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Welcome, Dr Kent Lundberg!
- Kent has been a lecturer at MIT and now teaches at Olin College.
- He also keeps a great blog called “Reading Jim Williams”. Kent personally knew Jim through Jim Roberge
- Kent also has a bibliography of all of Jim’s publications, which were very numerous.
- As fans of JW’s will know, some of his app notes were epic. AN47 clocked in at 130 pages.
- Kent has had one student in particular he remembers and has seen all over the place, including the cover of Wired: Limor Fried (AKA Ladyada) of Adafruit Industries.
- In his control systems classes, he doesn’t use network analyzers but uses Dynamic Signal Analyzers like the HP3562A.
- Dave says “Bow-duh”, Chris and Kent say “Bow-dee”, Bode’s family (but not him), say “Bow-dah”. Dave has been to Bodie, California.
- Kent is a fan of the Severed Heads, a long time Aussie band that did a lot of experimentations with synths.
- Kent also has a bunch of synths of his own, including Moog and Dave Smith synths.
- When he’s not teaching, Kent consults for industry for analog. His company is called Keeling Flight Hardware, Ltd. “Flight Hardware” also refers to hardware that is ready off the shelf.
- He also works at Lincoln Labs and has worked indirectly with Dr. Greg Charvat, who was a guest on show 115.
- When he’s not teaching or consulting, he also collects and repairs scopes, thanks to JW’s inspiration:
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6ODi7qSpYg[/tube] - Kent has a 511, a 556 and a 7104. Great hardware! He also has one digital scope from the older era: 7854
- Kent was the historian and editor for the IEEE Control Systems magazine and did a feature about analog computing.
- Beyond all this, he’s also an avid book collector and has hard-to-find books from the Rad Lab and the Manhattan Project (the ones that are allowed to be collected).
- He’s now developing a new class along with students to teach EE Prototyping. We can’t wait to see how that turns out!
Thanks again to Dr Kent Lundberg for being on the show! Find him on Twitter at @DoctorAnalog or at the variety of sites linked above.
I was never into Severed Heads but I did get hooked on a late 90’s remix of Dead Eyes Opened.
Also, regarding analog integration, I feel a little the same about digital as well: Logic->SoC->”just buy this module and whack it on some fibreglass with some connectors”.
And contextual learning FTW!. “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
Just getting around to listen to this one – good show. Kent attended one of my “Lunch and Learn” sessions at Lincoln Labs – I believe it was on advanced Radar characterization.
I agree regarding the 7104 – great scope. One of only 2 or 3 that featured the micro-channel plate CRT which gave incredibly fast visual writing rate. I had a couple of those in my lab at my first job. We also had a few of the 7854s too. Somewhere in a box I have a certificate from Tektronix that stated that I completed the class that they offered to teach customers how to use it!