Semi OT: engineering education

Yep. I exploded various concoctions in the basement of our house ;-)

At around age 16 my father provided me an account at the local electronic parts wholesaler and I was off to tinker land.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Some of what my peers got up to would surely land them in front of the spooks today. Then it was just 'boys will be boys.'

I was designing kits by then, after being frustrated by the overbasicness and missed opportunities of the kits I saw others use.

I got my only kit at a very young age, and spent ages trying to work out where the voltages changed in the circuit.

NT

The most difficult project that Melbourne University set its Computer Science students in my year (1980) was to write software (in assembly) for an Interdata 7/16 controlling a track like that, which had been constructed over previous years by postgrads.

The HO trains received a 200KHz carrier over the power line which was frequency modulated with an RS-232 data stream. One bit of direction, three of speed, three to address one of eight trains, and one parity bit. It was quite a fair achievement to have got that decoder and controller into an HO scale locomotive at the time.

Each of 20-ish track sections had a current sensor that could be set to interrupt once on every increase (i.e. *constantly*, given the quality of the contacts) or once and latch until reset.

You needed to ensure you didn't lose a single interrupt to safely use the latching mode.

On the final day for the project when everyone had been competing for time to test their software, we came in to find that someone had stolen the only working loco. The buggers! Lucky I had my program working already - others had to test their logic by dragging a key along the tracks to simulate the current draw.

Ahh, the days when a CS degree meant more than just poking at a graphical IDE with no idea what was underneath it...

I was seven years old when my father provided a bit of 3-core flex, a screwdriver, power plug and a light socket, and I sat on the step in the breakfast room muttering about how hard it was to get all the strands to sit nicely under the screws.

Dad knew that I wouldn't plug it in (240V!) until both the cases' covers were on, and I wouldn't electrocute myself. The worst was I could blow a fuse - but I didn't, I got it to work. Learnt to wrap the twisted wire clockwise to avoid the screw head from unwinding it - no washer on those old Bakelite fittings.

Mum was extremely nervous, but tried not to let me see that.

r s

What's more amazing is that some of them are eventually made to work at all .

That can work, if you know what the electronics can reasonably be expected to do, and the consultants know enough about the area to produce something respectable.

The last job I had - with Haffmans BV in Venlo - I got because they wanted a conductivity sensor for a fake beer-bottle to go through a beer-brewery's bottle washing machine (which is typically huge, and washes every beer-bot tle - most of them recycled - just before the beer goes into it).

Not only are regular electronic engineers typically clueless about measurin g the conductivity of aqueous solutions, but the conductivity of the variou s wash-liquors involved varied over a 1000:1 range. The washing starts with 2% NaOH solution at 85C which has a conductivity of 300 milliSiemens/cm, a nd finishes with tap water whcih has a conductivity of 300 microSiemens/cm.

I've got a Ph.D. in Chemistry, but still had to spend an afternoon in the l ocal university library to get my head around solution conductivity and the Warb urg impedance presented by a conductivity cell

The weird thing about that was that the most useful book I found had been e dited by a guy I'd known when I was post-doc in chemistry at Southampton in 1971-72 - he'd been working for Fleischmann (of Fleischmann and Pons - the cold fusion kings) at the time.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I like the German HO setup with the programmed cars.

There's even crime scenes!

But your right soething like N scale is smaller to work with at home.

Cheers

You bet! We made pipe bombs and contact explosives. DHS would have been all over us.

I was doing Heath kits, too. The first was a VTVM and when I was about 14, I built an SB-301 Ham Receiver.

Most of my family were engineers (one brother was a veterinarian) so inquisitiveness was encouraged.

But it makes it difficult to retire. Lately I've hinted ever so slightly that I want to gradually retire and that evoked unhappiness at clients. It would be nice if some of the smaller ones find at least one guy who can do run-of-the-mills analog so I can limit myself to the nastier stuff.

Oh yeah. Or they can only think in system blocks where they buy everything from some expensive scientific equipment company. Where a simple high speed diff amp that most of us here would whip up in a couple of hours and with $20 in materials costs $1k.

That is the most value they provide. Sometimes it's that casual discussion over lunch where consultants go "We had something like that happen at a client in a very different field and ...".

They sure are.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Either there's a real lack of younger EEs or they're somewhere other than here. But at least the maker culture is possibly encouraging.

NT

My sense of it is that scientists do engineering, engineers write software, and programmers work the help desk.

When I was a kid growing up, there was a yearly show in my town of Stamford CT. with O scale trains. We always looked forward to going. It's still going 40 years later. The layout is 45' x 145'

LAYOUT STATISTICS

Trackage: Over 6000 ft RR Engines and Rolling Stock: 1,700 and growing RR Passenger Stations: 13 Commercial and Residential Buildings: 124 RR Track Switches: 244 RR Yards: 11 Vehicles: 366

As for analog guys there just aren't many young ones out there.

Yes, it is indeed. I sure hope that many of the maker folks will move beyond just plugging modules together and writing Arduino sketches. In order to be really good in analog one has to dive down to transistor-level. There is no other way.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

So many seem to believe the myth that analog is disappearing

Yup. In fairness a lot of us started with kits & repairing things. A few of us kids moved on, most never did.

NT

Somewhere above a GHz it comes back even for the digital and communictions guys. "The logic analyzer says everything going out is correct but sometimes ..."

Or EMC. I got another case of that tossed over my fence, will be the job for today.

That is one of the problems. Nowadays kids do not repair anymore but toss. So far the topper was a kid who said the bike is broken and he can't ride it. "What, did you bust the frame after a jump or something?" ... "No, the front tire is flat".

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Everything is analogue ultimately. Logic is just packaged so their users can ignore the analogue details for the most part. The world doesn't seem to have noticed.

NT

[snip].

Absolutely! When ON Semi decided to change foundries for their

74HCxxx product line, who did they contract with to adjust the designs to the new process? A digital engineer? No! They hired me, a VERY Analog guy, to do all the redesign ;-) [snip] ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

But what happens after we all kick the bucket?

Doing EMC tests right now. That stuff always lands on my side of the fence. At least now the analyzer gear is small and thus no more back pain. The whole analyzer is the size of three cigarette packs.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The Chinese take over some more. It seems inevitable. The more the first world takes its eye off the ball, the more that happens. And a lot of eyes are off the ball these days.

NT

Photon counting receivers and femtoamp (or is it attoamp) amplifiers?