about electronics

And knock back anybody with a Ph.D.

Not particularly high level forums. The IEEE does publish higher-level stuff, but it does tend to be very specialised.

And there different levels of understanding even within that select group.

I get few of those, but it is my policy to not interview or hire PhDs. We fired the last one that we hired.

At the Sofar Ocean meetup, there were three major pitches and about 15 short ones, including me. One pattern that I see is that few startups know much about electronics and some openly beg for help.

You could go to meetups and meet people who need help. It's interesting.

Sofar looks real. They dump thousands of disposable floating bouys in the oceans and advise ships on the best courses to save time or fuel. They have a gorgeous facility in a pier with a beautiful frontage on the Bay.

The other thing I've noticed is that Raspberry Pi is not for kids any more. Sofar uses my fave cpu, the RP2040.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Edit: Very few people understand electronics as well as you.

A few years ago you had some posts with typical interview questions you used. I collected these and sent them to my now freshly minted EE child who will be starting work next month. So don't think that people aren't listening. If you have more pearls of wisdom to share, please do. Years ago Phil shared an article about how the front page of ceramic cap datasheets are a pack of lies, which was very revealing to me. Even now in the 4th quarter of my career I want to understand more about electronics.

I could if there were any around Sydney. Since I'm active in the NSW IEEE committee, I'd expect to hear about them, and get to put reports from such meeting in the quarterly newsletter (which I edit) if they existed. They don't seem to.

Sounds like a half-baked version of the Argo float project, which has been running for years (since 1999). One of my neighbours launches one from time to time as part of his job.

Whatever float your buoy.

I hope your kid understands electricity. Most ce/ee grads don't, and AI may make them into grocery store clerks.

Ceramic caps are awful. Buy a 22uF 10v cap and you might get 3 uF at

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I did a quick google search and found lots of maker spaces around Sydney.

AI Overview Sydney has a vibrant makerspace scene offering access to 3D printing, laser cutting, and workshops, ranging from public, free community spots like the Ideas Lab at Darling Square Library to membership-based community hubs like Taylor Street Creative Space in Annandale and Robots & Dinosaurs in Meadowbank. Here are top makerspaces in Sydney, Australia: Community & Membership Spaces

Taylor Street Creative Space (Annandale): A community-run space offering memberships, 3D printing, laser cutting, sewing, and workshops. Robots & Dinosaurs (Meadowbank): A well-equipped community hackerspace for electronics, coding, and fabrication. MakerSpace & Co (Marrickville): Offers 24/7 access to studio tenants and workshop facilities 6 days a week.

Public Libraries & Free Spaces

Ideas Lab Makerspace (Darling Square Library, Haymarket): Free public space featuring 3D printers, laser cutters, and regular workshops. The Creation Space (Mosman Library): A community space focused on creativity and technology.

They apparently have customers.

Humor. Good.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Last month we were discussing books. I remember reading a book about Seymour Cray, "The Supermen". In that book there was one behavior described that I didn't like. There were stories where if you didn't understand what was causing a problem (the example was a signal reflection, I'm guessing an impedance mismatch somewhere in the circuit) he would not educate the hapless engineer or executive what the root cause was, but instead flip the bozo bit on them and slowly drive them out of the company.

But somehow electronics are everywhere, anyway!

Training in critical thinking does make it difficult to generate uncritical flattery.

We've been through this. They seem to cater for hobbyists, rather than people trying to commercialise technically interesting ideas.

It still looks like a rip-off. We've known about surface currents since we've had boats. They move around a bit in an unpredictable way.

The Argo floats are designed to collect information on the deep return currents which are otherwise invisible. That program has been running for about twenty years so far, so we ought to know at least something about the return currents. In effect the Sofar floats sample the surface currents in detail - weather rather than climate - and offers short term forecasts, which may be useful in the short term but don't help you understand the system as a whole.

If you can't inform us you can amuse us.

But fewer folks are involved in design. Look at how many prebuilt "modules" are folded into designs instead of designed from scratch. In the 70's, I'd start with an idea and a blank sheet of paper. When was the last time you designed a power supply from scratch? A counter?

Trend has been in place for a very long time as "integration" reaches higher and higher levels. Folks don't even bother to put components on boards; easier to layer prebuilt boards and components -- in the name of "economy" (until, of course, you lose the ability to do those things!)

