Crystal radio by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This was the first generation of commercially successful radios.
It uses a crystal detector as its diode, which is a crucial element of the radio, thus its name.
They were superseded by transistor radios, which were much more reliable, portable and could amplify the signal received.
Video 1.
How a Crystal radio Works by RimstarOrg
. Source.
Pulse width modulation by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
GPIO generally only supports discrete outputs.
But for some types of hardware, like LEDs and some motors, the system has some inertia, and if you switch on and off fast enough, you get a result similar to having an intermediate voltage.
So with pulse width modulation we can fake analog output from digital output in a good enough manner.
Jump wire by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Notably used to connect:
You can buy large sets of them in combitation of male/male, male/female, female/female. Male/male is perhaps the most important
Video 1.
Making Jumper Wires by PCBurn! (2018)
Source.
Pin header by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
These often come pre-soldered on devboards, e.g. and allow for easy access to GPIO pins. E.g. they're present on the Raspberry Pi 2.
Why would someone ever sell a devboard without them pre-soldered!
Figure 2.
Underside of a Raspberry Pi 2
. Source. At the top of this image we can clearly see how the usually pre-soldered pin header connectors go through the PCB and are soldered on both sides.
Light-emitting diode by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
How LEDs work by VirtualBrain
. Source. 2021. Good 3d schematics clearly explaining part of the LED electronic package.
Transistor by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Although transistors were revolutionary, it is fun to note that they were just "way cheaper and more reliable and smaller" versions of exactly the main functions that a vacuum tube could achieve
The first working one in 1947 by John Bardeen and walter Brattain in Bell Labs Murray Hill.
People had already patented a lot of stuff before without being able to make them work. Nonsense.
As the name suggests, this is not very sturdy, and was quickly replaced by bipolar junction transistor.
Delft OpenCourseWare by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They have a lot of stuff, well done.
CC BY-NC-SA by default unfortunately, but what can you do...
One of the most beautiful things is how they paywall even public domain works. E.g. here: www.nature.com/articles/119558a0 was published in 1927, and is therefore in the public domain as of 2023. But it is of course just paywalled as usual throughout 2023. There is zero incentive for them to open anything up.
Video 1.
What they don't tell you about academic publishing by Andy Stapleton (2021)
Source.
Video 2.
The publishing scandal happening right now by Andy Stapleton (2023)
. Source. TOOD get the name of the academic who quit.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact