Raw

Around 1992 I'd been reading about Chaos theory and started playing around with some analog electronic circuits. I was amazed how easy it was to build a chaotic circuit, and on impulse I sent a couple of my designs off to Wireless World (the magazine best known for publishing Arthur C. Clarke's idea of geostationary communication satellites). More amazement, they published them in their Circuit Ideas section of June of that year. My first published work. The editor asked me if I had any more similar material. Well it took me a while, but I did a full article - The Twisted World of Non-Linear Electronics (PDF of images scans from mag, 9 pages - includes the chaotic stuff, which was republished in a little Newnes book). To my delight, it was the cover article in the February 1993 issue, and for the cover they did a brilliant modified version of Dali's "Persistence of Vision", with melting circuit boards instead of clocks. I think the only other thing I did for them was a piece on Operational Transconductance Amplifiers, which sound pretty obscure but are actually really nifty. The most notable circuit in that piece, The Versatile World of OTAs (March 1994 issue, PDF, 5 pages), was a heterodyne ultrasonic receiver - in other words, a bat detector :)

I'm pretty sure the material's all still valid (even though analog). A while back I hunted for old WW stuff on the WWW, alas nowhere to be found. Fortunately I'd "filed" my only copies of the magazines at my mother's, remarkably she was able to find them, picked them up last visit. Only just got around to scanning them.