MsPacMan

Volumens? That must be like a brightness adjustment for a light source...neat.

mike

those

You mean "pins". Needles have a slot for the thread. ;-)

Never thought of them. One "trick" I do use is a coiled up paperclip around the scope ground bent around and cut even with the center pin to make a ground probe.

You're a cheap bastard when it comes to electronics but by outrageously expensive shirts. That's sick! ;-)

those

useful.

Sorry, yes, pins. As you can see it's my wife who does all the sewing around here :-)

I found most paper clip wire to be too thick to get into vias. Pins or sewing needles are pointy so you can always wedge them in good enough that they hold for a while.

For dress-up events like client visits I buy nice shirts at Men's Wearhouse. I found that their quality is consistent but yes, a good shirt will easily set you back $40-$50. Of course I always buy mine in January when they have the sale 8-D

And that's only for formal meetings, BoD, due diligence or when finance guys are there. Other than that it's always jeans and regular shirts. At home T-shirts and in the winter Lumberjack shirts.

It does make sense to buy quality stuff. Cheap shirts can look bad after just a dozen washes while good ones last many years.

But hey, I knew a guy who had more money that Uncle Scrooge, was chauffeured around in a Bentley, yet he usually ate herring and potatoes. Now with food, we sometimes splurge. Same with beer, you won't find any cheap ones here.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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because

those

useful.

You think I do? There is a reason SWMBO, MBO. ;-)

Wedge them into what? Unfortunately, our "test pads" don't have vias in them. Probing can really be a PITA, but it saves space. The grounds normally aren't test pads, anyway.

Bingo! Though I wear only long-sleeved cotton shirts, so spring/summer is the best time for sales. I just bought some decent ones for $12 (75% off).

I wear the same shirts at home or in front of the customer. Well, the ones I wear at home are the ones I wore in front of the customer a few years ago. ;-)

Yes, but you don't have to spend a lot of money on them.

...but you do go cheap on electronics. ;-)

Just bustin' your hump...

because

those

(RS-422).

useful.

But tonight I'm doing the cookin', standing near the charcoal Weber at 100F.

ground

Then just put vias in them. Most of the time that won't cost extra in PCB fab.

Different here. We rarely run the A/C so I wear short and T-shirts. The office often hovers around 90F. When doing heavy-duty SPICE a lot more.

I'd rather have stuff that lasts.

Yes, there's always a cost calculator running inside my brain. Even when working on hi-rel stuff where cost really doesn't matter, it simply won't turn off. Once a client asked me what the electronics would cost, more casually. "45 bucks" ... some jaws dropped ... "We can't even buy a decent wrench for that, heck, our coffee maker cost more".

That's my wife's domain :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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a

because

points

...and those

(RS-422).

useful.

She left you outside in that condition?

ground

The problem is space on the other side (blind vias are expensive). We have a couple of boards are packed, one critically in places.

I wear them year around. AC or not. I don't own any others.

Same shirts, different day.

We're on a cost kick now. The owner decided that it's his money. Unfortunately, a lot of the decisions were made long ago and aren't easy or cheap to change now. It's tough when the rules change after the game is in play.

I didn't say it the other way around. ;-)

get a

because

points

...and those

(RS-422).

seen

useful.

As long as there's food that's ok :-)

around

ground

them.

aren't

Ok, yeah, then forget it.

;-)

Wow. I'd be drenched in sweat and it would not be a pretty picture.

Mostly that will result in a complete redesign. That is when the NRE that entails must be factored in, to see how fast the effort truly amortizes. Anything north of four years is generally frowned upon.

:-)

--
Regards, Joerg

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I scored a few of them from the shop inventory on a job I had back in the early 1980s. The company on the packaging was "Specialty Connector Corp.". Last I searched for them, it looked like their corporate sucessor only did pricey microwave stuff.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

get a

because

points

them!

...and those

(RS-422).

seen

useful.

Man does not live by food alone. ;-)

around

ground

them.

aren't

Yeah, there is an EMI shield and everything has to fit under it. I'm redesigning the board to consolidate things but that just means that more stuff gets put under cover.

I

;-)

Only when I'm working outside, or in the attic. The attic work likely won't start again until at least September. I thought I might get a break today and work out there, but nope (91F w/50% humidity and sunny). It's like working in the rain. You can only get so wet. ;-)

Yep. I'm doing a redesign now, but at least on this pass the ground rules state that no firmware can be changed. That alone cuts the possibilities some

80% (I've already done the design, including firmware changes). The real bigies would hit the case, though. There is well into six figures in the molds so there is no way that's going to pay.

get a

because

points

them!

