Circuit Design (bench work) is actually quite physically demanding

Keep at it - a daily whiff of solder smoke keeps you young :)

piglet

Right. I have three projects going on now, and one bench. The transition between setups is a mess. Cables, adapters, power supplies, test equipment, and scope setups all have to be re-done, not to mention the mentality shift.

To shift, the first thing I do is disconnect all the cables and probes and attenuators and throw them into a pile on the floor.

Mo and I both have a little "brain fog" from the virus. It doesn't seem to affect our ability to think about one thing at a time, but it does seem to make it more difficult to context switch.

With lots of people working from home, the number of emails has multiplied too, which is distracting.

I do enjoy the occasional bench work, soldering and measuring and moving around, to get away from a computer screen.

It can be art too.

r to do. Even 10 years ago I could remain focused from 8am - 8pm

. Getting a piece of wire, sitting down, realizing that the scope probe you have is wrong, getting up, soldering, but you ran out of water to clean yo ur tip, then back to finding a different component.

e it for granted. I wish I still did.

Good stuff. I like your choice of using leaded resistors

That last one looks great. Is that a coax low leakage inductance transformer? I remember you posted about it before, but not what it was for...

That's an isolated HV pulser. It's two parallel mosfets driving a transmission-line transformer. It puts about 80 volts into 50 ohms with under 1 ns risetime. The transformer uses a stock connectorized H.FL jumper so is easy to "wind."

It was tricky to Dremel and solder the surface-mount connectors on the board.

I use those connectors when I need to probe HF signals, always a hazzle with the ground pig tail

They are horrible to mate and unmate, and that tiny cable is lossy. I seed my boards with thru-hole SMB connector footprints, for important clocks and signals. An SMB can be a scope trigger, so you can prowl around with a probe.

You don't have to solder the SMBs if you don't want. Just tweaking them sideways is enough to connect for a while.

Yes, one needs to apply counter pressure for them not to peel the pads off the PCB

SMB is good. But they are big, and for final PCB revisions, often space is limited, so no room for the SMB

We use U.FL connectors all the time, but not at GHz frequencies. They're Digikey part number H9161CT-ND, pretty cheap, and and only about the size of a SOT23. You unmate them with a twist of a jeweller's screwdriver. They make really good high frequency test points, and don't have to be stuffed in production boards.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's the one I use also. For low frequency stuff, I have been looking at the PCBite:

It will free both your hands up and is flexible. But like a normal probe, very difficult to do short pigtails

to do. Even 10 years ago I could remain focused from 8am - 8pm

Getting a piece of wire, sitting down, realizing that the scope probe you have is wrong, getting up, soldering, but you ran out of water to clean you r tip, then back to finding a different component.

it for granted. I wish I still did.

I am now doing actual lab work in my basement due to covid issues. I just bought one of these for the soldering iron so I no longer have to jump out of bed at 2 in the morning and run downstairs and check if I left my iron o n.

(Its a simple timer to shut off power to a plug)

My Metcal shuts off if I don't use it for about 5 minutes. It knows somehow.

The bench here is currently at two "layers" of projects. Next move is bulldoze everything into a box. unused space is wasted space.