absolute morality is eager to take moral positions on a variety of topics, like the disabled.

Of course, we also had a look at the effort to finish the trolley rails and street construction before the gem show starts... in a week. Doesn't look very hopeful...

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Last weekend, I took the family to see a play by the ATC downtown: Freud's Last Session. I was pretty impressed by the play - but moreso by how the play came about! Details here

January 18 2013: It seems that there is an unanticipated problem with electric vehicles; unlike gasoline or diesel automobiles, they don't make any noise that might warn pedestrians that there is a slow-moving car sneaking up on them, as in parking lots or street corners. It seems the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is taking suggestions for equipping EVs with low-speed sounds. Of course, engineers offer things like: the Jetson's flyer noise. I would prefer the Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang sound from the Disney movie. But the horse-hoof sound suggested in comments to this article is attractive as well.

January 8 2013: More skepticism about finding exoplanets.

How to say you can actually find comets, which are much smaller than "Earth-sized" planets, from a theory to explain a brief spectral characteristic without any other direct evidence to support your theory?

Oh, the Phys.Org article doesn't say they had found exocomets, but that they likely found exocomets.

Actually, I don't really mind the possibility of there being comets around other stars, but I get a bit tired of the breathless hype, all in the service of "and because there are other planets (just like Earth), there is obviously life out there". It doesn't help when the "experts" trot out the discredited theory of solar system formation from the coalescence of dust and gas. Or fail to reconcile the problem of short-lived comets with their naturalistic notion of billions of years.

January 3 2013: Nifty set of design-related papers at Embedded.com (which I believe is the survivor/successor to the excellent Embedded Systems Programming magazine).

Handy list of modular circuits for stirring into a design.

January 2 2013: I came across this "rant" by Poul-Henning Kamp, an influential BSD developer, in which he complains about the lack of understanding in younger CS/IT people, who could not "recognize a cathedral if they saw it" (referring to Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar book). Now, I have been in software development most of my life, but I was never trained in it, it was always a hobby ("blessing" - getting to do your hobby as a job), and when the guys on the Linux sites start talking about their computer science concepts, it makes me acutely aware of my shortcomings. So I looked around for some reading lists with recommendations for the professional software engineer or computer scientist.

For Software Engineering: philosophical geek and the reading list from comp.software-eng

For Computer Science, not so much, perhaps an ongoing conversation at reddit

There are some common recommendations in these lists, which I will have to track down... although I note they are not available at the Pima County Library...

• The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan & Pike
• Code Complete, by McConnell
• Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, by Pressman
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, by Hunt & Thomas

Also of prominent mention is the seminal work The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth... but that's way too much.

I also learned of some great resources, like free video courses available from MIT and recommendations of classic works at the ACM Digital Library site (many of these books available as PDFs)

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About a year out: an astronomy tip! A super bright comet is expected to show up!

December 29 2012: Today is the last day of 2012, which will be memorable to me as the Year of the Arizona Centennial. But it is now over, so I am putting my Arizona Page back to a (more or less) standard format.

All the same, I hope the state doesn't take the Centennial signs down off the interstates. Or revert changes to Centennial Way in downtown Phoenix.

December 30 2012: Here's a cool gadget: The F18A video interface, which replaces the 9918 Video Display Processor on the TI mainboard with an FPGA that provides the same 9918 interface but drives a VGA display.

Currently out of stock, however. More fun TI stuff on this site.

December 29 2012: Updated my Ideal Church page to reflect the four aspects to my concept of an effective church:

• Primacy of corporate prayer
• Necessity of approaching Kingdom work (like disciple-making) with intentionality
• NEW Community fellowship groups NEW
• De-emphasizing the sermon and the Sunday morning "worship" service

Also, I draw a connection between the recently-released Les Miserables film and Christian Worldview.

December 26 2012: Some odds and ends, here at the odd end of 2012 (yes, we're still here):

A bit of TI-99/4A nostalgia.

