Author Archives: mechatronicsguy

Here’s the process for making the wire & bead Galton boards. First up, cutting the wire to length. I screwed two wood screws right into the bench, then wrapped the wire back and forth till I had a bundle of … Continue reading →

I’ve played with the Galton Board before a couple of times. It’s a lovely demonstration of the ‘Central Limit Theorem’ in statistics. That is, it shows in a really intuitive way how repeated binomial events (like coin flips) average out … Continue reading →

At the Electronex trade show last week I bumped into Dave Jone from EEVBLOG. We got chatting about the polarization stuff I was working on, and after a few minutes Dave turned to me and said “Wait, why aren’t we … Continue reading →

Warning: Level 5 cognitohazard ahead. Mathematicians especially susceptible. Proceed at your own risk: (More seriously, if you like puzzles/math, haven’t heard of the Collatz before, and have a big exam in the next couple of days, maybe skip this post?) … Continue reading →

Here’s a model to demonstrate a little known trick of geometry. The verticies of an icosahedron (20 sided shape) can actually be created using only three rectangles at right angles to each other. What proportion do the rectangles have to … Continue reading →

I’ve been playing around with tangible versions of the Bloch/Poincare sphere previously, and I think breaking polarization down into 3 orthogonal dimensions (Stokes vectors) yields such a useful mental model of what’s happening with various complex systems. In the same … Continue reading →

Here’s an update to the lasercut Poincare sphere I made previously. I was very happy with it as a desktop ornament, but it wasn’t quite the tangible intuition pump I was hoping for. I decided to remake it with the coordinates … Continue reading →