Margin Call: Fermi Problems, Highway Horrors, Black Swans, and Why You Should Worry About When You Should Worry
Jason Sachs walks through practical strategies for choosing engineering margin, from split-second Fermi estimates to industry-grade safety factors. He blends highway and boiler anecdotes with a MOSFET thermal example to show why probabilistic thinking, experiments, and documentation matter when you must decide fast or later justify your choices. Read this to learn how to balance conservatism, cost, and risk in real projects.
Basic hand tools for electronics assembly
Though the software tools vary with different microcontrollers, many hardware tools are the same.
Oh Robot My Robot
Jason Sachs turns a familiar poem into a robot sendoff, and the result is equal parts funny and oddly technical. The piece riffs on broken hardware, vanishing memory, and a machine that has clearly seen better days, all while keeping the rhythm of a classic elegy. If you enjoy engineering humor with a literary twist, this is a quick, memorable read.
Python Code from My Articles Now Online in IPython Notebooks
Jason M. Sachs has published the Python code from his EmbeddedRelated articles as standalone IPython notebooks. He automated extraction of example code and pushed the notebooks to a public Bitbucket repository under the Apache license, and they are viewable via nbviewer. The post lists available notebooks and asks readers to link back to EmbeddedRelated and share feedback on how they used the code.
My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow: Arthur S., Arthur T., and the Soup Nazi
Jason Sachs traces his decade-long relationship with Stack Overflow, celebrating its fast answers, polished UI, and massive searchable archive while calling out a growing culture of harsh moderation. He argues strict, quality-first closures and inflexible automation often alienate newcomers and block helpful short-term answers. The post urges kinder handling of gray-area questions and smarter automation to keep the site useful and welcoming.
Book Review: "Turing's Cathedral"
The early days of electronic computing are explored through George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral, which traces the IAS machine, John von Neumann, and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from 1940 to 1958. Jason Sachs praises Dyson's archival access and narrative detail, especially on hardware like vacuum tubes and delay lines, but warns the book's software explanations feel vague and would have benefited from diagrams.
Practical protection against dust and water (i.e. IP protection)
Needing IP65 protection while exposing humidity and pressure sensors on a tight $15 budget, Dr Cagri Tanriover hunted for a practical fix. He found that an SHT2x humidity sensor with a microporous filter cap and O-ring provides IP67-level protection, and by matching a pressure sensor that fits the same cap he met and exceeded the IP65 requirement. The post shows a low-cost, component-level workaround.
Musings on Publication — and Zero Sequence Modulation
Publishing technical content involves more than writing, it requires tools, reviewers, and patience. Jason Sachs walks through his lean workflow for posting to EmbeddedRelated, contrasts it with the multi-person review cycles at semiconductor companies, and points out a neat trick for checking PDF metadata. He also highlights a Microchip tutorial on Zero Sequence Modulation that includes a 3-D HTML5 interactive viewer to make space vector concepts easier to grasp.
How to Include MathJax Equations in SVG With Less Than 100 Lines of JavaScript!
Jason Sachs recounts a simple hack to get MathJax equations inside SVG without heavy dependencies or complex tools. His approach renders MathJax in temporary HTML divs, captures the resulting SVG nodes, and swaps them into SVG
Garden Rakes Revisited: The Hall of Shame
Jason Sachs opens a Hall of Shame to catalog the everyday software "garden rakes" that steal time and focus. He walks through concrete examples from PowerPoint point editing and Office window behavior to Outlook undo bugs and TurboTax's opaque errors, showing how poor UI and hidden behaviors force you to work around the tool instead of with it. This is a short, cranky checklist for avoiding wasted effort.
Project Log: Pixelblaze Christmas Lights
Festive fun and the hacker spirit combine in my janky attempt to adorn my house with addressable LEDs! In this post, I show you how I used a Pixelblaze and a cheap strip of WS2811 RGB LEDs (and not a little bit of hot glue and paper clips) to make a super cool set of Christmas lights.
Baking in Process Improvements
Jason Sachs uses a backyard cookie-baking session with his niece to illustrate practical process improvements engineers can apply. He documents batch-by-batch tweaks — temperature, dough placement, and a pipelined scooping step — that raised throughput and improved quality, then connects the lesson to pilot projects and small automations like a Python script for JIRA. The piece makes the case for quick experiments and a culture that rewards refinement.
On optimizing manual soldering
When faced with manual soldering of thousands of components, speed and efficiency become pivotal. Here are some takeaways from my own experience attempting to optimize such a process.
How to Include MathJax Equations in SVG With Less Than 100 Lines of JavaScript!
Jason Sachs recounts a simple hack to get MathJax equations inside SVG without heavy dependencies or complex tools. His approach renders MathJax in temporary HTML divs, captures the resulting SVG nodes, and swaps them into SVG
Getting Started With CUDA C on an Nvidia Jetson: A Meaningful Algorithm
In this blog post, I demonstrate a use case and corresponding GPU implementation where meaningful performance gains are realized and observed. Specifically, I implement a "blurring" algorithm on a large 1000x1000 pixel image. I show that the GPU-based implementation is 1000x faster than the CPU-based implementation.
Massive Open Online Courses ( Transforming education )
Jayaraman Kiruthi Vasan outlines why MOOCs have become a practical way for embedded engineers and programmers to learn from top universities without quitting jobs. The post highlights platform options like Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy, explains how on-demand video lectures and clear prerequisites make targeted upskilling feasible, and points to DSP and Python courses useful for embedded design.
