Magical Semiconductors of Pixies

Parker Dillmann
Welcome to circuit break from Macrofab, a weekly show about all things engineering, DIY projects, manufacturing, industry news, and the engineering student life and YouTube. We're your hosts, electrical engineers, Parker Dillmann. And Steven Kraig. This is episode 400 and 23. Circuit Breaker from Macrofab.

Parker Dillmann
Hey, Circuit Breakers. We have an announcement. We're running an electronic design contest on our community forums. The theme is food devices. Go to form.macfed.com to find out more information about the contest and how to enter.

Parker Dillmann
There's a category on the left side of the form that says contests, click that, they'll find it. For prizes, there's over $5,000 in cash and free prototyping services through Macfab. And the most important thing, a trophy to show that your design was one of the best entered. There'll be a link in the show notes where to find more information about this contest and how to enter. And thank you, Mouser Electronics, for sponsoring the contest.

Stephen Kraig
Joining us today is Alexander Vartanov. Alexander is a 20 year old electrical engineering student based out of Southern California who is a lover of all things electrical and mechanical. He goes out of his way to work on projects either for himself or with others. Currently, most of his time goes to school, his low cost kit car project, or working on projects for YouTube personalities.

Parker Dillmann
Welcome to the podcast, Aleksander or Alex.

Alexander Vartanov
Hello. Alex works, but yeah. Or Alegs. Alegs. Yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
I many aliases.

Parker Dillmann
So you're an electrical engineering student. How far are you into your degree so far?

Alexander Vartanov
So I'm currently, in community college, but I got accepted to transfer to, California State Northridge. So I'm not technically in the electrical engineering courses part of the, you know, getting a degree, but I yeah. I'm in the beginning stages. I haven't taken any classes, but I'm fairly familiar with electrical engineering, at least I think.

Parker Dillmann
So you've done, like, a lot of transfer classes so far. What's been the biggest difference between high school and your current college courses?

Alexander Vartanov
Generally, the mentality of the students and the mentality of the teacher slash professors, the students seem to care more than than in high school. High school is very much a just mess around, find out type of type of deal and but the students, at least, were in the classes I've taken, seem to care a little bit more, and they put in a little bit more effort. Professors, way more relaxed. I in high school, I was always hearing, oh, we're making this class hard because we have to prepare you for for college, university, but the professors are real nice, at least the ones I've had. So

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. It's surprisingly different when you're paying for every class you're doing. Right?

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. It's probably a motivator.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. And the professors are also paid a bit more than high school teachers too. So they maybe they can be a little bit more relaxed.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. I I do very much enjoy the the college atmosphere more than the high school atmosphere. A lot less banter, like, in a toxic way or any of that. Just people are generally nicer, more understanding towards each other, and more likely to help each other out.

Parker Dillmann
When I started college, I actually wasn't elect I picked engineering, but I wasn't an electrical engineer. So I think Steven went into a and m as a electrical engineer. Right?

Stephen Kraig
Nope. I went in as an aeronautical engineer.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, so we both changed majors. So Yeah. Yeah. Both of us, we didn't know what kind of engineering, I guess, we really wanted to do. We kinda I picked based off my parents because my dad was a chemical engineer in the petroleum industry.

Parker Dillmann
So that was what I knew at the time for engineering. So, Alex, why did you decide to pick the hardest engineering degree out there?

Alexander Vartanov
Nobody told me it was the hardest. No.

Stephen Kraig
Get ready.

Alexander Vartanov
I I picked electrical because I I've been doing electrical related things since, like, the 6th grade just as a hobby, and I thought to myself, like, I could do this for a living. I was, like, I went through phases where I considered, like, I'll double major. I'll do electrical and mechanical or, oh, I'll do electrical and chemical or all this. And then I ended up just saying screw the other things. I'm just gonna do electrical and get it over with.

Parker Dillmann
You know what's funny is you are gonna be doing all those things as electrical engineer.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, yeah. I'm I'm well prepared. I yeah. It's gonna be fun.

Stephen Kraig
Right. Well and after school, you will still do all of those things.

Parker Dillmann
Electrical engineers are starting to be treated as kind of the if you need to pick 1 engineer that your company has, it's gonna be electrical because they can do kinda everything.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. I've noticed that, at least in the recommended coursework, it's there's statics. So there's, like, mechanical stuff. There's, you know, of course, the electrical stuff, and then there's also coding related stuff. So it's kind of like a coverall engineer in a sense.

Alexander Vartanov
The mechanical stuff, it makes a little bit, like, why do I need this? But I realized, like, yeah, there's gonna be some need for mechanical later on with what I do. So

Parker Dillmann
Especially when you have to start fitting, let's say, electronics in the side of closures. What's interesting is they make you take statics because I took statics, but that was for my petroleum engineering degree. And fortunately, that covered, like, the physics elective that I had to pick for electrical engineering, I was able to be like, oh, I took statics, so I can just use that. But statics was not required for electrical engineering at my college.

Alexander Vartanov
There's actually a lot of physics I was required to take as prerequisites. I did take, statics. I had to take, like, a kinematics class of friction and motion and all those things. And then I of course, electricity and magnetism. But, yeah, there's a lot of physics demands and I still have to do a material science class that I haven't done yet, but yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Is that a requirement through the community college or through the 4 year that you're looking at?

Alexander Vartanov
Through the 4 year I'm transferring to. They have, yeah. They have a lot of those just somewhat slightly arbitrary, but not they're, like, slightly related classes that they throw in there. UCLA actually has a lot more classes that they throw in the pit as well. A lot more coding classes too.