This is pretty cool: Arizona has a State Library (I guess, similar to Library of Congress) with lots of resources, including a database of auto maintenance and repair data normally available only to professional mechanics.

I mentioned Gabriella Coleman earlier - an anthropologist stydying geeks - here's a interview.

Excellent resource: the AIIA Institute of apologetics and worldview

This series of wonderful interactive maps of Arizona includes the Iconic Landscapes, which includes a video link for the underwater exploration of Montezuma Well. This terrific website, The Arizona Experience, will go on my Arizona page!

December 21 2012: Happy End Of The World Day (not)!

From EE Times, a version of "Twas The Night Before Christmas" from an engineer's perspective (obviously a Texas Instruments engineer working the integrated circuit line at the fab):

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the fab,
The equipment was whirring, even in the chem lab.
The yield charts were hung by the exit with care,
And all of our steppers were in good repair.

Most employees had gone home and were snuggled up tight,
With dreams of implanters that were powered up right,
And along with their processes all shiny and new,
They dreamed aggressive forecasts would surely come true.

When out in the clean room I heard such a clatter
I sprang from my lab bench and fell over a ladder.
Away to the hall way I flew like a plane,
Threw open the door and almost burst a vein.

Down with the equipment with lights all aglow,
An object was moving by the computers below.
Who could it be in those extra-large cleanroom clothes,
And how did he get in since security always knows?

He moved by the gear so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick!
Faster than BiCMOS he worked hasty and neat,
Wafers of devices for toys to complete.

He looked up and saw me hovering above,
And I saw his hand wave in an antistatic glove.
He vanished as quickly as he had appeared,
With devices that Texas Instruments pioneered.

I heard a quick rumble on top of the roof,
And knew in an instant that I had my proof,
That TI silicon was in all his toys,
For all the good girls and all the good boys.

I heard him whistle for his reindeer to fly,
along with his booty of parts from TI.
As he flew to the north and clean out of sight,
I heard him exclaim, "Merry Christmas, and to all a good night!"

December 16 2012: My thoughts about my daughter's encounter with the Documentary Hypothesis and Form Criticism in her Northern Arizona University freshman history class.

December 10 2012: "3D Printing" is one of the more interesting technologies to come along. From what I've seen, there's the high-end used by big companies (like Raytheon) to do up prototypes, or there's the low-end used by "Makers" to do up little stuff. And the low-end, while certainly interesting, is low-end. So along comes this release that the big office supply and printing/copying outfit, Staples, is offering 3D printing at their stores. Just bring or send the the CAD files.

Unfortunately, only in Europe so far. I'm sure it will get here before long, if it takes off over there.

December 5 2012: From an EDN article: The Centennial Bulb. Burning in a California firestation since 1901! Seems that it uses a (non-Edison) carbon filament instead of a metal filament. I can't get past the Compact Flourescent light bulbs that cost tens of dollars and last less than a year. The technology is not mature. And yet the government is forcing them on us by banning these simple, low-environmental impact, inexpensive, American-made incandescent light bulbs. grrr....

December 4 2012: An occupational hazard most people don't have to worry about: From EE Times, engineers being kidnapped to build comm networks for drug lords.

I note many comments proposing to combat this by legalizing drugs. What to say? Smart technically, stupid morally.

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From the same EE Times newsletter (see the online version here), this remak:

NASA's Curiosity mission on Mars could provide signs of life from the Red Planet that could help us understand the origins of life.

"This Martian soil that we've analyzed on Mars just this past week appears mineralogically similar to some weathered basaltic materials that we see on Earth," stated David Bish, a CheMin co-investigator with Indiana University, specifying the soil appears similar to weathered basaltic soils of volcanic origin in Hawaii.

Spanish researchers said the rocks where Curiosity is roving are "extraordinarily similar" to those found in Cuatro Cienegas, a Mexican valley that may be an Earthly analog what Gale Crater was like millions of years ago.

