A circuit so stupid, Larkin could've come up with it

ge

t so

say?

f .

own

e

rk

ot of

as

if

of

ap in

to

I do not know if you intend to pursue electronics as a hobby or as your vocation. However, you are talking like you intend to just do whatever you feel like it as long as it is interesting. That is fine as a hobbyist, I suppose. If you intend to do real engineering work then you need to brace yourself for doing the mundane stuff for 50-75% of the time. The mundane stuff is what takes the good idea and hopefully turns it into money.

But even being able to be truly creative 25% of the time, and still get paid (why do I want to insert laid here?) is a pretty good way to make a living.

e

be

On a sunny day (Wed, 5 May 2010 17:29:00 -0500) it happened "Tim Williams" wrote in :

It is an interesting subject, there was a thread a while ago about calculating dividers. I also downloaded a MS windows program somebody here wrote , but it did not run very well in Linux wine (windows emulator) with all scroll bars, so you could never see the whole thing.

But I realised that is was too complicated for me, as I work this way (my neural net). Yesterday I needed to interface a MAX232 5V to a 3.3 V PIC. Now PIC to MAX is easy, as the 3.3 V is high enough. But backwards? Use a resistor divider. So what values? Well, I always think, and that is the clue, in *voltages*. So in this case 3.3V on the PIC input and 5 V from the MAX232, that gives 3.3 V over R2 and 1.7 V over R1.

5V -------- | R1 1.7 V over R1 |------------ 3.3 V R2 3.3 V over R2 | ///

Now voltage ration = resistor ratio. So 3.3 Ohm and 1.7 Ohm would work, but chip cannot do that

330 170 no, too low 3300 1700 OK, no high speeds needed, only 10 pF capacitive load, but 1700 Ohm? That makes 3k3 and 1k8 from the E series I have in the box, At least used some not so common values, keeps the stock balanced.

We are just a neural net, neural nets are not exact in the way digital logic or math aspires to be. I pissed a famous person in sci.math + sci.physics of by stating that 'math' is just a small subset of the neural net, is in fact a few dedicated neurons building a simulation. And then I am not even getting into the wild theories that our life is just a quantum manifestation of some cosmic whatever. Because that would mean we can solve problems with our brain *now* that we hope quantum computers will be able to do in the future. Not seeing that our brain dreamt up the idea of quantum computers in the first place. Good software, bad software, it is just like hardware. I am not sure there is a limit to what our brains can do though!

Yup. Inventing products, architectures, and circuits is the fun part. Getting all the details right, on pc boards and in boxes, is serious work. The parts lists, manuals, test procedures, firmware, VHDL, and ECOs are downright tedious. Best to delegate that to scutt bunnies whenever possible.

Something graphical along the lines of LabView could eventually replace a lot of procedural stuff like C. I know of some FADEC embedded code that is entered graphically, that a meta-compiler generates ADA from.

Wow, some day we may be able to actually draw schematics of logic, and have a magical piece of software convert it into VHDL for us.

John

dividers.

could

neural net).

Yup, calculating voltages first often simplifies tha math.

Sometimes it helps to arbitrarily make one resistor, or some combination of resistors, 1 ohm and then solve for some division behavior or whatever. Then normalize for a desired Thevenin or something else. That avoids ugly simultaneous equations.

math aspires to be.

We are a "neural net" made up of trillions of neurons, each of which has incredibly complex semi-intelligent adaptive behavior. The electronic "neural network" thing is absurdly naiive and, as far as I know, mostly useless.

I've met a few scientists who seriously proposed solving some complex imaging problems, with hard quantitative outputs, using neural nets. Lotta hand waving.

John

ogic or math aspires to be.

Back when fuzzy logic was the rage I heard a couple 'o fuzzy-philes gushing in the airport. "Fuzzy logic?" I asked.

Their heads snapped around, hopefully.

"Better than no logic at all I guess."

500mS befuddlement, then icy stares, morphing into beamed hatred. Conversation? Dead. Fuzzy logic gushing? Aborted.

Mission accomplished.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

No, he wants to insult me any way he can, including insulting my wife.

John

Speaking of the unemployable liar...

That was pretty low.

John, Stop with the dodgem. Show us a circuit SCHEMATIC that you claim works... so we can pick it apart.

** I didn't make your wife claim to be a BU coed... YOU did ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
      The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

That's right, STOP your car!!!! [1]

[1] Noun 1.dodgem / Dodgem - a small low-powered electrically powered vehicle driven on a special platform where there are many others to be dodged.

ote:

d

US ?

ng to

Like I said, no redeeming social value. krw could deny that until he was blue in the face (and probably will - he has no inhibitions about wasting bandwidth) but it is self-evidently true.

-- Bill Sloman,Nijmegen

I suppose we could have different definitions of "immediately."

John

Mmm? Somehow I doubt I have valuable input here, particularly seeing as these products have already been designed, built and sold.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

You're such a hypocrite, Slowman. A predictable hypocrite, but a hypocrite nonetheless.

?

Too predictable. As in way too predictable. As in insanely, tediously, stunningly, boringly predictable.

Or at least he used to be. Lately he's worse.

John

I suppose we could have different definitions of "obvious."

John

US ?

He's been taking lessons from dimbulb.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

good

of

the US ?

ening to

rite

krw claims that I'm predictable, but has yet to make a prediction, which pretty much defines his grasp of reality.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

good

of

the US ?

tening to

crite

As opposed to John Larkin, who posts enough irrational and unsupported nonsense to be tolerably unpredictable

John's ego seems to have been particularly fragile recently - he suddenly seems to have an even more desperate need than usual to be told that he is knowledgable and well-informed in every subject on which he chooses to post.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen