Grundig Satellit 300 whinge

Think so? Looks like hand-taped artwork on mylar to me. Even in the '60s, people were using pre-cut pads and tape. Remember Bishop Graphics?

I still draw schematics on vellum, but I use a pencil.

John

The worlds we perceive are clearly different - I suspect that imperfections in perception have more to do with the differences we report than any difference in objective reality (whatever that may be).

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ... Presumably

Design reviews don't go on for ever - though sometimes it feels that way - and some details are inevitably glossed over, particularly the ones that might upset the boss. And John seems to be easily upset - he certainly complains about being insulted surprisingly often.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I'm 69. I can remember back to when we did it that way. Computer-aided design offers the potential to eliminate a lot of human error - not all of it by any means, but at least the printed circuit layout is more likely to be consistent with the circuit diagram, and a TIP29A is less likely to metamorphose in to a TIP29 on it's way from the circuit diagram to the parts list (which didn't happen to me, but to an even better engineer - I was just the guy who found out that the drawing office had screwed up his design).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But you are the boss - as you persistently remind us - so you haven't got time to do it all.

When I was a senior engineer, acting as the technical lead on a project, I didn't get time to check a lot of the detail work, let alone do it - though I did manage to snag some of the really tricky bits.

You may be in a position to goof off from your system responisibilities to do some detailed design, but you can't be doing all of it.

I didn't get to do that when I was being paid a competitive salary - after the move to the Netherlands I found myself in jobs where I was used less intensively, and could get to lay out entire boards.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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We use the Optimum Procrastination Management methodology.

John

Is that similar to "the earliest date you can't prove it won't be finished by" estimation method?

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"No work is done before its time."

Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow, because in the meantime it may become unnecessary.

Sylvia.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

The converse is also true.

--

John Devereux

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Of course not. Other people do PCB layouts, FPGA design, embedded code, mechanical design, BOMs, and entire product designs. But that doesn't stop me from designing products too. I am pretty much the architecture designer for everything (with a lot of debate) and I write most of the manuals. I think I personally designed about 11 boards this year, so far. One more to go, likely, a VME LVDT/synchro simulator.

I don't run the business; I delegate that.

My company exists to allow me to design electronics.

John

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I write the manual before we design the electronics. It becomes the requirements document; every product needs a manual, so why not do it first? It helps enormously to ensure that the product is usable, and explainable, before it's designed. I also have my prime customers review the manual before we design.

I wrote the manuals, drew the schematics, and participated in the layout of all 11. Other guys did a few more. I did about 200 board designs one year when I was younger, but they were smaller, less complex gadgets than the stuff we do now.

Their function is to finance my design activity and to present me with interesting problems. Lately, they are doing pretty well at it.

John

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Then you aren't pushing the technology very hard. If you know exactly what the instrument can do before you design it - to the point of writing the manual - it can't be all that difficult or interesting.

The way the instrument goes together - and how it does what's required

- should be more interesting problems. I was recently re-reading some of my old weekly reports from the late 1980's (which - strictly speaking - I should never have taken away with me) and I was surprised by the way my understanding of the equipment I was specifying changed (and improved) as I was writing the specification. I'd started out with a pretty clear (and essentially correct)idea of what the equipment had to do, and how it could do it, but there was a lot of devil in the details, and there were some fairly dramatic changes as - for instance - it became clear that I could reliably get my hands on faster, bigger ECL static RAM than I'd known about when I made the original proposal.

My memories of that period feel pretty detailed, but it was a complicated machine and the story that I recalled was clearly less complicated than the process I'd been sketching out for my bosses from week to week.

Those weekly reports got circulated to the people I was supervising - as they came on board - as well as the bosses. I circulated it originally to keep myself honest about what I was writing about them, but it turned into a useful team-building mechanism; in the end I had to put a head-line section at the start that was short enough for everybody to read before they went on to check what I'd written about them.

At the end it was taking half a day every week to write the damned report, and I was covering software and mechanical hardware (where I didn't have any direct responsiblity, though I had to know what was going on) as well as the electronics.

