Jim Williams

=20

That's a lot of firmware.

Nah, about $15k per year worth. He'll be able to do that standing on his head. (His sisters will make sure.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Where do you get the space transformers?

The adapter thingies?

John

heating.

Yeah, those. They certainly aren't cheap. I should start adding this sort of thing to our prototypes.

heating.

They are cheap, considering that you get a bunch on a snap-apart sheet. The people who sell singles wind up being a lot more expensive.

We use these all the time, so the economics is pretty good.

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

John

fire

heating.

in a

Cheap is relative. Buying an assortment of these for various packages wouldn't be cheap at all. Often space on prototype boards is free.

I make similar things, though more your X-Acto style. That's not cheap either if you count time as being worth anything.

More peeping by proxy. Why do people killfile me if they can't stand to not see my posts?

And Michael probably hasn't used a Metcal. They make anything else feel, well, like a piece of wire over an open flame.

John

(...)

Yup. Metcals are very nice tools. Hexacon, Weller and Hakko etc. make perfectly useful soldering tools, too. Metcals are more efficient and easier to use.

--Winston

heating.

Next time you do a layout have the layouter add some of those. Es mucho mas barato.

fire

heating.

in a

Exactly my thought. There is almost always space on a panel for this sort of thing, especially with prototypes. Well, I guess there isn't a standard size for Chinese panels, but...

Unfortunately, I just had a couple of designs go out (one a prototype) and I didn't think of it sooner.

fire

heating.

in a

of

And if there's still a corner left over draw Snoopy, teeth clenched, scarf flying, fighting the Red Baron and heading back to Fort Zinderneuf sitting on a dog house full of bullet holes. My brother painted that onto the driver side of my first car, made the kids in passing cars go ballistic :-)

fire

heating.

in a

of

A friend used to reverse engineer chips for a living. One structure made no sense to him until he zoomed out. It turned out to be a Kilroy. He had a rather large collection of such chip-art.

We had one chip (the first pass of the Cyrix MX) where the designers signed one of the metal masks. The siggys made a direct Vcc-Gnd short. Oops. Ah, what's a million or so...

John Larkin a écrit :

When I was a kid I did repair my grand mother TV with what she had : an iron (for clothes :-). It just worked...

Now, I'm glad that I have Metcals...

-- Thanks, Fred.

Party at ME students at my university (somehow MEs were more fun to be around than EEs back then). Stereo died later that night and I found a bad solder joint. Not good. Of course those guys had neither a solder iron nor a clothes iron. There was only lots of beer, Ouzo, Vodka, Cote du Rhone, and similar items of the more practical kind.

But being a good ME the renter of this apartment had a tool box and there was also an old stove that (sort of) worked. Took an inbus wrench, heated it up, grabbed with pliers ... phssss ... done. Stereo starting working instantly. Instantly? Why ... now wait a minute ... I had soldered at the power switch and forgot to unplug the whole thing. In my defense I can only say that we were all heavily inebriated at that point ;-)

Those are pricey. I am pretty happy with my Wellers.

Only wusses shut the power off to do wiring.

John

AFAIR I also had a fairly full glass of Guinness sitting on the transformer so my hatch wouldn't become too dried up during the repair :-)