I work with NMR spectrometers on a daily basis, and while it would be nice to engineer a complete spectrometer, I really don't have the time or the money to gain enough experience... yet. This is an NMR project I knew I could chew in around a year: a proton precession magnetometer.

Let's just get it out there: programmers are a bit lazy. Our laziness is special, because it motivates us to work really hard up front in order to sit back and drink margaritas later (and longer) while our newly written scripts do the real work. This is that spirit applied to collecting data for transfer function plotting on a digital scope.

This project started when I found an old Eico 460 tube oscilloscope in my Grandpa's old shed. The collection of tubes, passives and magnetics inside turned out to be perfect for building a fairly clean-sounding tube guitar amplifier.

This project was my first foray into proper linear analog electronics. After a few microcontroller projects, I figured I'd try to build my own rendition of the Szekeres. I'm more proud of the machining work in this project, honestly.

Nixie tube clocks were all the rage when I jumped in on this bandwagon. I still love the warmth of these classic indicator tubes; there's nothing quite like them.

As LED clocks go, this is pretty basic. Clocks are simple enough to invite the beginning microcontroller hardware designer for a try, but complex enough to be at least somewhat fun. Here's what I made.

I wanted to get started with AVR microcontrollers, and since Arduino wasn't a thing back then, I rolled my own board for a self-contained digital thermometer using the ever-popular DS18B20.