People are always barging into my office and shouting numbers without a heads-up context, wanting decisions they should make themselves. And the phone rings and emails arrive all day. A boy can barely think. It's nice to come in on Saturday and be alone and Dremel and solder and scope things.
Plus, Mo broke her knee (cracked the patella, painful but not too serious) so a zillion ladies are coming over to knit and make lady noises. Good time to be out of the house.
We have a rush job, thing gotta work first time, and my part is the clocked hysteretic ("hysterical") switchmode low noise super wideband constant current source. Figured I'd breadboard it to make sure; the mosfet gate driver and the current sense amp both have some risk.
Another BB on the gold-plated FR4. It's only about halfway built, but I've got the basic power stuff switching. It's wildly insane without the two mosfet gate resistors.
The rectangle on the right is a cool Coilcraft 8 GHz power inductor, sort of a linear version of the Piconics things. The current sense resistor, between the big inductors, will have a small DC voltage and a huge AC common mode, so I might bring it down with a balun.
The self-stripping Beldsol wire is great. My iron temp is lower than ideal, so x-acto scraping the wire just a bit before soldering makes the insulation melt away a lot faster. The #30 wire cuts nicely with the x-acto, too.