Art of Electronics 3rd edition? (probably the billionth time this has been asked here)

No, one of the scopes is blue, another green, then one which is blueish-greenish :-)

Makes me wonder why they never built a scope CRT that glows fire engine red, or some other color.

And when you stop triggering, the *trace*goes*away* !!!

Bad writing rate, mostly.

I liked the P7 radar phosphor, fast blue + slow yellow. I used some Tek scopes that had it. Here's a P7 tube, aircraft radar display, glows in the dark nicely...

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/4FP7.jpg

There was a dark trace phosphor, too. I forget the P-number.

John

No, no, it's still there. You just have to make the room really dark. Seriously, once I slept in the lab on an air mattress. What's this eerie blue glow here? Turns out it was the Tek 7704 that I had used a few hours earlier. My last trace was still visible and the thing had been turned off for hours.

I also liked P7 a lot.

You've never seen an orange CRT?

They hadn't discovered rare earth phosphors yet? ;-)

I'd think that nowadays, with digital scopes all over the place, that you could pretty much get any color you want.

Does anybody know that? Is there a selection of trace colors on digital scopes?

Thanks, Rich

The Tek 11801C sampling scopes allowed all the colors to be selected, traces, menus, graticules, everything. And every color could be tuned for hue and saturation. Those scopes had a magnetic-deflection shadow-mask CRT.

The LCD scopes that we have don't allow changing the trace colors.

John

Hmph. I'd have thought that'd be a "no-brainer."

Thanks, Rich

I wonder, did they design their own colour TV tube? Wouldn't put it past them :)

Lots of them do though. I was trying out a Yokogawa model and changed them to match the TDS3054 colours I was used too!

Joerg could have made every channel bluey-green to make him feel comfortable with it :)

Not when the colored knobs for each channel correspond to the trace.

Lecroy 93XX scopes used orange phosphor.

The channel knobs are color-coded, and the traces match. We slip color rings on the probes, too. It all hangs together.

John

Probably. Here's a (bad) pic. It's a magnetic deflection *vertical* raster scan.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/T564_channels.jpg

I actually prefer my mono 11802:

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/TDR_0.1_slow.JPG

because it's much sharper and photographs better.

Great idea. Maybe there are "blur" and "tilt" and "barely visible dim" options too.

John

Well, I really agree with that.

After feeling aggravated about this all day yesterday, and then sleeping on it, I realized that my posts yesterday were heavily influenced by my anger at the way I was treated by the particular school I went to. Although that was a long time ago, I had to realize that I still cannot talk about it at all while remaining emotionally balanced. So I'll try to stay quiet about it, as I have been in the past. Anyone who wants to know more can contact me privately through my website, which can be found easily using a search engine.

I agree that there is a place for such things, but I cannot say that without stating clearly that anyone who is running an operation like that needs to act honorably, and properly inform young people what they are actually getting into, so that they can make intelligent choices regarding their lives. What works for some people can be disastrous for others, and ruin their lives rather than be of benefit.

It was not appropriate for me to enter into that kind of program, and if I knew what I was actually getting into, I definitely would have avoided it.

I totally agree. Getting back a little to the original topic, I first heard of The Art of Electronics through Bob Pease's column. During the time I was reading his stuff, he lamented frequently about the condition of electronics education, and was heavily critical of programs that trained the students to use Spice, and completely avoided working with real circuits.

At the time, I was just getting back into electronics in my own time, and I was learning to use Spice, and I had one DMM, and not even an oscilloscope, to work with. Bob's comments on this subject were invaluable to me and really "hit home". I realized that even at the best, the Spice simulations I was doing were a poor approximation to what was actually happening in the circuit. That was before manufacturers provided any but the most basic Spice models for their products, but over 15 years later, I still can't use Spice to correctly model the circuits I am designing.

Recently I've watched the entire introductory electronics course from MIT OpenCourseware, and some of the Berkely electronics courses that they've made freely-available. Although there is a lot of good in them, I think the main problem with university electronics courses is that they focus too much on mathematics and theoretical treatments, and not nearly enough on real circuits. Some of the better professors (including the one at MIT) admit to wrestling with this issue, but always seem to cover mathematical treatments in class, rather than talk about things like how to choose the best type of capacitor for the application, or how to read a manufacturer's datasheet. Or for that matter, do anything at all to help beginning students develop any kind of intuitive grasp of electronics.

Ideally, they would do all of those things, but I think the basic problem is that there is only so much time in a 4-year program, so they do what they think is academically "safe" for them in their positions in the universities. Unfortunately, it is not the best thing for the students. (To put it mildly.)

Now that I've had years to look back on, buying a copy of The Art of Electronics was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. I laugh at myself every time I see it in the bookshelf - it's a worn-out copy that I got for just $50 at a used bookstore, because I was worried about paying the extra money for a new copy!

So back to the OP: although I generally avoid making recommendations or giving flat out advice, I suggest you go ahead and get the second edition immediately, and don't worry. Get a used copy or a brand new one; it doesn't matter. If you spend more on a new copy, decades from now you might still have it on your bookshelf and be glad you got a new one.

Jay Ts

Ok, well, the next logical step for me to respond is to either get into a Caltech vs. MIT debate, which I don't want to do here, partly because it is inappropriate, and partly because I don't feel Caltech is worth defending, especially by me, ;-)

... Or...

I can choose to not respond to that, which is what I will do.

Have a great day!

Jay Ts

Everything about LeCroy is weird.

John

Math is key. It's the difference between an engineer and a technician.

Much of my work is in ultrasensitive measurements, and because of my book I get a lot of email from folks who are trying to make their own measurements work. I'm happy to help, but it's amazing to me how few people are willing to do their own algebra, even when their jobs depend on getting it right. I've seen a lot of people try desperately to get their crappy circuit to work by using gold plated op amps, ovenized diode breakpoint amplifiers, refrigerated resistors, and such things when two hours and three sheets of paper would have got them the right answer.

It's very mysterious.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I fondly remember, from my youth, a sportscaster on WSAZ, Huntington, WV, Jack Bradley (Budnik... he never used his last name on air :-), always finished his commentary with, "Winners never quit, and quitters never win" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Time to patent the idea of putting an RGB LED in the center of the knobs that changes its color to match the trace on the screen?

Heck, given that most probes today are "smart" with, e.g., a serial interface back to the scope anyway, you could put that LED down in the tip of the probe too.

That could actually be useful...

---Joel

Did you see they're now claiming the fastest scope crown? -->

It's the system they've used for quite some time now where they bandpass filter the input signal into a handful of banks, digitize those (via sub-sampling), and then digitally reconstruct the original waveform. Hence, while it is a "real time" scope, there's also a lot of latency due to all the digital processing involved.

---Joel