Heathkit arising again?

Most home automation gear requires a monthly subscription, to connect to a server somewhere. That is both a revenue model and a way to avoid port hassles. A Dropbox-based system (like mine!) can overcome that.

They also made nice PC kits available, I built my first XT-compatible from their kit. I also built a Geiger counter among other gadgets. I sure miss the company. They should never have sold out to Zenith.

So was most of the stuff I built as a kid. Much of it lost its luster the millisecond it worked. Like my pong game which I gave away without playing even one game. But you learn an increadible amount of practical electronics, stuff universities never teach.

Yeah, look at some cars :-(

The trend is also visible in the embedded (non-analog) world. Our pellet stove controller contains some things in the uC code that I'd consider blunders. And sometimes in the summer it turns itself on. So we have to unplug it.

It can be done without "calling home". All that most people want is that the electric stuff in the home becomes more intelligent. Like lights going on and off via dawn-dusk timers, seasonally adjusted. Or push a button in the bedroom and that starts the coffee maker. Have it automatically turned off after 1/2h or so in case someone forgets. Close the garage door if uncle Leroy forgets again (you wouldn't believe how often I saw that happen). X-10 does all of that but it is IMHO clunky and unreliable.

Maybe they had to? For many years they were affiliated with Schlumberger. Which I found odd or interesting, because when I worked there on an oil rig they were all into oil/gas exploration. I never figured out how a kit business fit in there.

As a kid with modest budget I decided to build my own cantenna. It had an SWR

It has a twist tip to select AC or DC measurements. There is a 1G resistor for DC and a pass thru for AC-ohms. I've used it with a RF probe in the past, don't recall measuring DC with out the 1G resistor. It's supposed to limit the cable capacitance from affecting the DUT.

But its easy to fab 2 replacements for the 1 probe.

Cheers

Amature Radio was hot in the 70's. I remember 73 magazine was almost

What the latest magazine thats 1/4" thick?

Cheers

I mostly design circuits, real ones with resistors and caps and fets and opamps and stuff like that. I don't write a lot of code these days, just little engineering apps for myself mostly; I have a real fulltime C programmer now, to do the heavy stuff. I can draw circuits forever, but I find programming for more than a week or two to be depressing.

Slow stuff, yes. Serious logic is mostly done in an FPGA now, but we still do really fast stuff with ECL and gaasfets and like that. That part is still fun. And it takes a serious hardware EE to do, not some computer engineering grad.

Hope that never happens! We expect our future designs will be centered around an FPGA that has a couple of ARM cores inside. The FPA will do the serious signal processing parallel in hardware, and the ARMs will do stuff like operator interface, ethernet/USB, self-test, supervision... things that still work best in procedural code.

Even then, the FPGA will be surrounded with "real" electronics.

I have remote temperature acquisition and heater controls in our cabin, and a webcam looking at the driveway, so I can check the snow depth and turn on the heat before we drive up. I can start the coffee maker (kettle, drip cone) myself.

We've seeded our workplace with cams, two on each floor. When the alarm company calls me at 2AM with (so far) false alarms, I can go online and check the place out, instead of getting dressed and driving in and meeting the cops there. Best use for the Web so far!

The microwave and optics mags (Microwave Journal, Microwaves&RF, Laser Focus World, Photonics Spectra) are still fat.

I think EDN has given up the print version... the last few issues were around 30 mils thick, by actual measurement. Is EE Times still publishing?

If you can do all those other things, why not do your own alarms rather than being awakened at 2AM? Not being critical, just wondering.

I have a country home about 90 miles away. I built a gizmo to call my cell phone it the temperature is too high, too low, power off, and other triggers. It has worked wonderfully for years using the PSoC1 which does the DTMF dialing itself.

John S

Since 1982, QST Magazine has always been a consistent 1/4" thick, usually about 160 pages. It doesn't change for a rather odd reason. The ARRL sells binders that hold a years worth of QST with a fixed width. If the issues were to expand or contract, they wouldn't fit. That can change in the future, but so far, it hasn't.

The ARRL is also experimenting with an online and downloadable version of QST. However, since one of the major benefits of ARRL membership is the magazine, the ARRL protects its magazine articles and content. The online and downloadable run on Adobe Air and include multimedia content (mostly video clips). The download size is about 170 MBytes per issue. Each issue must be installed on the computer (ending up in C:/Program File/ARRL/QST/ which is a dumb place to put user files), and requires a current ARRL member login and password to install. I have some not very nice things to say about the way it's being done, but I'll save that for a different rant.

Heathkit never went away. They continued to sell educational electronics kits to schools after they dropped their other lines.

A one megohm resistors, not one gig. That raised the input impedance from 10 to 11 meg. A 1090 meg resistor was used in their 100X HV probe to give an 1100 Meg input impedance.

Zenith bought Heathkit to get the government contracts to supply computers to the military. At the time, they were selling bastardized systems that ran a modified version of MS DOS called Z-DOS The ports were at different physical addresses, so a lot of software wouldn't run on them. A third party board would convert them to MS-DOS, and let them run readily available software. I don't know if they are still usable, but I had a set of binders with the custom BIOS source code.

Dropbox has agreed to give the feds full access to everything on their servers. Welcome to 1984.