An engineer's emergency kit business card

http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/an-engineers-emergency-kit-business-card.html

by amirmc • 13 years ago

173 75 13 years ago

boldport.blogspot.co.uk

ck2• 13 years ago

How exactly would you get through TSA with that...

remember they almost shot and killed that MIT student that was wearing some circuits as art on her shirt

afandian2• 13 years ago

The author never expressed a wish to visit the US.

Kliment• 13 years ago

The author applied to YC which sort of implies wanting to visit the US for a few months.

amirmc• 13 years ago

If you can take a laptop through (or in fact any electronics) then in principle, this should be no problem.

cenhyperion• 13 years ago

This is the TSA we're talking about.

protomyth• 13 years ago

The laptop is on a list + the card is not on the list + it looks different = not on the list and different gets you in trouble

micheljansen2• 13 years ago

Easier said than done. I have personally experienced what happens when flying with a nonstandard electronic device in your carry on and it's not an experience I would like to repeat. In my case, all I was carrying was a hardware prototype consisting of a standard Samsung touch panel + control module in a custom injection molded plastic enclosure. Basically a glorified iPad.

This resulted in me being detained for over an hour while they ran every possible test on it, inspected every single item in my carry on and even photographing every individual page in my notebook. I was then followed until I got on the plane and even had to confirm that I was on the plane before it was cleared to depart.

This was on a US domestic flight. I have flown with prototypes in Europe several times (international flights) and have never had any problems.

Either way: bringing nonstandard electronics, even things that are much less sophisticated than acceptable things like laptops etc. can cause you major headaches when the TSA is involved.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

"Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't hack. Two of his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so that he could use the computer by telephone from his hospital bed.

Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their friend who was a patient.

The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player, ... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was clearly a droid.)

Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an idea.

The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"

[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide himself what would be shown on the TV. --ESR]

[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the following bit of filler:

     Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
     from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
     had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but
     without the TV screen."  She asked him if it could have been a
     "typewriter."  "Yeah! Yeah!" he said.  "That's what it was
     called."

I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of today's teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either.... -- ESR]"

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TVTypewriters.html

----

If you went ahead and assumed that TSA agents are really just cleverly projected computer algorithms (androids perhaps?), your predictions concerning their behavior probably wouldn't be far off.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

In principle a bomb detonator is a custom piece of electronics, as a consequence, airport security has a problem with different electronics circuits.

I fully acknowledge that "custom" and "different" are not equivalent concepts, but well, that's the rationale.

majke• 13 years ago

a) Citation needed. b) Aren't the TSA officers unarmed?

sp3323• 13 years ago

Citation: https://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/... It was Massachusetts state police who arrested her at gunpoint, and were completely unapologetic about freaking out and blamed the victim for being scary.

Edit: yeah, the same police force who had just freaked out over LED advertisements earlier that same year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare

segmondy• 13 years ago

you don't have to carry on, you can still check in.

laurenstill• 13 years ago

I'm building the DIY cellphone specifically to see what sort of TSA pushback I receive.

I've gone through with lockpicks, booze, arduinos, rpis, various components and boxes full of electronic bits. Only major issue I've encountered was accidentally packing items in a box that shipped reloading supplies.

duiker101• 13 years ago

Well done Saar, nice to seem someone from the Pitch & Mix on HN!

boldport7• 13 years ago

Thanks! ;)

sadiq• 13 years ago

There's more of us about.

EGreg• 13 years ago

I just never understand how OCaml programmers love to party.

leif• 13 years ago

They're functional alcoholics.

rlpb• 13 years ago

At first I wondered why you needed all those parts just to light an LED. Then you explained what they were for. Nicely done.

asb• 13 years ago

For those not familiar with Saar/Boldport's work, he's working on PCBmodE (https://bitbucket.org/boldport/pcbmode, used to create this business card PCB), an open source layout tool borne out of frustration with the existing tools widely used by the industry.

The most impressive board designed using PCBmodE so far in my opinion is Saar's 'lifegame' http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-lifegame.html

joelgrus• 13 years ago

Very cool, although it seems like it might be simpler to just learn OCaml.

manojlds• 13 years ago

F# is what's the cool kids are doing these days :)

mturmon• 13 years ago

"The heart wants what it wants"

___1___• 13 years ago

I prefer Kevin Mitnicks:

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ranh/106709219/

sutro• 13 years ago

Obligatory link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk

jwr• 13 years ago

I am impressed by the amount of work someone did to make this site completely unusable on iOS devices.