Stephen Kraig
That's fascinating, because I had to take a handful of those as well, but they weren't until later in my degree. Like, I think I took electromagnetism my junior year, my 2nd semester of my junior year. It wasn't a requirement to just get in. But then again, that was also a electrical engineering specific electromagnetics class, whereas physics 2 was electromagnetism. And I suppose that that's more generic for other degrees as well.

Stephen Kraig
I think overall, EM was the worst class that I had to take. Just because the professor was god awful, and, I mean it's already a difficult topic, and, it just none of it made sense, and it just felt like jumping through hoops and proving math for some reason. I don't know. It was very difficult.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. I managed to, like, kinda kinda scrape by with a decent bit of just, like, intuition. But, yeah, it was a interesting class. Like, some things, like, oh, yeah. Charges.

Alexander Vartanov
They happen. Good luck. And a lot of other stuff like that. Like, oh, yeah. Calculate the value of this capacitor with this force, the random variables that you will never need to do again.

Parker Dillmann
It's interesting that they're making you take those kind of physics classes to be able to transfer in instead of, like, more basic math classes? So what kind of, math classes have you taken so far?

Alexander Vartanov
I've taken the calculus trio, and I'm currently taking differential equations. They, for some reason, didn't require me to take linear algebra, and I'm not complaining.

Parker Dillmann
So Yeah. Because we've talked about that before is I think linear algebra is probably the most important for electrical engineering. And Oh, great.

Alexander Vartanov
It's no.

Parker Dillmann
No. No. It's interesting is for my degree, that was an elective math class I took, and I end up using that, like, more often than not. More way more than calculus, at least. Mhmm.

Parker Dillmann
But that's just what I do.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. I didn't have an official linear algebra class. I had a class that came after DiffEq, and I don't even remember what it was called, but it was like matrices and manipulation and things like that. Algebra. It's linear, but it wasn't called linear.

Stephen Kraig
It was called advanced mathematics or something like that.

Parker Dillmann
Even though Diffie Q is super advanced mathematics?

Stephen Kraig
There's a certain point that you get to in math where things stop stacking, things stop building upon each other, and they branch, and I think that's DiffEQ. After DiffEQ, you're then applying everything DiffEQ and down to different topics.

Parker Dillmann
That's fair. Yeah. I would agree with that. What's been your favorite class so far? And I guess your most hated class too.

Alexander Vartanov
Most hated class so far, diffy q. Even though I'm currently in it, you know, just knee deep and plowing through. Favorite class, I was taking chemistry 101, and the first time I took it, I dropped it because the professor just wasn't working out for me. I'm retaking it right now. So much nicer.

Alexander Vartanov
I love chemistry. I've taken multiple chemistry classes before in, like, high school, AP chem, the whole shebang. Chemistry is fun when it's, like, understandable chemistry, when you're not dealing with, I don't know, arbitrary stuff. But I love chemistry and the, physics with, like, the physics one was also pretty nice. I I did enjoy those classes a lot.

Parker Dillmann
You said arbitrary chemistry. What's that entail?

Alexander Vartanov
So the things in chemistry I enjoy are the things I can, like, visualize. You know, reactions

Parker Dillmann
I'm picking electrical engineering.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. I got them.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. But yeah. I thermochem, honestly. People complain about thermochem. It's not that bad.

Alexander Vartanov
You're just moving heat from here and there, and it's do making things do things, but it's not atrocious.

Parker Dillmann
Alice is gonna tell us that he can see electrons move.

Alexander Vartanov
I can visualize electrons. I can understand where they're moving mentally. You know those, like, videos that you used to see in, like, high school and stuff when they were teaching you very basic electronics? Like, here, the electrons move this way through this very simple circuit. Mhmm.

Alexander Vartanov
You know, that type of stuff.

Stephen Kraig
Water in a pipe kind of stuff.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. So that's how I generally visualize. And then, of course, I visualize it like an oscilloscope, but that's more of a literal visualization than anything else.

Parker Dillmann
It's gonna be interesting what you think of when you start looking in your substrate slash solid state class, when you start looking at how semiconductors actually function and seeing how that translates because that's gonna be interesting.

Alexander Vartanov
Currently, to me, semiconductors are a magical black box where you put pixies in and it spits pixies out. But

Parker Dillmann
Eventually, that will not be the case.

Stephen Kraig
Right? I don't know. They're still magical to me.

Alexander Vartanov
It's a magical I see that does magical things.

Parker Dillmann
I remember having to I drew the energy levels of how it and channel most it worked for a job interview once.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, nice.

Stephen Kraig
That was

Parker Dillmann
a long time ago. Back where I remember Could

Stephen Kraig
you could you do that now? Could I do that now?

Parker Dillmann
Did

Alexander Vartanov
you get the job?

Parker Dillmann
I did, but I declined it. It was a internship for, AMD, and they wanted me to skip a semester to do a internship through, like, the summer and then through, like, the fall. And I was just like, no. That's not worth it. I'm gonna keep at school.

Parker Dillmann
Thought about it because the money would have been nice. But

Alexander Vartanov
What year would this have been? Like, was it

Parker Dillmann
In between my junior and senior year.

Alexander Vartanov
Okay. But was this like pre like, was this Athlon era or, like, Bulldozer era or

Parker Dillmann
I think it was in the Athlon X2.

Alexander Vartanov
Okay. So when AMD was still on the uphill?

Parker Dillmann
Barely.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. It but it's not a bulldozer situation. So

Parker Dillmann
No. No. It was the bulldozer was right after the x two. My fear was I would become because they they wanted, like, a lab tech intern, and my fear was the money would have been good, and I would not have gone back to school and finished my degree.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, gotcha.