...and those

bit

(RS-422).

seen

useful.

Well, ok, food plus beverages then :-)

[...]

That's what one guy thought. Until the whole deck gave way and turned itself into a raft. He lucked out and got off, somehow, but the deck was later found a few miles downstream.

That would put enclosure changes off-limits, unless you make a bazillion of these per year. I've often run into this "no SW change" or "no firmware change" requirement and never really understood it. There are nowadays so many trick you can play in firmware that save beaucoup bucks because whole chunks of hardware could simply vanish.

--
Regards, Joerg

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Wow! That *is* a perspiration problem.

Sure. The issue is two-fold, really. First, the thing works. A good chunk of the possible savings is a newer DSP (savings of $6-7 per), but they had so much trouble with TI getting this one working that the owner is afraid of touching another unknown. I can save another $30-$40 pretty easily, but at least the device drivers would have to change. I don't know how well they've isolated these from the application, either. The other issue is that there are other projects where the firmware engineers' time might be better spent. So far there hasn't been any (time), so...

I've gone through so many cost scenarios on this product that I'd rather do another project too, but whatever...

I've often heard that the Analog Devices SHARC DSPs are rather "friendlier" and work better (in terms of the actual behavior relative to what the data sheet claims)... have anyone there who has the time and inclination to do a bit of a skunkworks project?

We're sticking with TI DSPs as well for the moment, though -- not enough spare people/time to be contemplating a change right now.

---Joel

Nope. Not at all. They're stressed just getting the scheduled product changes done[*]. AIUI, the runner-up was the BlackFin (the guys still wear their blackfin T-shirts when the TI guys show up). A complete G729 package wasn't available for it. [*] We have a new manager, who asked me if I wanted to help out with the firmware. "Nope, I don't know how to spell 'C'. If you want it done in assembler or VHDL, fine." Besides, I have Xenocryptophobia.

As long as you have a competent logic designer on hand who isn't afraid of an FPGA, I wouldn't worry about it. I could have easily saved them two and maybe three years in development on this thing. ...and a lot of grief since.

Long-term you might think about rolling your own CoDec? G.729 does seem to be pretty good, but it still has more latency than some people seem to prefer. Probably the reason why a lot of wireless mics are still using plain old analog FM? (The unfortunate downside though is that it's rather difficult to cook up a good CoDec without stepping on someone's patented IP in the process, and a lot of the IP owners aren't interested in talking with you if you're only looking for, e.g., hundreds or thousands of licenses per year.)

I like Wikipedia's description of G.729 annex B: "If transmission is stopped, and the link goes quiet because of no speech, the receiving side may assume that the link has been cut. By inserting comfort noise, analog hiss is simulated digitally during silence to assure the receiver that the link is active and operational." "Comfort noise" -- that's great! :-)

I generally only volunteer to do firmware when it's a small enough project that I can do the entire thing myself -- e.g., a smart battery chargers or whatever. :-)

---Joel

Since we're only looking at 1/20th of that, or so, rolling our own doesn't make much sense either. From what I'm told, the guy that did program it is top notch. Yeah, as we've discussed before, we're at the fringe of acceptable delay now. A lot of work was done to mitigate the problems but it's really hiding the issue. There are places to cut down some buffering but latency certainly is a problem.

There is some comfort it's not a "comfort squawk", I suppose. ;-)

Yep. I do hardware, but if there is a little code needed to get it to work, I'm fine with it as long as I own it all.

So far, we've been happy with a 68K or an ARM for the slow stuff and an FPGA for the fast signal processing. That's a different way to slice peoblems.

John

Different problems, different solutions. Certainly there is an overlap, but it's not all that much.

spare

We just did a Spartan6 design that runs 16 channels of A/D conversion, each channel having an SPI interface to its A/D, two programmable

8-pole lowpass filters, a data interpolator, and a 4K FIFO. The FPGA also does our VME interface and some trigger logic that you couldn't do in a DSP. Brutal parallelism is nice sometimes.

Using a separate uP and FPGA partitions the problem nicely, at the cost of interconnect pins.

John

...and I don't think any of John's stuff is battery powered, whereas Keith's and mine is.

G.729 is also a pretty complex algorithm; it'd be a awful lot of work to put the bulk of it into an FPGA.

---Joel