Golden Rules of Troubleshooting

Reminds me of that fellow, Ainit da Troot

Ok, I promise not to make any more promises.

- If I did everything I promised to do, I'd never get anything done.

- Everyone lies, but that's ok, because nobody listens.

- Do unto others. Then run.

- Troubleshooting: Find the person giving you trouble and shoot them.

- Most embarrassing moment: When the Chinese clone works better than the original.

- Election time: Promise the voters anything, and then do whatever the opposition promised to do. It happens every 4 years.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

[stuff cut]

Anybody have good stories of this?

No. I'm taking the 5th ammendment. What you don't know, won't hurt me.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Ha.

Did the unnamed parties steal back some of the enhancements?

Of course, with my help. But when they wanted some of the money they paid me back, I diplomatically declined. Business ethics in many parts of the planet are very different from the US. [Q] What's the difference between a bribe and a commission? [A] A bribe is paid in advance. A commission after. Otherwise, they're the same.

I know of several other cloned products were are better than the original, but I'm not talking and not worried. A fair chunk of my income comes from what I euphemistically call "design reviews"[1].

There are also companies that can't even copy a product and get it right. One favorite is a company that fired its outsourced designers, only to find that the documentation they had supplied with the product was fatally inaccurate. The company then had to reverse engineer their own product. The resulting clone was dead on arrival. I was hired to fix the problem without changing anything. Right. I traced the problem to whomever measured the parts misreading the range setting on the LRC meter. All the values were off by a factor of 10 because someone had removed the range knob, and replaced it rotated by one detent. It was obviously not an accident. After that was fixed, I had to deal with an "improved" PCB that closely matched the schematic, but not quite. The highlight of the project was when one employee, with a very guilty conscience, offered me a bribe to not blame him for any of the problems. I didn't take the money because I thought it might be a trap. It wasn't.

[1] The difficult part is keeping a straight face. I once worked on a BlueGoof wireless speaker system, where the designers had placed the BT chip dead center in the middle of the PCB, located the chip antenna nearby, and put a shield over both. Range was suppose to be about 30 meters minimum, but was only about 0.5 meters. I couldn't believe it, but there it was. It was amazingly difficult for me to NOT burst out laughing during my initial fee negotiations and artificially protracted circuit analysis. I found plenty of other problems and mistakes, so they got their money's worth.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558