Parker Dillmann
That was my biggest fear. And so I don't know if that was a wise choice or not, but that's the choice I made.

Stephen Kraig
So quick tangent, because you said lab tech. I ran into something recently. In fact, someone I worked with who worked at a, I won't say the name of the company but it's a large company that you would know if I said it. And he when he left, he was a solder technician level 28. They apparently have 30 different grades of solder technicians at this one place.

Stephen Kraig
And I think I can't remember what he said. He got hired on as, like, a 13 and got promoted to, like, a 21, and then got promoted again to a 28. Like, why why would anyone need that level of granularity in solder technicians? I I mean How do you even determine that level of granularity?

Parker Dillmann
I do know why. Yeah. What's that? So why is so you can so the problem with a lot of companies and technicians is it's hard to have upward mobility. Really, a lot of times, it's like the only mobility you have to go up in most of those companies is to become a manager.

Parker Dillmann
Right?

Alexander Vartanov
Mhmm.

Parker Dillmann
And the problem is you only need so many managers, you know, for certain company sizes. And so if you put in those micro levels, at least the people are progressing in

Stephen Kraig
job title. Yeah. But he was progressing, like, 10 levels at a time.

Parker Dillmann
Right? Okay. That's different. But I'm saying that's that's why that's there though is Okay. And and they can have different pay scales in there.

Parker Dillmann
And they probably actually have, like, certain qualifications that you need to have to have a certain level. Probably.

Stephen Kraig
It just seems What

Alexander Vartanov
does level 30 entail though? Is that, like, just telekinetic flow of solder? Or

Stephen Kraig
You're you're you're the king

Parker Dillmann
of the techs. You shoot lasers out and you can solder those laser beams.

Alexander Vartanov
It's like laser welding, but with solder. Is that even like a That

Parker Dillmann
is totally a thing, Alex.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
That is a thing?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. So you it doesn't, so you still put the paste down on the board, but it uses a laser to melt the solder the solder paste.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, so you don't end up heating the package?

Parker Dillmann
Correct. That's the idea. That's cool. It's the biggest problem you run into that is it tombstones really easily because you're you usually only heat, like, one leg at a time and it tends to pull parts around. I wanna say they use it a lot when you have to use, like, gold and stuff to, like, solder.

Stephen Kraig
Gold, you have to get stupid hot to Yeah. Get it to actually melt and solder.

Alexander Vartanov
Freaking lasers, man. How do they work? Magnets. How do they work? Permanent magnets are still black magic to me.

Alexander Vartanov
They just oh, we have a magnetic field. How?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Magnets are permanent magnets are up there on especially with getting work out of them. That's one of those things where, like, when you go down, like, the perpetual motion YouTube channels.

Stephen Kraig
It's always magnets. It's always magnets. Always magnets. Okay. It's always magnets, and it's always a dude in his garage building plywood and sticking magnets to it.

Stephen Kraig
Seriously, go watch it. PVC pipe. Oh, you're right. And there's

Alexander Vartanov
You know why? Because it's easy to shove batteries in plywood and PVC pipe.

Stephen Kraig
That's a good point. Yeah. I like that.

Alexander Vartanov
You wouldn't want, like, a billet aluminum bill, like, contraption because then it's expensive and it's hard to shove magnets into.

Stephen Kraig
You already sound like an, a full degree engineer.

Parker Dillmann
Keep showing magnets into it until it works. So speaking of YouTube, Alex, so you do a lot of, I wanna say, like, behind the scenes work for YouTube channels.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. So it's sort of behind the scenes, sort of not. I do, like, appear on camera, but I'm far from the main subject. I do projects for various YouTube personalities who need electrical or mechanical things made for their videos.

Parker Dillmann
I think that's actually how, Alex, you and I started talking was it was your alarm clock project.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, yeah. That one was a fun one. So, for context, 2 separate YouTube channels, one after the other, got in contact with me. 1 was, Tyler Blanchard. I I worked with him before for other projects, but he got in contact with me.

Alexander Vartanov
He was like, hey. I have a video. I need so I found these alarm clock ideas on Reddit, and I want them made. One of them was a alarm clock paper shredder, and the other one was an alarm clock water gun. So he tells me, yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
Make these. You've got, like, 4 days. Go ahead.

Stephen Kraig
So So

Parker Dillmann
what what do these 2 alarm clocks do?

Alexander Vartanov
So paper shredder 1, basically, you're supposed to shove a couple dollars into it when you go to sleep. And if you hit the snooze button instead of, you know, flicking off the switch, It'll trigger the the paper shredder to, you know, start shredding your bills and time is money and all that. And the water gun 1 is alarm go off, you get hosed down. Yeah. Those were the 2 for that guy that I made.

Alexander Vartanov
And then 2 weeks after that, his friend, much larger channel, Arac, gets in contact with me, and he's like, hey. I saw what you did for Tyler. I want, alarm clock that launches fireworks and an alarm clock that hoses you down, but much more literally. And it kinda spiraled from there to the point where he was surrounded by fireworks on a bed at 6 in the morning, downtown LA, and it woke up the neighborhood.

Parker Dillmann
So how did you make that work? Because you've modified some preexisting alarm clocks to make that work.

Alexander Vartanov
Yes. So the alarm clocks that I used for 3 of them, the the 2 for the first guy and the one for the second guy were, these little sharp cheapy alarm clocks off of Amazon. And what I did for them was they, both the the switch on the back to turn off the alarm clock and the snooze button are floating they're like a floating switch that pulls to ground. So all I did was add a pull up resistor across the switch to, its power, and I I put, like, a little detection circuit. So when it would be pulled down, it would trigger.

