Open Circuits

I’m very pleased to announce my forthcoming new book, Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, co-written with Eric Schlaepfer.

Open Circuits is a coffee table book full of cross-section photographs of electronic components, along with photos of those components in context, and descriptions of how they work. It’s coming this fall from No Starch Press, and is available now to pre-order.

Book cover for Open Circuits

From the rear cover:

Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the surprisingly beautiful design waiting to be discovered inside everyday electronic devices. Through painstakingly prepared cross-sections and stunningly vivid close-up images, the book reveals a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder. From simple resistors and capacitors, to cutting-edge circuit boards and retro Nixie tubes, the authors’ arresting imagery transforms more than 130 electronic components into awe-inspiring works of art that will delight engineers, artists, designers, and photography enthusiasts alike.

My co-author Eric Schlaepfer has been our regular collaborator on projects such as the Three Fives and XL741 soldering kits, as well as the MOnSter 6502 and our Uncovering the Silicon project.

Open Circuits is coming this fall in hardcover, and is available now with a pre-order discount and early-access PDF from No Starch Press.

It’s also available to pre-order at your local bookstore — who we sincerely encourage you to support — as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major booksellers.

3 thoughts on “Open Circuits

  1. I worked for a little while at a test lab (in Sunnyvale!) doing things like opening packages, removing the coatings on the chips, and taking photos (some as duplicates). Transistors are very pretty in color!

  2. Any chance you’ll be doing a book/site/tweets that explain how these components are made? Just got my early release .pdf, and as I look through it I keep coming back to the question of “how on earth do they make these things?”

    Or even just recommendations of existing resources that illustrate/video/explain the industrial process of creating resistors, capacitors, etc.?

    1. It’s not the only focus, but our book does talk quite a lot (in the limited space available) about how many of the components are made, and particularly those in the passive components chapter. If you haven’t already, you might want to download the free chapter (which is that one) to see what we say about them.

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