Jeri Ellsworth, self-taught engineer, talks about her career (2011) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Jeri Ellsworth, self-taught engineer, talks about her career (2011) [video]

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129 pointsjacquesm24 comments

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Jeri Ellsworth is a wizard! A huge inspiration to me.

I always loved this floppy drive reverb she made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr7B-7BFP4

I wish Jeri would build the J64 - the definitive rebuild of the C64.

The C64 DTV is pretty close. You can hack them to add a keyboard and disk port without too much trouble.

Altavista was pretty close to Google.

I thought that was the C-One: http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

Have you seen Mega65? I'm unreasonably excited about it. Not one of Jeri's projects, but it looks great. With the right FPGA, you can apparently try it right now.

http://mega65.org/

I didn't know her story. Amazing person.

She really is an amazing person - I met her once, and became instantly a fan when she pulled out a "transistor I made".

I mean, really .. make your own transistor? From scratch?

Simply one of the most inspiring people I've ever met.

Indeed. I tried to make a transistor with the reverse side of a pile of 74LS IC dies I extracted with solvents, household chemicals and a blow torch. I managed to make an acceptable diode that lasted about 2 minutes at a mere 200uA of current. I gave up then and decided that the transistor was the base abstraction layer I could be bothered with.

For ref diode recipe:

1. 74LS die. Turn it over.

2. Small pile of borax on one half. Small pile of sulphur on other side.

3. Apply torch until everything is baked nicely.

4. Scrape off surface with a razor.

5. Poke two pins connected to your circuit until you find a bit that works like a diode (can take a few minutes). I used a simple home made curve tracer out of a twin-t oscillator, buffer and an oscilloscope. Don't hit it with much current or it'll kill it instantly.

You can do this with a lead crystal as well (that's how in the old days the diodes for crystal receivers were made).

Even a dirty razor blade and a pencil will work as a diode!

Yeah that was where I started with the idea and then decided to see if I could dope some silicon to make a diode then move up to transistor level, then a simple IC.

You could knock up a point contact diode or even transistor without too much pain but that's not as much fun :)

There's info on how to make point contact devices in here: http://www.qrparci.org/wa0itp/csts_book.pdf

Demo https://youtu.be/-Qph8BNrnLY

Note that those are FETs, not just ordinary transistors.

...and then she makes an inverter from two of them:

http://hackaday.com/2010/03/10/jeri-makes-integrated-circuit...

C64 Bass Guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kDhpFaf4EY

I first thought this was just someone slapping on an empty C64 case for a guitar body. It's... a bit more than that.

She's been a major inspiration for my own work for years.

I like your 'burning zombie'!

Heh, thanks. That was sort of the start, my first major project outside of programming, outside of anything I had actually been trained in.

I'd always had hobbies of a wide variety, and people always like to parrot that tired "jack of all trades, master of none" line. Seeing Ellsworth's work, it made it feel normal to not only be interested in and doing a bunch of different things, but to try to be good at it all, too.

She's always seemed extremely brilliant, yet ultimately accessible. She's always not only created awesome things, but tried to explain them as well. To try to bring other people along into the fold. We could all use more of that.

Fun story: Back in the early days of hobby computing a friend-of-a-friend, a guy called Jim ran a robotics gig in Amsterdam. He asked me to control a head on a stalk with the face of a politician on it lip-synched to some audio. Jaw movement, eyes rolling side to side, some facial animation. Very funny job. Anyway, one night I was working on the 'head' with the latex part off, you have to imagine a very scary looking appliance with teeth and two eyes painted (very realistically) on ping-pong balls behind a skull like frame of fibreglass.

I was writing some code deeply concentrated when my refrigerator decided to generate some really ugly spark causing the servos on the head to become activated, the jaw opened really wide and the eyes rotated to face me, which totally scared the shit out of me.

So much for me being level headed and cool under pressure ;)

Hah! Yeah, that would freak me out, too.

The caption of her as "Force of Nature" made me laugh. Very inspiring.

jacquesm, thank you for doing my homework for me. You went far beyond what I teased about.

For background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9576219

Thanks again.

windytan is sick. I have read the stuff every time it is posted here, and I am saddened with all my interest in SIGINT as a kid I never took it seriously, because her non-mil, non-intel signals analysis makes it seem so much cooler than what I read about as a kid! And it is so approachable.

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