Alexander Vartanov
For the paper shredder 1, it would only trigger with the snooze button, so I that was a fairly simple one. Just when it pulls down, it trigger monostable 555 circuit to run the shredder for x period of time. The, water gun one was a bit more complicated because it it needed to be turned off when either the snooze button or the power switch was hit. Sorry. Either the snooze button, not the power switch, the, like, alarm off switch was hit.

Alexander Vartanov
So I needed to build a very questionable AND gate out of 2 discrete NPN transistors to turn off the monostable circuit.

Stephen Kraig
I I'm curious why why you say questionable.

Alexander Vartanov
Because it wasn't a perfect AND gate even with, one of so with an AND gate, if one input goes low, the output's supposed to drop fully to 0. One of them did that. The other transistor dropped it only to, like, 0.3 volts, and it didn't fully turn off the 555. So I had to use a diode as a voltage dropper with a, with a resistor to pull enough current across the diode to have enough forward voltage drop to turn off the 555. My oscilloscope saved me many times that weekend.

Stephen Kraig
So you pulled all this off in, what, 4 days, you said?

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. 2 days to get the parts in and then one day each alarm clock to build.

Parker Dillmann
We'll put links in the show notes to the the videos. Are you at all in those videos?

Alexander Vartanov
I wasn't in the one on Tyler's channel, but for Arac, I was I did show up for showing off both the the water gun hose down and the,

Parker Dillmann
firework bed. Firework bed.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. That one was I told them, like, hey. Don't give him blanket. Well,

Parker Dillmann
I guess since you're not in jail, no one got hurt. So

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. Nobody got hurt. It was close, but nobody got hurt. I was very on edge the entire time. Like, I had a master kill switch on that thing and everything just because I did not want a false positive to set off those, those fireworks early.

Alexander Vartanov
There was, like, 20 different fireworks that had to go off.

Parker Dillmann
So did you have to set up the igniter part? Yes. So for the igniters,

Alexander Vartanov
I use these, like I'm not sure if you're familiar. Like, these little cobra talon or whatever they're called. They're like a little nichrome coil that clips onto the fuse, and you just feed it 12 volts and it does its thing.

Parker Dillmann
Okay. It's a little heater element almost?

Stephen Kraig
Mhmm.

Alexander Vartanov
And it just yeah. It's a very easy simple clip on. So I had 20 of those feeding back to 1 lithium battery through a big boy relay, and that's what would trigger, and, you know, send all the current there.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. That's great. I have not seen these before. Remember back in high school, we would ignite fireworks with, remember Estes Rockets, the little igniters that you'd shove up in the in the back of the little tube, that was great for igniting fireworks. So we'd put fireworks underground and blow them up remotely.

Stephen Kraig
Wait. Underground? Yeah. Yeah. We'd light up the fuse and stuff like that, dig a big hole, stick them under there, and blow big craters in the air.

Parker Dillmann
I feel like you're doing, like, North Korea nuke testing.

Alexander Vartanov
The live, Saving Private Ryan recreations.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With with MADs. Right?

Stephen Kraig
Classic.

Parker Dillmann
So I know you did a a car with LEDs all over it.

Alexander Vartanov
Yes. So that was that one was a bender. That one was a week to shove 30,000 LEDs on Alex Choi's Lamborghini and have them all addressable and controlled from, like, a single controller. And, by god, that was a the most soldering I have done in a 1 week period ever.

Parker Dillmann
So did you actually, like, solder them on the Lamborghini?

Alexander Vartanov
Yes. So the strips got stuck down, and then I had to solder a ton of power distribution wires because you have a lot of voltage drop over a strip. So I had to inject power every, like, 400 LEDs, and then I had to run all the wires to, like, a central fuse box. And there were 2 100 amp hour lithium iron phosphate batteries behind the driver's seat that powered the whole thing. Full bore, it's supposed to pull, like, a 150 amps at 24 volts.

Alexander Vartanov
It is but the problem was it was so bright at any reasonable, like, brightness percentage that we had to turn it down to 5% brightness for it to show up and not white out the camera.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, yeah. Because you were probably shooting it at at night. Mhmm.

Alexander Vartanov
We calculated, like, the brightness density was similar to, like, if the sun was blasting down in the middle of the day. Like, it's that bright in a small area. So, like, when it was driven down the freeway, it just lit up the freeway.

Stephen Kraig
This, this cannot be legal to have that going on.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, yeah. He called his lawyer, like, hey, man. Because we had a, like, a red and blue flashing lights thing across the entire car. Like, hey, man. Is this okay?

Alexander Vartanov
And his lawyer was like,

Stephen Kraig
no. No. Yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
A lot of these projects or people I got in contact with were because I had initially gotten in contact with 1, YouTuber who made, like, an open call. His name's Lewis Wise. He made, like, an open call, like, hey. If you have any project experience and you wanna work on cool projects, let me know, and I'll throw you in this group I have called the wise task force. And then from there, it kinda spiraled.

Alexander Vartanov
The first project I did IRL with him was jet bike. So it was a one of those miniature jet engines on a bicycle, a $150 Walmart bicycle, and we took it, like, 75 miles an hour out in El Mirage, dry lake bed.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, wow.

Alexander Vartanov
It's not safe. He got speed wobbles. So and from him, I kinda got all the connections to work for all these other, or work with all these other YouTubers, which is fun. How long you've been doing the YouTube thing for? I technically got in contact with Lewis in summer of 2021.

Alexander Vartanov
The first project I did with him was spring of 2022. And then from there, I've just been in, you know, constant contact working either, like, in the background for research for projects or, like, actually hands on with, with his projects.

