A nicer voltmeter clock

Sometimes, electronic circuit design is mostly about wood | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 26 days ago

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

Are you a C or C++ programmer? | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 month ago

The Secret Life of Circuits

Many of you follow this blog because of the regular features about electronic circuit design. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 month ago

Why I refrain from infosec punditry

If you know about my professional background, the most puzzling aspect of this Substack must be that I don’t use it to talk about my primary field of expertise: information security. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 month ago

Conway's Game of Life, in real life

When life gives you switches... | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 2 months ago

How much of HN is AI?

I have a complicated relationship with Hacker News. The site is the most important aggregator of geek news and a major source of traffic to this blog. At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general directi … | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 3 months ago

Approximation game

The number 22/7 and the pigeon flock of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 3 months ago

Unreal numbers

Reals are really weird. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 3 months ago

It's all a blur

Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 4 months ago

You gotta think outside the hypercube

A closer look at the tesseract and the ways we can render it on the screen. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 4 months ago

The toil of (blog) art

An image is worth $19.95. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 4 months ago

See it with your lying ears

This blog has a history of answering questions that no one should be asking. Today, we continue that proud legacy. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 5 months ago

Cursed circuits #4: PLL frequency multiplier

How do you turn 1 MHz into 100 MHz? With magic, of course. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 5 months ago

Cursed circuits #3: true mathematics

Op-amp arithmetics, explained in a more accessible way | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 5 months ago

Cursed circuits #2: switched capacitor lowpass

Still using resistors? Get on with the times. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 6 months ago

Cursed circuits: charge pump voltage halver

There's plenty of circuits that are hard to understand because they're complicated. And some that are hard to make sense of because they seem too simple. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 6 months ago

It's hard to build an oscillator

Especially if you want it to work. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 6 months ago

When it comes to writing, LLMs have won

As a middling author, I find it fairly easy to sniff out LLM-generated articles. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 7 months ago

What's the deal with Euler's identity?

Untangling a cursed formula from 1748. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 7 months ago

Things you can do with diodes

Paying homage to the component we usually don't think about. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 7 months ago

Weekend projects: Chicken Squisher 3000

If it clucks like a duck... | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 8 months ago

Zombies

Interior of an abandoned, boarded-up convenience store. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 8 months ago

How has mathematics gotten so abstract?

What's the meaning of "numbers" and "arithmetic operations"? We consult Georg Cantor's turtles and look at Giuseppe Peano's code. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 8 months ago

Folks, we have the best π

And some novel ideas for bicycle wheel design. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 8 months ago

Getting silly with C, part ~(~1<<1)

It's vibe coding. Relax, everyone is doing it. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 9 months ago

How many dimensions is this?

A degree in mathematics might not save you from stacking boxes for a living. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 9 months ago

Multitudes

A warm, late-summer night in Bruges. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 11 months ago

Gödel's beavers, or the limits of knowledge

Can you examine infinitely many integers in finite time? Are there numbers you're not allowed to know? Can a monkey beat a beaver in a fair fight? | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 11 months ago

Self-referential abstractions

A quick look at the wacky epistemology of analog circuitry. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The proof that π = 4

Recreational math: why a troll proof involving circles is less wrong than it seems. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

0.9999... ≊ 1

If you're playing both sides, you always come out on top. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Decibels are ridiculous

Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Complex numbers #2: a world in 3D

Why is there no equivalent of complex numbers for three dimensions? And what's the deal with quaternions? | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

A 20-minute intro to complex numbers

You might have heard of complex numbers before -- but why exactly did we choose i = √-1? | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The Mathematics of Love

Interior of an upscale restaurant, night. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Sierpiński triangle? In my bitwise AND?

Exploring a peculiar bit-twiddling hack at the intersection of 1980s geek sensibilities. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The Long Winter

Interior of a vast cavern. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

My approach to teaching electronics

Explaining the reasoning behind my series of articles on electronics -- and asking for your thoughts. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Resistors, Johnson-Nyquist, nV/√Hz

A major source of noise in electronic circuits is easy to understand. The unit we use to measure it is not. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Real MLCCs (and inductors) have curves

Linear components are pretty nonlinear -- and parasitics don't tell the whole story. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Why do lemon batteries work?

And chemistry, I guess | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The Rapture

It’s fascinating how these vascular bundles, containing xylem and phloem, are arranged in a ring located beneath the skin (periderm) and the cortex. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Electricity and the speed of light

Does electricity travel at the speed of light?... does light? Yes and no - and you'd be hard-pressed to find an explanation that has an intuitive physical basis. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Understanding root-mean-square voltage

And how do we derive its value for sine waves? | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

Why are sine waves so common?

A simple question that takes some effort to answer in a satisfying way. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The Afterlife

AGENT: I am prescribing vardenafil 5 mg for you. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

But good sir, what is electricity?

A quick look at the physics of conductors, insulators, and electric charges. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago

The Review

Interior of a low-rise office park. | Continue reading


@lcamtuf.substack.com | 1 year ago