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- Great comics from OhmArt! Be sure to check them out and buy some of their merchandise!
- Tales from the cube talks about a label over an EPROM…has anyone seen this article?
- Bill Schweber wrote about the persistence and insanity of engineers chasing problems.
- Katie Luper is a former lawyer going back to school for EE! That’s different…and awesome!
- You can be a winner at the ACE awards! If you pay…
- The Dangerous Prototypes 7400 Contest is over! (or is it? Dave wasn’t sure)
- We need more engineers in popular culture! Scotty (James Doohan) tells that over HALF of the Milwaukee school of engineering listed him as an inspiration for them joining the program.
- Dean Kamen talks about the role of innovation and why we need people to solve problems…not create jobs.
- 31% of new grads don’t have jobs?! Crazy. Also, this survey says that the majority of new hires make <$30k. Is this realistic in your area?
- Chip of the Week:
- Maxwell’s HNS-1000 Nuclear Event Detector…know when there’s a nuclear event with a chip!
- NXP puts an ARM Cortex M0 in a DIP package!
- Potential art for Dave’s new office? A toilet made out of PCBs!
- Extra Charge Capacity:
I think I’ve got the ubiquitous UV eraser Dave was talking about. The problem with them was that if you had the chips in chip carriers, you had some issues getting the drawer back in. I think I ended up loosening the screws of the enclosure to help with this. If i can find the “home made” one we used for a long time here at work I’ll post a photo. I’m not convinced that overexposure kills the chips. Maybe if the chip has some other perishable material that is affected by UV…. but I’ve acidentally left the lamp on for over 24 hours a couple of times (oops) and the chips were fine. What’s cool about windowed chips is you can see the little wires inside flame on when you’ve fatally shorted something 🙂
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The problem with freeze spray is there’s never enough in the can because all of your colleagues have been spraying each other with it.
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Curiosity show was definitely inspirational. Best visual of nuclear fission cascade: fish tank, mouse traps and ping pong balls.
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I don’t think I have the board any more or a photo but i have had to hack away at the ceramic of an lqfp chip around a pin I broke off to get enough surface area to get solder to.
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That Maxwell chip must be doing the rounds somewhere. A friend emailed the pdf to me last week with the suggestion “We need one of these rigged up” 🙂
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Yes, having some product targeted to hobbyists is smart. Mindshare is valuable even if it has slow boil results for the vendors. Hobbyists become professionals. Professionals can also be hobbyists and buy demo and eval boards and other easy-to-get-something-going parts. Universities and other technical colleges teach with it. <- There's a danger there that they get attached to certain products once they're designing in the real world though.
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If this 1K uC comp gets legs I'm interested to see what the restrictions would be. I can think of a few loopholes people might try. There's some apples to apples comparison difficulties too. If there's no divisions, will all the competitors default to the most awesome 1K device from the one vendor? Defining divisions that get no comlaint would be difficult.
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JD
with regard to the problem of large parametric searches check this out:
two screens and it still doesn’t fit!
oh and something else completely unrelated but cool
http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
Why didn’t I think of that???????
How long before someone uses that Maxwell chip to make an Arduino nukeshield?
Will Limor Fried (Ladyada) ever be a guest on The Amp Hour?
If you ever design a PCB toilet, I hope you’ll make the gerber files available 😉
Dave – definitely build a PCB wall:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPU72VmtHuY
Technocratic Toilet Troubleshooting….. at least you can feel FLUSHED with success when you find the problem.
Older than EPROM’s, try blowing fusible link proms with a breadboard and a large collection of wire links. Thankfully only a 16×4 unit though, as we did not have a programmer for them. There were boards that used 2708 Eproms in a OTP ceramic package though, complete with the need for applying a -21V substrate bias ( and they made a pretty fair imitation of a firecracker if the bias supply died and went positive) to the whole collection of them. Never had to copy one of those, had enough spare boards already programmed.
I used to have a wall of unpopulated PCBs! Mostly boring green resist though. I tried sanding off the resist but the copper oxidises in no time. Depending on how stealthy you want to be, how about covering the outside or inside of the door with them? Black PCBs with gold or even traditional HASL would look pretty sexy, especially to non-engineers. You could even get a 1-off EEV nameplate for the door.
On pop-up ads: At the rate that it is going, Dave will need to make his own chips:)
The AdBlock Plus add-on for Firefox will take care of pop-up ads.
Curiosity Show!
Hi Folks, today we learn how to make Wormstew in the outback!
Awww that was a great show, really enjoyed it, when I was a boy 😀
Bring the Curiosity Show back, please Australia, please.
Eproms were never as much fun after the raised windows became integrated. Popular prank was to burn random errors into a copied chip, chisel off the top window insert a tiny gotcha picture then epoxy it all back.
The first rule of a pub lunch was to always secure anything you were working on before departure.
for those who think the nuclear detector is silly, i would like to remind you of this thermonuclear that is rather prominently placed in our solar system.
its called: the sun.
I actually just got a job assignment today from my job at my university’s Electronic Design Facility that involves CERN…
Hi guys, I checked the specs, one of the Nuclear Event Detector chips signals at radiation levels that are instantaneously fatal… in fact, 200 times larger than what causes death in a few days. If you ever saw that pin go low, you wouldn’t even have time to bend down… Your whole body would become inanimate biological jelly (jello) in an instant. Wet string? I received TV pictures on a wet string yagi antenna, 30 years ago. Used very salty water, worked well!
So basically a sensor that says ” Hey, an atomic bomb just went off right here” to allow whatever it is signalling to print the last thing it is ever going to send to STDIO ” Oh CRAP!”.