It loads slowly, poorly animates (what for?), scrolls abysmally, and prevents zooming in.

I'm sorry for the slightly off-topic comment, but I think this needs to be said. I long for clean, simple, readable web pages.

boldport7• 13 years ago

I'm the author and maker of this board. The blog is hosted on blogger (Google). When I decided to use blogger I wrongly assumed that it will 'just work' across platforms, but it hasn't been the case, unfortunately. There isn't much I can do in terms of configuration, and the only option is to find a new blogging platform, which I may do in the future.

mrtbld• 13 years ago

I think it is because of the Blogger's "Dynamic Views" template your blog uses. Maybe another (more classic) template would be better for cross-device compatibility.

jfb2• 13 years ago

I hate what blogger is doing, but the project is very cool.

MarkSweep2• 13 years ago

You don't necessarily have to get off blogger. You can change the template to be more sane. Currently you are using the "dynamic view" template with "magazine" as the default view. If you select "classic" (the first choice in all the dynamic view templates) your blog will stop popping up light boxes by default.

Any template outside of the "dynamic view" category will be even better. Where better means to me "does not need JavaScript to display properly".

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

which leads me to mention : http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

It was referenced here yesterday and now it ranks with "Programming MutherFucker" in my brain.

jfb2• 13 years ago

The thing is, Mobile Safari and the Chrome on Android are perfectly good web browsers, and can render web pages pretty much exactly as can a desktop browser. Misfeatures like this are the result of pathetic platform envy. Yes, native applications have access to superior controls. No, your uncanny valley reimplementation of native UI is not cool; it's not innovative; it's bad design. It's dishonest, aggravating, and in a better world, would lead to revocation of the offender's internet license.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Nicely done, I wonder if you could add a 555 timer with the legs pulled straight out to the sides. Not sure you could clip it and still plug it in a socket but you could rewire it 'dead bug' style.

boldport7• 13 years ago

That's a thought. I'm interested in new mechanical configurations of components, and how to hide/embed them into the board in interesting new ways.

pg• 13 years ago

Is it the default now for individual entries on blogger.com blogs to be displayed as lightboxes, or is this just an unusual option this one user chose?

thinkalone• 13 years ago

It displayed as the default "Microsoft Word" layout when I first viewed it (after enabling Javascript), but then, when I used the "back" keyboard shortcut to try and come back here, the page re-displayed in a lightbox. Fun.

pavel_lishin2• 13 years ago

Every blog there seems to do this by default, which means that Pocket, etc., can't read them.

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

Just try reading it on an iPad. It's an absolutely miserable experience. It feels like they tried to reimplement scrolling, which, of course, they get totally wrong.

It baffles me that companies spend significant amounts of time and resources making a user experience that works great rather awful[1].

[1] See also: Flickr.

MarkSweep2• 13 years ago

Oddly they are continuing to make it worse. For at least a year you have needed JavaScript enabled to view Blogger sites. It's a blog, why do you need JavaScript to display a loading screen! And they scroll horribly in mobile Safari too.

And now these light boxes. I don't get it.

Related to the BoldPort product though, I think electrical engineering world is world could use some better tools. Earlier in the week one of our electrical engineers spent a day helping to debug a new board. The problem ended up being a signal name was renamed in one place but not another. If the current EE design tools don't have refactoring support much less some sort of electrical "uninitialized variable" error, there must be room for improvement in these tools.

ajasmin• 13 years ago

Here's a reformatted copy of the article (no lightbox): http://ajasmin.net/saved_page/an-engineers-emergency-kit-bus...

I really like the concept. Time to to make my own PCB business card.

eli• 13 years ago

Typical HN negativity: someone posts a cool project and the top comment is bitching about the blog design.

droopybuns• 13 years ago

This is cool, but I like Michael Ossmann's better.

http://ossmann.blogspot.com/2011/02/throwing-star-lan-tap.ht...

PCB board for a LAN tap. Definitely one of the coolest business cards I've received- particularly at a hacker con.

pavel_lishin2• 13 years ago

I think that the banana peel is a reference to this: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1qkd9x/secret_staircase...

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Love the banana for scale reference.

memset• 13 years ago

Next on my wishlist - a business-card-sized emergency soldering iron!

solistice• 13 years ago

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9450 it's not business card sized, but it'd probably fit in a pocket.

jds375• 13 years ago

What a cool idea. Hope he finds a way to make it scalable.

An engineer's emergency kit business card

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