Also, John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory mission, noted in an op-ed article in the New York Times, that some of the rocks Curiosity has studied are reminiscent of rocks he "skipped" across a stream near his childhood home in Pennsylvania.

So the logic goes, "Mars geology is a lot like Earth's; Earth has life; Therefore, Mars has or once had life". What a stupid non-sequitur argument.

December 2 2012: Another cool feature: Seems some FPGA eval boards come with Pmod ports, introduced by Digilent; "Pmod" = "Peripheral Modules", little boards that can provide functions to the host FPGA. This EDN article notes the availability of fifteen little Pmod modules from Maxim, and makes mention of some eval boards that have Pmod ports, such as:

• The LX9 board available from Avnet (shown to the right) with a Spartan-6, costs $89 (not bad at all), and given "Xilinx" and "Eclipse" is probably usable from Linux (at least, putting Linux ON the LX9 is a popular exercise, it seems)!
  
• The ZedBoard available from Avnet for the more pricey $400, but with a lot more capability. It seems ZedBoard has its own online community with reference designs and vendor support. Wow! Looks like it comes with Linux already running on it! In fact, given the presence of schematics and layouts, it could be an Open Hardware design, but it doesn't explicitly say so.
• The Digilent Nexys, which doesn't seem to be available commercially. I'll note the Digilent Atlys board, available from Avnet (for $350!) also has Pmod ports, and seems to be popular with the OpenCores open-source hardware community. Actually, a search of the OpenCores site reveals support for LX9, Nexys, and Atlys boards (and many more, I'm sure, but not the ZedBoard (yet)).

December 1 2012: It seems the English were the real computer pioneers. Here's the Harwell Dekatron, the world's oldest original working digital computer.

November 28 2012: This anthropologist has studied hackers in the wild, just like a different anthropologist may study Pigmies in Africa by living with them. She wrote a book, and got an interview with Wired. I think she gets it, since, while the book is for sale on Amazon et al., she has released it with a Creative Commons license and will soon make it available on her website.

I find it fascinating that techie culture can be the subject of anthropological study. Although I suppose that is increasingly true as western civilization fragments into various identity groups. I also find it curious that Ms. Coleman is published to such a large extent on Al Jazeera...

November 24 2012: Here is a sweet little FPGA experimenter's board at a not-unreasonable $65 price, from Sparkfun: the Papilio One. With USB-connected JTAG and breakout headers for the I/O which may be compatible with Arduino "shields". And, presumably, since it has a Xilinx Spartan FPGA part, the Xilinx web-based tools which apparently work under Linux may be usable.

In a comment to the product description (I guess Sparkfun treats their catalog like a blog), a user points out another Sparkfun gadget, a Xilinx breakout board, pretty much all the pins, no hand-holding on programming, and a bit pricey at $100.

And finally, another comment provides a link to an on-line FPGA tutorial course. Just getting started, so more to come.

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Another useful link: a multi-part introduction to USB from EE Times (professional grade!).

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More on the Tucson Originals restaurant front: Last Sunday, we tried out the Agustin Brasserie at the little Agustin Mercado, on Congress just across the river. This is destined to be the final terminus for the trolley (if they ever finish ruining downtown streets and businesses with their pokey construction). A fine little restaurant. With oysters! Not much else at the Mercado, so I wish them the best.

November 10 2012: As we have been trying out the Tucson Originals restuarants, we have found that it is sort of a club for restaurants, that there is apparently a membership fee, and it seems that sometimes, restaurants join and then subsequently find the benefits aren't worth the cost, and drop out. Others join. So there's some turnover.

Therefore, I have updated the Tucson Originals section on our Arizona page for the current roll, as well as move some stuff from the "We have yet to try" list to the "Places we have been" list. Of special note is Bella D'Auria, which is right near us, walking distance, and quite good. I'm also surprised to note that the Tanque Verde Guest Ranch "cookhouse" is on the list; I've been there, the food is tremendous (and abundant, especially the desserts), but I always figured it was more connected with the guest ranch than being a restaurant on its own.