I'm sure it does, but if the designs were pushing the envelope half as hard as you claim it wouldn't be all that practical.

The problems can't be all that interesting if you can chew through eleven of them in one year.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Look at my products. Do many of them look trivial to you?

When would you figure out what you're trying to do?

My manuals include specifications.

Why not? If you don't know how to take calculated risks, you shouldn't be doing it.

Why would anyone spend months designing one PC board, even if it's interesting?

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/T940_first_board.jpg

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/First_CO2_SPM.JPG

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/TEM2_CTRL.jpg

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/TEM2_FPGA.jpg

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/TEM2_Power.JPG

John

I once asked my boss why we were putting up with the time wasters higher management was telling us to do, rather than getting the real work done. His answer was that it was better to be fired in six months for not getting the job done than today for not doing what the big boss wanted. In six months there is a good chance someone else will be in even more (schedule) trouble.

[...]

Nice.

The last one made me smile - that's the "just get the job done" solution there.

--

John Devereux

Those little LTM8023 bricks are very handy. Price is OK, and they are reliable and very clean. They're good for 2 amps each, and parallel easily. The U2 site was just in case we needed more FPGA core current, which we don't.

We did make our own Cuk for -12, and bought the big ugly 24-to-12 isolator block.

Like the current shunts?

John

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Those that I've looked at didn't look trivial, but they didn't look innovative either - more filling a gap in the market than creating a new market.

When you have a tolerably precise idea of what you can offer for a practicable price.

My specifications included a lot of discussion of what we needed to do and quite a few suggestions of how we might do it. If the guy who did the detailed design of the digital electronics had paid much attention to the suggestions, the maximum sampling rate might have been twice as fast, but he - correctly - decided that the project would never make it into production, and cut a few corners. It wasn't exactly a self- fulfilling prophecy, but it didn't help. Clever engineers can be a mixed blessing.

The risks that you are taking don't appear to be all that nerve- wracking.

Because a complicated board can take that long.

I reworked the electron beam tester timing circuits for pulse generator to drive a an electron-spin resonance machine - the coarse timing was to have been based on a 500MHz clock driving ECLinPS synchronous counters, and the fine timing on on the MC100E196 (which hadn't been available when we were building the electron-beam tester, and - with it's 20psec quantisation - it wouldn't - in any event - have satisifed my pointy-headed boss's demand for 10psec time resolution which drove us much further into new technology than was sensible, to the point where the project proposal that I'd put in based on GigaBit Logics GaAs parts had been written tongue-in-cheek to demonstrate that the 10psec specification was a "bridge too far").

Since the time delays generated by the MC100E196 are painfully temperature dependent, the board was to include hardware for converting these time delays into mark-to-space ratios, and eventually low-pass filtered analog voltages, which could be digitised to monitor the actual delays - all 128 of them - in a millisecond.

By then I could no longer buy ECL static RAM, so the programmed pulse widths were to be stored in CMOS static RAM and clocked out - four at time - to be translated to ECL levels and serialised.

It was a complicated board, and took several months to design. Latching the data to program the MC100E196 to dealy the pulse edges happened after the latching of the data to program the synchronous counters to generate the pulse edges, so it had to be doubled buffered. I recall that Jim Thompson ran into the same problem with one of his designs at the same time and asked for help here - which I was able to provide, but Google's advanced groups search can't find it, so it may just be a pleasing delusion.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Which I do before I design it, not after.

Why would I do that? I design things with a high probability that they will do what I intend. And the great majority do, without breadboards, on the first spin of the deliverable PCB. Engineering consists of building things that have a low probability of failing. Bridges, airplanes, skyscrapers, laser controllers.

a...

You can do 10 ps delay generation, or time-interval measurement, with

10KH ecl and an FPGA. Or even all FPGA, but the TCs will need compensation.

That sounds like a bummer, when you spend so long working on a board that the parts become obsolete before you get it to work.

Sounds like a slow, expensive failure. We prefer to not do that.

John

The secret of success in management is to be into the next job, preferably with another company, before your mistakes get attributed to you ;-)

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)