In a way, Agilent represents the most grassroots electronics parts of HP from before they became overly invested in laptops and fell.
This is the cutest product name ever.
Since 1992, Mr. SQUID has been the standard educational demonstration system for undergraduate physics lab courses.
YBCO device, runs on liquid nitrogen.
This is how electronic circuits are normally prototyped!
Once you validate them like this, the next step is usually to move on to printed circuit boards for more reliable production setups.
Breadboards are a thing of beauty and wonder.
Point-to-point constructions on woden boards
. Source. Predecessors to breadboards from where the name came. A thing of beauty, so vintage. You could actually write stuff on those with a pencil!Breadboards - Trash or Treasure? by Keysight (2020)
Source. How to teach Publish your material even if it is not perfect by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.
This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.
And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Examples of famous fails:
- QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 7.11 "Epilogue" mentions how Julian Schwinger has lots of unpublished notes, or that his collaborators had to write most of the stuff down themselves in the end because he felt they were not perfect enough
How to teach Exams and homework are useless, only projects matter by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16See: Section "Exam".
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:
Bluetooth support: not enough RAM for it, though in principle its chip/transceiver could support it! microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.1/ble.html
Supported editors: microbit.org/code/
Bibliography:
Microbit simulator using some Microsoft framework.
TODO the Python code from there does not seem to run on the microbit via
uflash, because it is not MicroPython.support.microbit.org/support/solutions/articles/19000111744-makecode-python-and-micropython explains.
forum.makecode.com/t/help-understanding-local-build-options/6130 asks how to compile locally and suggests it is possible. Seems to require Yotta, so presumably compiles?
When plugged into Ubuntu 22.04 via the USB Micro-B the Micro Bit mounts as:e.g.:for username
/media/$USER/MICROBIT//media/ciro/MICROBIT/ciro.Loading the program is done by simply copying a The file name does not matter, only the
.hex binary into the image e.g. with:cp ~/Downloads/microbit_program.hex /media/$USER/MICROBIT/.hex extension. 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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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-calculusArticles 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
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. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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