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- We were recently reviewing our stats and our hourlong(ish) program has been downloaded almost 500,000 times. What does that mean in totals?
- 36.1 million amp-hour-minutes
- 600,000 amp-hour-hours
- 25070 amp-hour-days
- 68.7 amp-hour-years
- That’s a lot of listening! Thanks to all of you! And if reading is of more interest than listening, we now have select transcripts available.
- Chris has a new project that hopefully will be helpful to people looking to progress in their electronics learning journey. It’s called Contextual Electronics.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEbu3h5FBZI[/tube] - Dave has been working on Fundamental Fridays videos that are the talk of the town! Lots of great information to digest!
- Dave got a new Samson microphone that has some heft. He’ll be using it while talking about whatever is under his microscope.
- What is the cheapest you can deck out your lab with decent test equipment?
- Dave got a great deal on a Keithley 2015, which he currently reviewed
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXMKgxx_Oc[/tube] - Heathkit might be coming back…again? They have (had?) a survey on their site but no indication they’ll be coming back. There was an EDN article about it and one of the commenters made a great point that it used to be cheaper to build your own equipment. Not the case these days!
- Former guests of The Amp Hour, Zach “Hoeken” Smith and Ian of Dangerous Prototypes both have a desktop pick and place. We got an email from the manufacturer Neodentech (update: there is now NeoDen USA for easier interactions for people in the States) that they are now exporting them, though the website looks hard to navigate.
- Sometimes it’s easier just to get a foot-controlled solderpaste dispenser that is a syringe.
- Chris uploaded some videos since he returned from Dayton. One from Hamvention walking around and talking to friends and vendors. Also one video where he walks around marveling at the planes inside the US Air Force Museum
- Former guest Greg Charvat (also featured in the hamvention video above) took the R390A radio he got at the swap meet and turned it from just a receiver to a transceiver using a homebuilt transmitter
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kAfVfgEm74[/tube] - Boldport (previously mentioned for the “artistic PCB software”) made a board in the spirit of Bob Pease, with the diagram drawn into the silkscreen.
- Chris got a part wrong, it wasn’t an amplifier, it was a voltage to frequency converter, the LM331 (designed by Pease)
- Chris maintains this isn’t needed as much these days because you can either pass signals over a digital isolator (0ut of an A/D converter) or you can put a micro on the other side of an isolation barrier (like a transformer). Obviously this isn’t the only application, jeez Chris.
- Altera has an app note about doing layout for 100 Gbps transmission of data(!). In reality, this is 4 parallel 28 Gbps transceivers, but still! Crazy!
- There are TONS of signal integrity considerations when moving up to those data speeds. Listen to the show with expert Howard Johnson for more about this topic.
- Dave has had to troubleshoot and tweak these parts before, trying to optimize the bit error rate.
- Sometimes you can isolate problems by switching between a hot air pencil and cooler spray. In a pinch, you can turn over a can of compressed air and use whatever drips out.
- 6.4 EAGLE has integration with LTSpice, according to the release notes from January 2013. Has anyone tried this functionality?
- Looking for a new podcast? Chris really likes Innovation Hub. They had a great show about robots recently.
If you like the show, please consider giving us a review on iTunes! This helps us show up in their index. Thanks!
Thank you to Steven Groves for the picture of the 75-in-1 kit!
Sorry, I don’t do iTunes. I am an occasional listener to the Amp-Hour.
There was some discussion about Chris’s new wep page. While I agree that you don’t learn much from building stuff that works, it is my feeling that troubleshooting stuff it very difficult for a beginner. I learn best by starting with something that works and then changing it to see what happens. Might I suggest this approach?
Yes, I like this idea better. I agree about the troubleshooting too. That will be a part of the course, at least the parts of troubleshooting that can be taught.
I talked to a friend who was in a class once where he said 60% of the projects didn’t work by the end. While you should encourage people to strive to succeed (and struggle in the process), I don’t think you should set people up for failure either.
“I hope your project fails!”…
One idea: provide a detailed list of footprints, some with swapped pins 😉
That’s just evil. Easily one of the hardest things to find in a broken board.
If your course covers layout and the pitfalls, the idea was that the students should intercept the bad ones before sending out their gerbers.
Swapped pins happens quite easily. Just take KiCad and use the ‘standard’ N-MOSFET schematic symbol and combine that with a SOT-23 footprint. Chances are high that the pin-mapping will be off.
Completely agree! But as your example shows, this kind of swap can happen naturally. Rigging it so it’s guaranteed to happen may not be necessary.
I listened during my road trip from NJ to NC… A couple of comments:
You guys were joking about a ham radio license being an “attractive” quality. Did you know that Dilbert did a cartoon on this? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-19/
Regarding the hovering test equipment… …some of Tek’s bench scopes, like the MDO4000 series, have a standard VESA mount feature on the back. This allows you to mount the scope on an articulating support arm typically used for monitors and TVs. Using this, you can lift the scope up and out of the way when you’re not using it, and pull it down when you need it. It also keeps people from wandering off with your scope!
…and, thanks for the mention of my YouTube channel!
You are spot on when you say that sometimes you might want to figure out what motivated the manager to come give the engineers shit. I thought that the path to being super engineer is to be the guy in charge. I did that for 15 years before I figured out that the more “in charge” you are, the less you actually work on stuff.
I don’t know how many times I got stuck in the middle between Engineers and the CIO. I once had to have a talk with an engineer because the CIO didn’t like the manner in which the engineer walked to get stuff off the printer.
“He just saunters over like he doesn’t have a care in the world.”
“Do I really have to talk to him about how he walks?”
“Yes, tell him he should walk like he has purpose.”
“… don’t saunter?”
“Yes.”
I got fed up and finally got out of management, now I’m an engineer.
A recent request that I was given by my boss:
“When assigning an IP address to devices in the plant, I want them done low to high from left to right.”
“Left to right? What does that mean?”
“When standing in front of the plant and looking at it. An IP address of x.x.x.1 will be on a device on the left side of the plant.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“You realize the plant is a 3 dimensional space right? What if there is a device above x.x.x.1 or what if it’s on the left side of the plant and it’s 100 feet behind it? Are we going to assign a number based on it’s altitude and distance?”
“Hmm… I’ll get back to you on that.”
What is the channel you mentioned? Analogish? I can’t find it… Any link?
Maybe you’re thinking of my youtube channel that Chris mentioned. Yes, mostly analog, geared mainly (but not entirely) towards beginners/hobbyists:
http://www.youtube.com/w2aew
Alan