November 9 2012: article from Jack Ganssle describes a very easy development environment for ARM. While I read the comments, I was thinking, "but I don't WANT the environment to configure I/O for me; that's where the fun is, to figure out the device". Then, when I got to the comments, I recognized other problems:

• The "easy" library is NOT OPEN. You can't fix bugs or alter behaviour or introduce other features.
• The toolset is NOT LOCAL. You don't have any control over what the company does with it. You can't lock down the version you used to develop a gadget. You have no guarantee of the future of anything.
• Your project files are stored "on the cloud". Sorry, but I am nervous about "cloud computing"

And related: Jack posed this product as good for students or young hobbyists. I disagree. Unless a young hacker uses real tools and learns real chip features, the "education" will be fast and practical, but very shallow. This is my problem with high-level resources like the LEGO Mindstorm. You can do amazing things with the Mindstorm (like that Great Ball Contraption)... but you never learn how the Mindstorm works.

Also, from a comment to the article, I learn about the Freescale Freedom platform. Looks like I can get one for... $13!!! But it doesn't appear to be entirely compatible with Linux (updates promised, some motion, no solution observed).

November 8 2012: Absolutely amazing: the Great Ball Contraption. Says it's LEGO, and I can see some of this, but there's a lot of specialized parts in this rig.

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Discovery Channel is creating a new "competition" show: Top Engineer.

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A history of the steam engine. Very brief. Emphasis on vehicular applications, but the Corliss is included. I remember visiting the Carillon Park near Dayton, Ohio, when my dad was posted to Wright-Patterson AFB, and the huge Corliss engine on display there. Sure left a lasting impression.

November 2 2012: From this EE Times article, I see that Texas Instruments has a reference design for a $70 tablet computer based on one of their processors. It's not a product yet, but I will be first in line when it is. Or actually, it is sort of a product; they have involved an outfit in India, AllGo Systems, who has a development kit with the eTab computer ($70 supposedly), Android (free, supposedly), and the hardware design files, for... $999. Bit of a mark-up. I'll wait.

October 27 2012: I was troubleshooting the irrigation control system in the front yard a few weeks ago, and I left my nice X10 controller out in the sun, just for a few hours. The plastic case softened and warped! Useless. I've since gotten a replacement, so I took the ruined one apart.

Here's the controller board. The membrane switch matrix is on the other side. The big chip is apparently a PIC controller, proprietary to X10. It's a lot bigger than the ones in wall-wart modules, but I'm guessing this one needs a lot of I/O to interpret the switch matrix. The cord goes right into the board - no transformers; the board uses the big blue safety-rated capacitors to divide down line voltage and rectify it directly. Very economical, which is why I doubt any other technology will bump X10 from the top of the home automation market.

So I'm trying to follow the circuit traces, and the power cord goes into the board, but not where I think it should. There must be a jumper, but there's no reason for the jumper; the trace is right next to where it should go. Yes, there is a jumper, but why is the wire so tiny? It dawns on me... it's a FUSE. Cheapo X10 doesn't add a fuse component, they just use a bit of fine wire!

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Engineers are a silly lot. Who else would calculate the feasibility of Cinderella's glass shoes?

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Rand Simbert is a real science kind of guy (well, except that he's probably an evolutionist, but a lot of people are in this category), especially about spaceflight. Apparently, he made some remarks questioning global-warming expert Michael Mann, who responds by... suing! Mann produced the famous "hocky stick" global temperature history graph. So if the global-warming "science" can't stand on its own, they resort to legal force to silence the detractors. Nice. Rand is updating status on his Transterrestrial Musings site.

October 18 2012: EDN has been running a "messy desk" theme for a few months now. The paradigmatic "messy desk" is for either Bob Pease or Jim Williams, both now deceased. Linear Technology has now set up a display in the lobby, a "shrine", as it were, to the memory of their Favorite Son.

