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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #465 – An Interview with Ted Yapo

#465 – An Interview with Ted Yapo

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Ted is a fan of soldering AND stock photography

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

  • Ted is a lifelong electronics hobbyist
  • He studied engineering physics in college.
  • Full color faxes were a thing in Japan but never took off elsewhere.
  • After working on scanning equipment, he moved on to doing networking work.
  • He also did some consulting after Cisco.
  • Mid-way through his career, he went back to graduate school.
  • Wrote a paper about finding telephone wires using LIDAR for helicopter pilots.
  • Transitioned into AR, sort of like Projection Mapping. It was used for architectural daylighting simulation.
  • Going back to school is tough for what you remember. Ted had to relearn linear algebra. He recommends using Gilbert Strang’s lectures, which gave more context.
  • After school, Ted did consulting with a few partners, mostly New England.
  • Ted got started posting to Hackaday with 2016 HaD prize.
  • His first entry was the “Diode clock“, which utilizes the fact that diodes act like switches for RF when you pass DC current through them.
  • “Upping serendipity quotient”
  • Using diodes as an AND gate
  • Using pin diodes for a doppler radio project
  • 1n4007 can act as a crude pin diode at certain frequency
  • Built digital clock that uses diodes for the counters
  • Assembly instructions – 46 boards!
  • Power supply is around 6 MHz
  • One of his other popular projects is the Tritiled, which helps figuring out where things are in the dark
  • Based around the idea of tritium lights
  • Modern LEDs are extremely efficient at a certain current
  • Droop happens at higher currents
  • The 8 GHz sampling oscilloscope is a more recent project
  • Research came out of the diode clock
  • Schottky diodes for sampling
  • Tek S4 sampling head 14.5 GHz
  • Diodes can switch in 10-15 pS
  • Stroboscopic effect
  • Equivalent time sampling
  • Tek 11801 from 1989
  • Nyquist still applies
  • Verifying on the bench is difficult
  • Paper from picosecond pulse lab
  • Jim Williams using an avalanche diode or a step response diode
  • Looking at RMS error
  • Another architecture 1975 by SP McCabe
  • Using a fast comparator to sample waveform, similar to a successive approximation ADC
  • ADCMP582
  • That’s the time base calibration
  • What will people be able to build with an 8 GHz scope?
  • Using it to measure transmission lines on PCB boards
  • Using Time Domain Reflectometry
  • Ted has a splitter TDR head
  • Tracking generator + Spectrum analyzer = Scalar network analyzer
  • Rigol came out with cheap spectrum analyzer, DSA815, Ted got one of the early units
  • Tracking generator outputs signals that are the same as the frequency on the spectrum analyzer
  • Ted gave a talk about this at last year’s Hackaday Superconference
  • There is no phase in an SNA
  • SNAs are harder to calibrate
  • Paper was about how to do two measurements to compensate for errors in the generator
  • Chris has a friend doing Python scripting on test equipment via their ethernet jacks.

You can find Ted on Twitter, Hackaday.io and as a writer for Hackaday

Comments

  1. The Engineer says

    November 4, 2019 at 9:38 am

    That…. that’s not how you use soldering irons.

    • DHK says

      January 18, 2020 at 10:13 am

      So you did not get the first line: “Ted is a fan of soldering AND stock photography”

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