More... The next time your TI calculator craps out, may I suggest various reliable, economical, and ecologically correct (no battery needed) paper slide rule calculators: That's about all I could fit on the table. My guess is about an equal number more, but mostly for non-electronic calculations.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I'd definitely be interested to see the rest. Slide rule calculators is something we will likely make a whole series of for developing world use.
NT
[snip]
snip]
I did that stumble about a year ago... potential analog circuit consulting project in Prescott, AZ... "manager" insists on "testing" (*) my capabilities, by asking me to review a big-ass schematic and tell him how it works... I immediately spot an input from a mechanical push-button switch going thru an RC differentiator to set a flop :-(
Now I know, around here, that's de rigueur, but on a military aircraft panel?? I allowed as to how there were safer ways to do that.
End of interview.
(*) I don't know why some youngster thinks he's capable of "testing" my abilities, but it happens to me all the time. Unfortunately, it often results in loss of business because I can not resist turning the tables and asking the inquisitor a good "trap" question >:-} ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I find that type of person tends to change specs halfway thru the job. So you probably made the right choice.
Cheers
That's fine with me... I charge by the hour >:-} ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Well, I was absolutely certain that I knew exactly where the box of mechanical, electrical, and machine shop paper slide rules was hiding when I posted that. Now, I can't find the box. I'll dig some more later. However, I did find some more goodies that might be interesting: The Moire patterns on the left are for cloth thread density. Also buried somewhere are my navigation tools (parallels, protractor, triangles, etc).
If you're going to make paper calculators, I suggest that you also look into nomograms and nomographs. If you're going for mass distribution in the 3rd world, it's much easier to duplicate a nomogram page than a paper slide rule. There's some stuff online: I use "Graphical and Mechanical Computation" by Joseph Lipka (circa
1918) as my main reference, when they were called "alignment charts". There are some loose charts that apparently were not scanned that are referenced in the text. Bug me if you want these scanned.Impedance Nomograph by Clifford Heath
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I like that. It would save time, and looks nicer than my text tables.
I don't have the time to follow this lot up at the moment. Not much is legible on the photos. I'm sure we could make similar, in one form or another.
thanks NT
What's the point in these modern times... you can solve almost any equation with an everyday simulator... even with LTspice ;-)
It's become so easy I've even implemented Newton Solvers inside some of my subcircuit behavioral models.
Nomographs/grams are not deadly accurate... simulators are. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I think your collection is interesting, and scanned copies would a public benefit. I might even automate some.
Thanks for the rap. I'm open to making new ones, as time permits and if they're sufficiently interesting. Suggestions welcome.
Clifford Heath.
Thanks. I had a problem when trying to help the local wood butchers. I could fix their chainsaws (this one is mine): However, they kept wrecking them by mixing the wrong proportions of chainsaw oil and gasoline when working with a partial amounts. I original contrived a table of numerical values, but but the math was a bit too much for most of them. So, I added a graph, which solved the problem. Notice that there are tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet for US standard and metric measures. The spreadsheet was not for their use. I used it to create the tables and graphs. Most often, it was a big table on one side of the page, and a graph on the back.
For the wood butchers, the paper printouts didn't last very long. So, I would laser print on heavy stock, spray glue the paper, attach the printouts to a 9x12" size 1/8" plywood or plastic board, and coat it with clear acrylic (Krylon). That will survived grease and oil, but not fuel attack. The one's from 5 years ago are still around and in use.
Sorry. Cheap Moto G cell phone camera that decided to go into HDR (high dynamic range) mode, which is not very good for picking up detail, especially if I moved. If there's anything in the picture that looks interesting, I can disassemble the paper slide rule, scan it, and email the scans to you.
Footnote: I think I know where my mechanical calculators went. I loaned them to a machine shop owner who hasn't returned them.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I hadn't really thought of it as a collection. More like a pile of stuff left over from another era. Back in the days when I was still climbing towers and doing RF, I found myself needing to do rough calculations of things like fade margin. The problem was that I had my calculator, but often didn't have the magic formulas available, printed, or memorized. So, I used nomograms, which were not particularly accurate, but good enough to determine if the reason the point to point RF link didn't work on installation was because the original calculations were wrong, or if something was broken or misaligned. Also, just seeing the screen of a red LED calculator in bright sunlight was enough to make me switch to the cardboard calculators. Today, the average smartphone is sufficient for most calculations, and such paper calculators are probably an anachronism.