Once upon a time, Hughes Aircraft was a bit like that. Now they don't really recognize foundational personalities. Unless they are managers.

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From EE Times: This Great Idea. Now that pretty much all rechargeable gadgets are intended to recharge from a USB port, instead of having little adapters the plug into a wall outlet and provide a USB port, this gadget provides USB ports as part of the wall outlet! And at $25 each, a nice deal.

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Beautiful pictures from WWII era of aircraft assembly and military exercises or promo shots. don't quite know why a Russian posted these, or why he posted them on his Russian site, but they are Beautiful. Link to source site: www.shorpy.com. Which includes this Beautiful picture of the Duquesne Incline Railway in Pittsburgh, in 1900. I rode that rail! Just not in 1900.

October 17 2012: Excellent article on Tesla and Westinghouse and the AC electricity system, versus Edison's DC system. Tremendous pictures of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where the technology was showcased. Relatedly, the effort to purchase the Wardenclyffe lab for a museum seems to have been successful.

Update: I looked at the above link again, and corrected the entry to the 1893 World's Fair.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I see the original Ferris Wheel was also at this Expo. I also see that World Fairs are still ongoing, with the most recent in 2010 at Shanghai. Or maybe just this past year, in Korea. The next one? 2015, in Milan, Italy! Gotta start saving up...

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I know who and what H.P. Lovecraft is, and I know what software development is, but I hadn't ever connected them until now.

October 15 2012: The One that Started It All, 35 years ago.

We still got ours. Or rather, my dad still has ours. Still gets use. Space Invaders rulez.

October 4 2012: Real geeks don't watch television, so no surprise that I never saw this on The Big Bang Theory. Per this EE Times post, there is a multi-side variation on the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" decision-making strategy:

Scissors cuts Paper,
Paper covers Rock,
Rock crushes Lizard,
Lizard poisons Spock,
Spock smashes Scissors,
Scissors decapitates Lizard,
Lizard eats Paper,
Paper disproves Spock,
Spock vaporizes Rock,
Rock crushes Scissors

October 3 2012: Now that I have an Archos 403 mini-tablet, I have another reason to be mildly irritated about the airlines' policy about having passengers turn off all electronic devices during take-off and landing. And to turn off wireless at all times. Except on aircraft equipped with wireless networking. See? Already there is indication that electronic gadgets do not and really cannot interfere with aircraft systems. And not that it inconveniences me personally; I turn off my Archos for take-off and landing anyways, because I enjoy take-off and landing. But like the author of this EDN post, for the airlines to make a policy about something technical without real justification is annoying to me on an engineer purist level!

September 29 2012: News of my daughter being interested in a short-term missions trip next summer prompted my thoughts about such.

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Am I a Joss Whedon fan? Yes. Am I a Firefly fan, and wish that the series had continued? Yes. Am I a LEGO fan? Yes again.

So when a friend of mine posts a facebook alert about a LEGO geek who built a LEGO Firefly-class starship, was I interested? Yes.

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Time for another local change: I had the excellent site for Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant as a regular visit place on my sidebar. The "Turkish Lieutenant" story is still available, but the artist is not producing new material for the web. While I recommend the art and the "for sale" stuff by the artist, I'm taking it off the sidebar.

In its place is "Thrilling Tales", a gorgeous Art Deco-style science fantasy site inspired by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. It isn't a web comic, but rather an illustrated story, but it is regularly updated. And the "for sale" stuff is beautiful as well!

September 28 2012: Some amazing model builders have made a supercharged V8 engine. Beautiful! And it runs at more than 10,000revs!

A link from the comments takes you to the Model Engineering Society page, with some amazing pictures of other beautiful working models. I'd like to learn the story behind these interesting little motors:

September 26 2012: An article on LWN has some good links on Open Hardware resources like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that work under Linux.