Ejaad-Nama 0x0C: Lemon Markets and Other education
Ejaad-Nama (Urdu: Letters of Invention). A fortnight newsletter about Science, Electronics, Makers, DIY, and everything technical. We talk about lemons, acid batteries, and anything in between.
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Market for Lemons
A market for lemons is a market where the quality of the goods in the market degrades over time because the buyer and seller both have different information about the goods. The economic paper was written by George Akerlof who examined the used car market: The seller has all the incentives to hide the faults of the used car. The buyer does not know the exact condition of the car. Due to the uncertainty, the buyers tend to undervalue the goods pushing out the good condition cars completely out of the market.
Elliot Williams from Hackaday recently compared the sharing of free 3d models in this article with the “Market of Lemons” as the downloader does not know how well the 3d model is designed and will have to invest at least filament and time to print costs to find out.
It got me thinking about my feelings when shopping from eBay or Ali express.
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How to Learn new things
My formal education and professional work has always revolved around electronics. I think its precisely that reason that I envy mechanical engineers (Grass is always greener on that side, you know). At this point in my life, I don’t get enough time to study and practice complete mechanical engineering lectures as a student would. So I try to take a practical approach:
Buy Architecture LEGOs and assemble them.
LEGO assembly can be very therapeutic and educational.
Therapeutic: It allows me to disengage from whatever my state of mind is at that time. Educational: It provides great insight into how structures hold together and the importance of each tiny building block.
In some countries, you can find LEGO rentals as well as local LEGO clubs. This hobby can get expensive pretty quickly. But if you have enough pieces, you could start doing your designs like a 3d printer made of LEGO.
3D Printing - Spring Loaded box
Another way I use to learn mechanics is to 3d print interesting mechanisms and observe them in action. In the past, I did a 3d printed a floating table and explored the best way to assemble. Or a Catapult gift card which inaction turned out to be very effective.
Recently though, I came across a print-in-place spring-loaded box design by youtube called SunShine. Print-in-place means that all mechanism is 3d printed on to the bed and there is no assembly or processing required once the printing is finished. The design is clever use to gears and 3d printed circular spring. Well, If you keep the box closed, the spring kind of loses its tension over time just like what I did to mine.
This got me thinking: Maybe it’s possible to 3d print a mechanical watch. A mechanical watch in essence uses the same spring called the Mainspring which is wound up and used as a power source as it unwinds.
I found one on Thingiverse and would be printing it just for the sake of how fun the assembly would be.
Free Books
As a newsletter writer, ofcourse I am going to promote the reading. here is a list of free springer books found on reddit. There are plenty of nice books of different fields to get your feet wet:
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💡 Tips for Electronics Engineer
I decided to create one more section, where I would share one technical tip which I learnt over few weeks. Lets see if I can keep it regular. This one comes from Adafruit Website:
When it’s an inductor! Treat every via in your PCB as if it has about 1nH of inductance. Using multiple vias in parallel will reduce parasitic inductance and can cut down on unwanted oscillation.
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I am going to finish my newsletter on a punny note:
This joke took me some time to get it. :)
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If you would like to send in your projects and hacks to be part of the newsletter, please do comment below, or email me: a.nadeem89@gmail.com. Leave your feedback in the comments about the content. and subscribe here, and share the newsletter with your friend.