Parker Dillmann
Now did you, think you wanted to be an engineer back then, or has your experience doing these projects spurred you on?

Alexander Vartanov
I knew I wanted to be an engineer since, like, at least an electrical engineer since the 6th grade. But it has doing these projects has definitely, like, reinforced my, like, yeah. You can do this for a living and you can have fun doing it. At least fun is air quotes here, but you can have fun doing it.

Parker Dillmann
So since the 6th grade, what happened? Like, that's not that's not a same thing a 6th grader says they want to be.

Alexander Vartanov
So kind of what the trigger was was around the 6th grade, my dad I'm not sure if you're familiar with, like, the first generation of LED lights, which was just a bunch of 5 millimeter LEDs on a PCB in, like, a thing, you know, just all white light. Yeah. He brought a couple of those home and said, have at it. He gave me a soldering iron, and I had at it. I just took off a bunch of LEDs from the thing.

Alexander Vartanov
I desoldered them, stuck them together, shoved them on 9 volts, the whole shebang. Did destruction testing with it, like, how many volts can I pump into it? Like, everything. And then from there, my electronics spiraled. I got a little cheapy, RadioShack rest in peace.

Alexander Vartanov
Soldering iron and some of the little kits they had, the Velman kits, soldered those together. Failed miserably because unregulated soldering iron plus burning the crap out of yourself is not a good recipe, but, yeah, from there, I kinda just kept doing electronics, little projects here and there. Of course, they got more complicated as time went along, but, yeah, just as I thought, oh, that's a cool thing. I'd like to do that. I just did it.

Parker Dillmann
So why why did your dad just decide just to give you a whole bunch of LEDs, basically?

Alexander Vartanov
They were thrown away at work, and he's just like, oh, cool. He and he brought 2 of them home. There was the, like, a bigger one and a smaller one. He just brought them home, like, here. Have at it.

Alexander Vartanov
Here's the soldering iron. Do what you want.

Parker Dillmann
Did you show any interest in that before that? Or

Alexander Vartanov
I'd showed interest in soldering, but not electrical soldering. You know, wires together to make, like, decorative things and all that. And I started doing electrical because of those LEDs because I already knew basically how to hold the iron and not burn myself immediately. Still burn myself, but not immediately. And then yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Isn't that funny? It's some sometimes it's the smallest little things that can change a huge portion of your life and just your dad saying have some fun with some stuff I brought from work and now you're going to school for it.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. When I was learning to solder with a little RadioShack iron and saw learning to solder PCBs, I would always, alright, put the component in, you know, try to solder, and then go over and reach for some wire, but I bend the iron in my finger enough that I'd, like, singe right where my pinky is. So I very quickly learned that the wire is stiff. Hold the iron more tightly. It's been a a fun roller coaster.

Alexander Vartanov
I I got my first one of my more notable purchases that I made in the early parts was, bought myself a lead acid battery in the 7th grade, and I just kinda messed around with that for a while. I had, like, a little 2 watt solar panel. Like, oh, I can charge the battery off of the solar panel. And I oh, a 5 volt linear regular. I can charge my phone off of this battery that's charged by the solar panel.

Alexander Vartanov
And yeah. Stuff like that.

Parker Dillmann
So you already wanted to be an electrical engineer before you started doing this YouTube projects, but how has the YouTube projects changed how you view engineering?

Alexander Vartanov
It's definitely changed how I view pacing. Like, I've realized time is at least because YouTube projects, you need to do very fast paced because everyone's on a filming deadline. It's taught me how to do the the bare minimum to get the project done and just how to do it do it fast. I've done some things that are, like, not a 100% orthodox, in terms of electronics just to get them done, get them out the door because, you know, it only needs to be used once or whatever the meth the thought process is. But it's also made me better at soldering, faster at soldering, and way better at rapid prototyping.

Parker Dillmann
So what's your favorite solder?

Alexander Vartanov
I'm not sure if you're familiar. Well, you're out in Texas. We have this place in Southern California called Apex Electronics. It is a surplus store where all of the aerospace industry that used to be in SoCal, all the their surplus ended up in, like, from the sixties seventies, all that Lockheed and all that. Their surplus ended up in that store.

Alexander Vartanov
And so I got a roll of 60 40 Kester solder manufactured in 1994, a pound of it, and that's my go to right now. And I got a pound of it last year for $20.

Parker Dillmann
Wow. Nice. So, Alex, when my grandfather passed, one of the things I inherited was a box of Kester 60 40 solder.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, wow.

Parker Dillmann
Kester 44. That was probably the best thing I've ever inherited. I've only used one roll, 1 pound. I gave away a couple of them over the years.

Stephen Kraig
Still have a pretty decent amount on this spool. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
I think I've been to Apex Surplus.

Stephen Kraig
There's actually an Apex in Houston.

Alexander Vartanov
It's not the same, I think. It this one's like a privately owned little Yeah. Little shack.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, okay.

Alexander Vartanov
And there's there's lore too if you're curious. Yeah. What's the lore? So Apex is owned by this dude and then well, I think it was a family thing and then it got passed down to 2 brothers. I'm not a 100% sure.

Alexander Vartanov
I heard this, like, one time, and it's a bit foggy, but it passed down to 2 brothers. 1 brother kept the store. The other one went and started Apex Junior, which is an online only surplus thing, which carries I love the name. Yeah. It carries the same moniker and it's supposed to be like a like a branch off because he wanted to, like, go online or whatever or there was some rift in the family or whatever, but now there's Wait.