What I Learned From Crashing and Burning in Grad School
Have you ever felt so consumed by something that it started to crowd other parts of your life? So obsessed with success in a particular area that you could hardly think about anything else? I found myself in exactly that spot in 2018 when I first started graduate school; I wanted to succeed so badly that I worked myself to the bone and I let even my marriage and my health suffer in service to it. This state of being is, believe it or not, NOT conducive to success, in neither the long-term nor the short-term. But it took two authors and one pivotal book for me to understand that, to see the pit I had dug for myself, and to begin the path back out. In this blog, I want to share with you my journey in the hopes that you can avoid the mistakes I made.
Supply Chain Games: A Warning on Tariffs
Jason Sachs warns that the 2025 tariff surge could amplify an existing semiconductor inventory glut and destabilize automotive and industrial supply chains. He lays out why steep, rapid tariff changes cannot be absorbed by years-long fab lead times, sticky proprietary ICs, or quick part substitutions. Read this to understand practical risks, likely timing, and what engineers and buyers should watch over the next two to three years.
Nokia in Soup Again?
Nokia is back in the spotlight, this time for closing its Germany manufacturing plant and triggering a public backlash. The post contrasts that controversy with Nokia’s earlier, surprisingly effective handling of the BL-5C battery replacement program, where affected users could request a new pack online and receive it by courier. It asks whether the company can recover its image again.
Definite Article: Notes on Traceability
Traceability sounds bureaucratic until you need to identify a mystery part, a board revision, or the exact firmware that was shipped years ago. Jason Sachs shows how it applies across hardware, software, testing, and documentation, from Digi-Key’s cut-tape part tracing to device IDs, build metadata, and precise test records. The message is simple: if you cannot prove what something is and where it came from, you are flying blind.
Painting with Light to Measure Time
When Jason Sachs needed to verify a first-order sigma-delta LED dimming implementation but had no oscilloscope, he turned to long-exposure "light painting" to turn time into space on a photograph. By sweeping the camera across blinking LEDs he captured pulse trains, read the bit patterns from the light trail, and confirmed the result with a tiny Python accumulator model. The post shares practical tips on timing accuracy, exposure, and avoiding ambient-light artifacts.
Getting Started With CUDA C on an Nvidia Jetson: A Meaningful Algorithm
In this blog post, I demonstrate a use case and corresponding GPU implementation where meaningful performance gains are realized and observed. Specifically, I implement a "blurring" algorithm on a large 1000x1000 pixel image. I show that the GPU-based implementation is 1000x faster than the CPU-based implementation.
Definite Article: Notes on Traceability
Traceability sounds bureaucratic until you need to identify a mystery part, a board revision, or the exact firmware that was shipped years ago. Jason Sachs shows how it applies across hardware, software, testing, and documentation, from Digi-Key’s cut-tape part tracing to device IDs, build metadata, and precise test records. The message is simple: if you cannot prove what something is and where it came from, you are flying blind.
Practical protection against dust and water (i.e. IP protection)
Needing IP65 protection while exposing humidity and pressure sensors on a tight $15 budget, Dr Cagri Tanriover hunted for a practical fix. He found that an SHT2x humidity sensor with a microporous filter cap and O-ring provides IP67-level protection, and by matching a pressure sensor that fits the same cap he met and exceeded the IP65 requirement. The post shows a low-cost, component-level workaround.
Stuck with Jira — and Stuckons
Jason Sachs vents about Jira’s quirks and why it still feels stuck despite years of fixes. He walks through concrete pain points: nonstandard markup, relentless notification noise, poor meta-task support, and limited analytics that make day-to-day engineering work harder. To explain why schedules blow up, he introduces a simple kepton model of planons, workons, and stuckons that highlights unexpected work.
What I Learned From Crashing and Burning in Grad School
Have you ever felt so consumed by something that it started to crowd other parts of your life? So obsessed with success in a particular area that you could hardly think about anything else? I found myself in exactly that spot in 2018 when I first started graduate school; I wanted to succeed so badly that I worked myself to the bone and I let even my marriage and my health suffer in service to it. This state of being is, believe it or not, NOT conducive to success, in neither the long-term nor the short-term. But it took two authors and one pivotal book for me to understand that, to see the pit I had dug for myself, and to begin the path back out. In this blog, I want to share with you my journey in the hopes that you can avoid the mistakes I made.
Who needs source code?
Many developers feel that the supplying source code is essential for licensed software components. There are other perspectives, including the possibility of it being an actual disadvantage. Even the definition of source code has some vagueness.
A part of history
At KVHS's 40th anniversary Gene Breniman reflects on how a tiny 100-milliwatt AM experiment grew into a high-power FM station and a launchpad for engineers. He credits teacher Ernie Wilson's hands-on mentorship for turning students into builders, and laments the loss of his high school's electronics program amid budget cuts. The post is a personal reminder why practical tech education and resourceful projects still matter.
Scorchers, Part 4: Burned by the Happy Path (Simon Says)
Designs that only work along the happy path break in real use, causing frustration and sometimes safety risks. Jason M. Sachs uses everyday examples from microwaves to car Auto Park logic to show how mutable software and physical state create brittle behavior. He outlines practical firmware fixes such as clear state machines, sensor or user-driven resynchronization, soft-start delays, and a ‘‘Drunken Happy Path’’ fuzzing approach to find real-world failure modes.
Supply Chain Games: A Warning on Tariffs
Jason Sachs warns that the 2025 tariff surge could amplify an existing semiconductor inventory glut and destabilize automotive and industrial supply chains. He lays out why steep, rapid tariff changes cannot be absorbed by years-long fab lead times, sticky proprietary ICs, or quick part substitutions. Read this to understand practical risks, likely timing, and what engineers and buyers should watch over the next two to three years.