The same is true in software; folks just throw big chunks of software together HOPING they understand how they work and their limitations -- because actually understanding would "cost" too much in time and personnel. Can you even FIND main()?

Probably not. AI is essentially mindless plagiarism. It gets stuff right about 90% of the time, rather like junior engineers, but needs to be backed up by people with deeper understanding

Ceramic caps can be voltage dependent - but it does depend a lot on the actual ceramic. Reading the data sheet carefully can be informative. NPO ceramics are about as good as it gets. Ceramics with higher dielectric constants offer more - but less predictable - capacitance.

The online stuff is a major disappointment. I don't know what this Stack Exchange thing is, but quite a few of their circuits that show up in searches are on the horrendous side. And from what I've seen, Reddit, another one I don't visit, is a mixed bag of some good and some bad. It can be a good starting point for further exploration. Whoever the audience is, they most certainly don't want an in-depth explanation of anything, or maybe don't know what in-depth means.

What technology is the Sofar buoy using for gyroscopic orientation? It doesn't look all that cutting edge, and the website is useless.

She (it probably was a she) was a horrible circuit designer and screamed at people in meetings. I didn't hire them.

You'll never know. You don't want to know.

That's their point. The Sofar bouys report currents and winds and sea states to finer resolution than satellites or whatever. They can tell a ship, in real time, that if they alter their course a few degrees now, they will save 20 tons of fuel.

At the startup meets, most of the projects are obviously silly. A few aren't. But everyone wants help with electronics. It's kind of fun.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's rare for a ceramic cap data sheet to even mention the cap fallout with voltage, much less quantify it.

NPOs are great, but only come in small values.

Classes, and categories like Z5U, are very crude. One has to test caps when it matters, and then hope one can buy consistent parts.

We do buy big reels of custom-mixed caps with defined behaviors and tempcos. I had Capax make us 5000 pieces of 3.3 pF 0805's, with -4700 ppm/degC tempco. They came out close. We have a lifetime supply.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

BIG difference between measuring ocean state at the surface and the more extensive scientific measurements made mostly at depth, like 1000-3000m deep (Wiki). The operating depth alone precludes making measurements in many coastal areas that are nowhere near that depth. To call it half-baked misses the point.

NOAA has the Global Drifter Program that does the same thing:

Seems the data is already there to plan optimum shipping routes.

Now they're going the autonomous robot route, looks good:

"NOAA has been expanding the use of uncrewed aircraft and marine systems to collect and use high-accuracy and time-sensitive data across its mission. These systems are a force multiplier for NOAA — supplementing NOAA’s traditional methods of data collection often at lower cost, increased safety and reduced risk, especially in remote or extreme environments. A diverse array of uncrewed systems are already used in seabed mapping, marine mammal and fishery stock assessments, emergency response, including tornado damage assessments, and at-sea observations that improve forecasting of extreme events, such as hurricanes, harmful algal blooms and hypoxia."

When the AMOC collapses, which won't be the first time, the straight-line winds from the equator to the poles will make the oceans worldwide unnavigable, with mean wave heights of 30 meters, lots of shore damage, and just general reconfiguration of everything mankind has ever known about the oceans. There is plenty of geological evidence of just how bad it was: Eemian Interglacial. "house-sized" boulders deposited on the beach.

And there are dozens of identical Chinese products, all copies of some original design.

I still design on paper, D-size vellum.

I did both recently, including a little high votage supply. Autotransformer flyback driving a Cockcroft–Walton multiplier thingie with the voltage controlled by one pin from the RP2040 CPU.

It's fundamental that if someone can slap some boards together, then someone else can too. So the selling point becomes price, a race to the bottom. No thanks.

I'm doing a board layout myself now. It's tricky enough that it's easier to do than to explain all the constraints to someone else. I don't even appreciate all the issues until I do it. I can change the schematic interactively with the layout.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's what I just said.

Crude they may be, but you didn't even mention that they existed.

That implies more technical expertise than you exhibited above. Did one of your customers spell out the details, or that pesky Ph.D. that you fired?

Not a prediction that you are in any position to make. I'd quite like to learn if there was anything like that going on locally, but I've been hanging around IEEE stuff here since about 2012, and have never got a whiff of anything like that,

If they do it in the next week. As I put it below, it's looking at weather rather than climate.

|-----------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] Offers 24/7 access to studio | |tenants and workshop facilities 6 days a week."| |-----------------------------------------------|

Wow! I live in a time zone where here are 7 days a week. (S.