Stephen Kraig
Apex Junior, does it have a website that looks way old? Old as hell. Yeah. Okay. I have been ordering wire from Apex Junior for over a decade, and I did not know Oh my god.

Stephen Kraig
It was that place.

Parker Dillmann
I love because I never heard of Apex Junior. I open up the website, and the two pictures I would never order from this place.

Alexander Vartanov
I don't actually know what the front page looks like. Wait, let me see.

Parker Dillmann
Apexjunior.com. You're affordable. Yeah. You're a source of of for affordable electronics. But, like, it's just, like, 2 pictures of the warehouse, and it's, like, you know, I don't think that's the most flattering pictures of a warehouse.

Stephen Kraig
I have never been able to find this anywhere other than Apex Junior. They sell Teflon covered wire that is super slippery, but it just doesn't melt when you solder it.

Alexander Vartanov
It is from the aerospace industry in Southern California and it became surplus and they bought it up.

Stephen Kraig
Go figure. Yep. That's awesome.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. It's it's a sweet place. And if any of the listeners want a really cool place to visit electronics heaven, go to Apex. The prices are great for, you know, secondhand electronics of many flavors.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, man. I would have a field day there.

Alexander Vartanov
And if you want just cool stuff, they have it. Like, I, a friend of mine went there and he got a bunch of titanium fins from a turbine there for like by the pound. And then he also got pure tungsten carbide discs that were like perfectly flat and he got those too, like $8 for 20 of them. They were big tungsten carbide discs. Like, they just have stuff.

Parker Dillmann
What do you use those for? Nah.

Alexander Vartanov
It was probably used for something military at some point, but now it's a paperweight.

Parker Dillmann
I love so the pictures on Apex Surplus's website are. So they had the I g 88 Steven, heads. Oh. The engine combustion chambers. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
That's on their front page. But I was looking scrolling through all their stuff. They have, warfare missile launchers.

Alexander Vartanov
Okay. A lot of that is, actually for rent for the movie industry. So that's what is their main source of business. That makes sense. It's rentals for Hollywood.

Alexander Vartanov
So they rent out a lot of, old computers, like Apple Twos and all that, just to sit on the set and look pretty.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Be background. Mhmm. I

Alexander Vartanov
mean, they all function too. So if you wanted to, like, show somebody using an Apple 2, you'd go there, you'd rent it out. They also have a lot of old timey oscilloscopes that are absolutely gorgeous or, like, aircraft instrument clusters, the whole shebang. If it was related to, like, Lockheed or Boeing, or anybody based in Southern California in the sixties, seventies, they probably have something from them.

Parker Dillmann
Do they have Boeing airplane doors?

Stephen Kraig
Maybe. From the sixties, seventies.

Alexander Vartanov
I mean, if it falls into the lot, it's fair game.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, okay. EEV blog. Here's a video episode 124. It's Dave Jones walking through Apex Electronics.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, sweet. I didn't never know he visited it.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. This is a, this place looks like a gym for sure.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Next time I fly into, that area, I'll have to, go check it out.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. I went there one of the more recent times, and they let me hold the real Ghostbusters, like, vacuum pack that they have. It's a real vacuum pack from the set.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, nice. And they let me hold it.

Alexander Vartanov
And it was heavy. It was very heavy.

Parker Dillmann
I wonder if they I'm imagining, like, they bought that at surplus somewhere through some auction.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. They have a lot of movie props there that were kinda given to them because they were made from parts from Apex.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, okay.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. But if you if you go there and you talk with the employees, a lot of them are very cool and you can they'll give you a tour and they'll tell you all about it. They have a room of electronics, like, electronical devices that they rigged up to look pretty and blink. It's just a shipping container, and it is gorgeous when they close the doors and all you see is, like, blinking lights. It looks like a submarine.

Parker Dillmann
So have you built anything for YouTube that uses stuff from there yet?

Alexander Vartanov
Not for YouTube. I'm working on a coil gun with a friend that uses capacitors from Apex that we get for pennies on the dollar, and we got, like, £10 of enameled wire there for a $100. It's great. Yeah. Coil gun.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Let's talk about the coil gun then.

Alexander Vartanov
Lot scarier than you think.

Parker Dillmann
Well, high voltage and high velocity.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. Voltage isn't that high. I think we're currently at a 100 volts DC, but

Parker Dillmann
It's pretty high for DC.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. It's not instant death though if you touch one of it, one of the legs.

Stephen Kraig
Does it not touch one of the legs?

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. Because because it's not gonna go through you to ground. You have to touch both of them for it to be a bad time.

Stephen Kraig
Sure. Sure. Sure.

Alexander Vartanov
But, yeah, it a 100 volts is a party when you have a, like, I think 2 Tesla strength at the center of that coil. I we oh god. Do you want to hear the current Shunt story?

Parker Dillmann
Go for it. Absolutely. So we were trying to

Alexander Vartanov
figure out how much coil current we were pushing because we had a we're using an SCR to, like, trigger it. So we're like, hey. Let's make a current shunt. I have this 18 gauge lamp wire. So we, I put the like, a length of it across a d cell, and I measure the current, and then I cut it up and, like, measure out the sections.

Alexander Vartanov
So I get a quarter of that length, and now I have, you know, air quotes measured, shunt because I, you know, voltage drop and all that. And I put up my oscilloscope across the current shunt. We fire off the coil, and it's like 600 amps from 2 milliseconds going through some 18 gauge lamp wire. It was a party.

Parker Dillmann
Have you propelled any projectiles yet? So we shot a half inch, 2 inch how

Alexander Vartanov
much a diameter, 2 inch long steel slug, like, 50 feet on a 100 volts, And that was a single stage. We're cooking it up to, like, 10 stages by the end of this. We're aiming for, hurt really bad.

Stephen Kraig
Shoot through a wall kind of thing?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
So okay. If you do it multistage, are you doing it, like, a timing thing? Or how are you going to get it such that all the coils fire as the projectile flows through it?

Alexander Vartanov
So there's 2 ways of doing it. You can do, like, a purely timed thing or you can do, like, optical triggers. We have, like, LED shining and another LED that'll pick up when the projectile is coming by, then you have a fixed delay from that trigger to the coil, or you can just guess. But the fun thing is as you reach higher velocities, the time that the coil is magnetized is longer than the time the projectile spends in the coil's field. So after the first couple coils, the last coils all turn on at the same time and make one really big magnetic field.

Alexander Vartanov
So it's like one coil, Like, first coil fires, second coil fires, 3rd and 4th coil fire, and then the last 6 fire all at the same time, and you just have a massive pull as it yanks the projectile through. Neat. And you get some very strong magnetic fields that very rapidly collapse and make big EMF things happen.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. How are you handling, the snapback from that? Because those coils can I mean, I don't know how big they are, but you could be generating many tens of thousands of volts as it collapses?

Alexander Vartanov
So I think the thought process is the SCR will absorb it and shove it back into the capacitor. SCRs sidebar. SCRs are incredibly durable. They're not very good in terms of heat production and all that, but they can take a lot of abuse. So, yeah, you can just shove thousands of amps through an SCR rated for a 100 for a couple milliseconds, and it'll be, yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
Sure. Why not?

Parker Dillmann
All that's just remind me of is the new launchers that they're using on aircraft carriers that are they're not steam powered. At least the new generations, they're they're electromechanical. And I'm, like, I wonder if the military has to get FCC certification for these big coiled guns.

Alexander Vartanov
You can probably shield most of it just with by just covering it with iron.

Stephen Kraig
Or the hull of a giant ship?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. The hull of a giant ship.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. Giant ship. They're also in the middle of nowhere, so Yeah. Just international waters, do what you want. It's also the government.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. They make their own rules. It's okay.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. They're the ones that make the the the rules about it. I didn't know that they were moving to an electric system on it because, yeah, they've been just doing I shouldn't say just, but it's been steam powered for a long time. Right?

Alexander Vartanov
Mhmm. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't see why they need to go electro mechanical.

Parker Dillmann
I don't know what the reason is either, but that's one of their big things on on rail guns. So

Alexander Vartanov
Gotcha. Oh, yeah. Rail rail guns are we considered doing a rail gun, my friend and I, but we decided that coil gun's a little bit cooler.

Parker Dillmann
What's the difference between a coil gun versus rail gun?

Alexander Vartanov
So rail gun, it has fixed magnets or, like, constantly on electromagnets, and you run electricity through the projectile, which creates an opposing magnetic field to the magnets that are stationary, and that's what forces it forward. And you basically have, like, brushes that rub across power rails as it comes through. With a coil gun, you have coils that need to turn on at the right time, and the object is either ferromagnetic or actually magnetic, and that's what sucks it along.

Parker Dillmann
Gotcha.

Alexander Vartanov
So it's it's 2 different concept. That's why, the rail gun videos you see has, like, a big plume of smoke. It's the brushes burning.

Parker Dillmann
Vaporizing off.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Because that because the projectile or whatever carrier that holds the projectile actually has to physically make contact with the rails on it. The fun thing about a rail gun in comparison to a coil gun, however, is that the if the projectile already has velocity when it enters into the rails, the velocity just increases from that point. So, effectively, you could shoot a gun into the railgun and then have it make contact with the rails, and then it just boosts the velocity from that point. Oh, yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Obviously, that's a huge engineering challenge.

Alexander Vartanov
Just make a longer railgun. Yeah. True. True.

Stephen Kraig
Make a longer railgun, but you there's a lot you have to deal with. Like you were saying, the, things just tend to ignite when you rub those brushes on the rails like that.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, yeah. Honestly, the reason they're going with railguns over coil guns, at least my thought process is, like, you don't have to worry about timing with a rail gun because it's the it's basically a brushless motor versus a brushed motor. Coiled gun is a brushless motor. Railgun is a brushed motor in the most literal sense because it's computer controlled coils versus static arc, like sorry. Brush controlled coils.

Parker Dillmann
So, Alex, what are you looking forward to the most going to your new college, California State University? What are you looking forward to the most, like, actually being in electrical engineering now? Like, what's your first class you're gonna be looking forward to?

Alexander Vartanov
I'm just looking forward to, like, a lab where I guess I actually work on circuits. I mean, a lot of it's gonna be a step back from what I do at home, but it's gonna be nice to actually just do it in a professional setting and understand a bit more of what I should be considering when working on circuits versus what I do at home, which is make it work. And if it works long enough to do what you need it to do, that's enough. So

Parker Dillmann
I mean, that's product development in a nutshell, though, except that no. And it needs to last long enough for the warranty to run out. Exactly.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. The warranty for me is you have to go fix it. So the warranty is indefinite or it needs to work once, get it over with.

Stephen Kraig
Well, it sounds like you certainly have the practical aspect of getting the job done. You have that down for sure. Yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
I I like to think I do.

Stephen Kraig
I honestly hope that the labs are are not boring for you because it sounds like you are way past what the labs generally teach.

Alexander Vartanov
I'll have to do them regardless, so I'll I'll look forward to it. And if anything, I just get to leave early because I already finished the lab.

Stephen Kraig
That's a good way to think about it.

