signal indicator

...and the following week he came back and said, "Could you do it for

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However, you can't buy the fitness that a full day of mountain biking brings. Like I did on Friday. You just can't get that at a gym. I have seen enough people who worked into the 70's, never had time for this sports stuff and then paid a heavy price via a failing body. Assisted living many years earlier than usual. This doesn't only apply to members of the "0.1-ton class". I know people who are wiry and thin yet I can see the effects of not doing any long endurance activities. The folks that start huffing after a couple of briskly walked miles with hills in there.

The other thing is volunteer work, in my case lay caregiving for our church and, privately, nursing home visits. That kind of activity only works with strict and pretty full schedules which would interfere with consulting.

Also, bought beer isn't as good as homebrew almost no matter how expensive. Not even close. So now I only take on some hardcore work, enticing clients to hire their own engineers of finding another consultant and then jumping in when they become stuck. Keeps the brain cells going, creates income and retains a dose of EE fun for me.

Oh, we could probably push that another buck or so but there comes a point where the amortization of the NRE no longer happens.

Solid-state diodes were invented before tubes!

We compute "direct cost" of a product: parts cost + unburnened assembly and test labor cost. Selling price has to be at least 3x, preferably 6x to the occasional 10x. That works in our business.

There are businesses that charge 50x.

For low volume stuff, the development and support costs are serious.

We live in a beautiful place with hills and trails and views, so why are people paying to sweat on boring treadmills in grim storefront gyms?

I have

Yes. Find some kids to do the grunt work.

Indeed. I cannot exercise just for the sake of exercising. I played racquet ball and hiked many trails in Belize. I got the exercise but with great entertainment.

That is what I'll never understand. Though you do need the time to just take off. I do that on at least one weekday, taking the road bike or the mountain bike and I am gone all day. In the evening I come back drenched in sweat no matter what the temperature is, tired and totally happy.

Absolutamente :-)

Main objective though is that they learn the ropes over time so that they can do the whole enchilada. We don't live forever,

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Citation, please.

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But the opamp, the opamp. When I was young, around 20, I never used opamps. It was all discretes. Tubes for the big stuff.

Sound like good margins. For us guys it's ok as long as it pays the tab at Zeitgeist and similar places.

That is why there is (was?) a Ferrari dealership in the Bay Area.

True. I don't get involved in too much low volume stuff. In the beginning it may be but then it usually takes off. So far the topper is a design that runs off the assembly line unchanged since 1994. At one point this client asked me to indentify all resistors than could be changed to 10% and to untrimmed (typically meaning 30%). Cost them 1/4h of my time and they made that back probably within the month.

I made my own little opamps, about a square inch of PCB with wires sticking out one side, a SIP basically. Started with a pair of brand-new GE NPN plastic transistors. By selecting one resistor, I could trim them to 1 uV/degC.

Alas, Z is a long walk from our new place. But there is a great dive bar 2 blocks away.

Wow, untrimmed resistors. What do they cost in the millions?

We do an ultralow noise digital laser controller with a BOM cost of $37 including the board and connectors, excluding the diode laser and the optomechanics. It replaces a $3500 purchased laser. It's way more fun doing stuff for cheap like that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Okay that's the premium performance solution. He just wants to know if a signal is there, so he's detecting a change is DC quiescent to something else, anything else.

Rainy season September-May. "The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle."

My wife's '19 Mustang convertible has a 10-speed automatic with paddle shifters on the steering wheel. Right thumb shifts up, left thumb shifts down. I wouldn't want it in a snowstorm, either. AAMOF, it just gets in the way anytime. Autos are so good anymore that it doesn't matter.

She had a '14 Mustang before this one that had the Takata issue. When we traded it last year, the passenger side airbag cartridge still hadn't been replaced.

You do realise the more complex options offered won't get every first pulse either.

NT

If I have an unused differential PECL output, I could do this:

Maybe I'll stick to RF-style diode detection. Less tricky.

Looks like I might have an unused CML differential output from a logic fanout chip. Here's a detector that drives a single schottky diode differentially.

That sweep is from 0 to 5 GHz.

I'm using the CML gate outputs unterminated, which I think puts -16 mA alternately into its internal 50 ohm resistors, 800 mV p-p at each pin.