However, that's not the situation in 3rd world countries, where modern technology is being handled by installers and users with little technical expertise. To make this work, the calculations and calculators must be simplified. I haven't done much of this, but my friends in the solar business tell me that nomograms, charts, and graphs are the answer if you're many miles from civilization and expert technical instruction is not available.
(...)
Thanks for doing the work. I use printed version of your nomograms fairly often when I'm in a hurry, which is all too often.
Think of something that might be useful when your away from civilization, have your hands dirty, or in a location (i.e. rain forest, exposed mountaintop, snow, etc) where using a smartphone might awkward for futile if the user is not technically qualified. For example, I use a printed sun path calculator all the time for locating the path of the sun when dealing with solar power site surveys: This is not a nomogram because a universal sun path calculator would not be practical or needed. However, like my chainsaw fuel-oil mix calculator, it can be customized for the occasion and the specific situation. So, instead of a paper slide rule or nomogram, I suggest a computah program that generates a nomogram or graph for the specific location or purpose. For example, a chart of how many miles your specific car has to go before it totally runs out of gas based on the non-linear fuel gauge reading, calculated from the arc of the gas tank float.
Probably the most useful would be a nomogram for calculating and predicting the exact cellular or cable TV bill. The formulas used by the vendors seem to involve quantum effects, game theory, and a roll of the dice. These might therefore be difficult to reproduce. If you're looking for the ultimate challenge, this might be it.
Methematical instruments, slide rules, and slide charts:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The trick to effective Googling is to know the magic search buzzwords. In this case, it's a "slide chart":
Nuclear bomb effects calculator: Presumably, after a nuclear attack, electricity for computahs will be at a premium, which should inspire the need for paper "slide charts" and calculators.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Heh. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and I enjoyed it :) It's not like my supper depended on anyone ever pressing the Donate button (no-one ever has) :).
I'd forgotten I even made a customized style sheet for printing, but I'm glad that's useful too.
Game theory, absolutely. It's called "competition" :)
The well over a billion people that haven't a hope in hell of affording anything that could run spice might disagree with you.
NT
LTspice is FREE. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Very true. When all you have is a big hammer, everything that you pound with it, will serve as a nail. The problem is that nomograms are not for you. You don't need them, you probably don't want them, and you have better tools available. You need accuracy, repeatability, graphics, and the ability to deal with complex problem. Third world users need an easy way to avoid all these benefits and just crank out a "close enough" answer to their problem. When you're trying to locate some solar panels in the middle of nowhere, "close enough" is usually good enough. When you're trying to mix fuel and oil for a chainsaw, a nomogram will suffice. When you're trying to estimate how much asphalt is needed to resurface a road, you don't need much accuracy. There are plenty of things in this world that don't benefit from excessive precision. Besides, 97.4812% of such calculations are faked.
Idea: Build a slide rule to work out the Drake Equation. 7 terms multiplied together means 7 disks on a circular slide rule. Never mind detailed numerical accuracy. Just color code each scale by the level of optimism and mark known values from existing research. The resulting answer will still be several magnitudes of error off, but it sure beats digging out the latest numbers from the internet and grinding them together on a calculator. Should I run into someone with purple hair, tattoos, and body piercing jewelry, who appears to be an alien visitor, I can immediately calculate the probability that they really exist or if I've injested a halucinagenic recreational drug.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The computah to run LTspice is not free. Neither is the time invested in learning how to use the computah, the OS, and the program. Same with the time doing updates, chasing bugs, and converting real world problems into something the computah can work with. With all this expensive overhead, sometimes I wonder if computers are an obstacle to productivity.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
It's hard to find a young person today who can "design" anything without having a computer.
They should save the money wasted on a "smart" phone and buy a PC instead. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
So what. A computer isn't. Suggest getting a computer of any sort to the poorest couple of billion people and it'll be at best a joke.
They're just tools. Overall they're a boon, I think we grew up in some sort of dark age.
NT
There are free web-based resources that will do a lot of useful things with just a browser. SPICE, designing and testing analog filters, compiling programs in various languages, spitting out CNC G-code...
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.