Parker Dillmann
So you're not that far in your journey yet, but what advice would you give to, let's say, high schoolers? I don't think I'd hope we actually don't have any high schoolers listen to this podcast because that just one would be weird.

Stephen Kraig
I don't know. I think it'd be really cool, and I bet you we do.

Alexander Vartanov
If we do. Greetings, younger people. Advice I'd give is, find something you're passionate about and would love to do outside of a work environment, and then do that as a job. Like, it's not always, like, do what you love as a job because then you won't love it. There's an aspect of that, but find something you're passionate about.

Alexander Vartanov
And if you care enough about it, then it won't be unbearable to do as a job.

Stephen Kraig
So so go find a Lamborghini and solder a bunch of LEDs to it. Right?

Alexander Vartanov
Well, if the Lamborghini is provided to you and the LEDs are paid for, go ahead. Don't go out and buy a Lamborghini just to put LEDs on it.

Parker Dillmann
I think if you can just go out and buy a Lamborghini, you're probably not going to college.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. It's a good point. Or

Parker Dillmann
you might be going to college, but you might be going to, like, a hoity towardy school to get, like, a business degree or something. Maybe I'm wrong there.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. That's well, depends on what Lamborghini. If you're looking at a Lamborghini tractor

Parker Dillmann
That's even more expensive.

Alexander Vartanov
They still make tractors, which is was surprising to me, but I don't know how much they cost. Wait. Lambo makes tractors?

Parker Dillmann
That's what they originally did.

Alexander Vartanov
They started making tractors. They made cars. Now they make tractors again.

Stephen Kraig
I

Parker Dillmann
don't think they ever stopped making tractors, actually.

Alexander Vartanov
That part of history is fuzzy for me. Didn't live through it, so I couldn't tell you.

Parker Dillmann
So is there also any other upcoming projects that you're working on, Alex, besides the, coil gun?

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. The big one is also for YouTube. I'm working on y'all ever watch Spongebob?

Parker Dillmann
Oh. Long time ago? Yeah. Long time ago.

Alexander Vartanov
Great. So remember the boat? I mean, they're underwater. The boat Spongebob tried to get a license for, basically, every episode? Yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
I'm building that. I'm building a boat on wheels. Does it float?

Parker Dillmann
I'm gonna dress

Alexander Vartanov
it up like the Spongebob one. It's gonna be something. Does it float? No. We're not making it amphibious.

Alexander Vartanov
That's a bit too much scope creep for us. But in a nutshell, it is a go for interceptor, which is like a meter made car, and we're throwing a 1969 StarCraft Falcon, which is a little 14 foot aluminum boat, and we're just shoving them together. And it is going to be an interesting combination of vehicles. And we bought the Interceptor as a as a nonrunning, like, oh, it has electrical gremlins. Be my guest.

Alexander Vartanov
And we ended up just tearing out all the electronics, and I'm shoving a standalone ECU onto it because I did not wanna try to diagnose a aftermarket propane system.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, it has EFI? So it it yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
It had EFI, but it was an aftermarket carbureted propane system where it, like, kinda injects propane into the intake before the throttle body

Stephen Kraig
Mhmm. And

Alexander Vartanov
they just blocked off the injectors.

Parker Dillmann
So It's a weird conversion.

Alexander Vartanov
Oh, it was. And we had to drain a lot of propane out of that tank, which which is a bonfire for a couple days. It's a lot of propane.

Parker Dillmann
I have one more question before we sign off, Alex. So because you've been doing kinda like the background off screen stuff for a couple years. Why haven't you just decided to do your own channel?

Alexander Vartanov
So I've considered it, and just talking with other people in the YouTube sphere, it seems like making the projects isn't actually most of a video. There's a lot more that goes into it, and I'm just not interested in that aspect of it. Like, there's the whole storytelling aspect. There's the editing. There's thumbnail design.

Alexander Vartanov
There's getting it into the algorithm. Production as a whole, there's a lot more to it than just make a project and film it, and those parts don't really interest me or, like, yeah, I just don't think I could do them. So when I was given the opportunity to you get to make cool stuff and just no strings attached. You get to make cool stuff for YouTube. I'm like, yeah.

Alexander Vartanov
Sure. I I'll I'll make them, and I'll make them happen. And yeah. I I get to show up in videos. I get to make cool projects, but I don't have to worry about any of the production or the money or any of that.

Alexander Vartanov
So it's nice.

Parker Dillmann
Get to do the fun part. Exactly.

Alexander Vartanov
I just get to do the fun part even if I burn a lot of time doing it.

Stephen Kraig
Alright. So engineering sounds like it's perfect for you.

Alexander Vartanov
I hope so. I hope I don't end up just in an office just staring into a computer for the rest of my life. I I hope I'm a little bit more of a practical engineer, but we'll see how that turns out.

Parker Dillmann
So thank you so much for joining us, Alex. We're gonna have to have you back on in maybe a year after you've had another to some actual engineering classes to see how that's going.

Alexander Vartanov
Yeah. Sounds like a fun time. Thank you for having me.

Parker Dillmann
And, for those interested in learning more about Alex's work and projects, we'll put all the links in our show notes, and you can see those at form.macfab.com. So thank you for listening to Circuit Break. We are your hosts, Parker Dolman. And Stephen Craig. Later everyone.

Stephen Kraig
Take it easy.

Parker Dillmann
Thank you. Yes. You are a listener for downloading our podcast. Tell your friends and coworkers about Circuit Break podcast from MacroFab. If you have a cool idea, project, or topic that you want us to discuss, let Steven and I in the community know.

Parker Dillmann
Community where you can find personal projects, discussions about the podcast, and engineering topics and news is located atform.macfab.com.