Week 1 Bench: Noticing a leak

The first Bench — treating a machine as something that emits, not just something that computes

22 February 2027

Before the Bench#

Bring a device you can plausibly instrument later in the semester: a laptop, a phone, a smart card, a microcontroller — anything with a chip in it that you have physical access to. You are not measuring anything yet. You are choosing a subject.

In the Bench#

A short exercise: for the device you brought, list every physical quantity it changes while it runs — current draw, temperature, the sound of its fan or its capacitors, the light from its screen or its LEDs, the time it takes to finish a task. None of this list is exotic; all of it is usually treated as waste. The Bench’s only job is to stop treating it as waste and start treating it as a channel with a sender, whether or not the sender meant to send anything.

Afterwards#

Keep the list. Each week attaches a channel from it to a mechanism, a measurement, and a historical disclosure. By week 12 the list is the outline of the semester, not a warm-up exercise.