On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 03:48:32 -0400) it happened "Michael A. Terrell" wrote in :
Youre AlmostAlwaysWrong I used Opera
That is kids stuff, dangerous for any prototyping that has anything to do with power.
True enough, not for power, these are excellent for knocking together a circuit rapidly. You can build it as quickly as you can think it. No good for anything over 2 mHz or so, and kinda noisy for audio, but to get an idea how something will work out, they're great. Mine is an old Heathkit, basically the same unit. Tom
understand why people do simulations of circuits that
Hmm, and I've been slowing the edges on the pulse generator, just didn't connect that the dots in my head yet when I wanted a ramp from a to b?
PWL, nice to know too. That's my learning curve at the moment, knowing how to implement what I want to do.
One thing I'd like to make is low voltage power factor correction, after a transformer, but I still can't see how a PFC boost looks resistive to the input side. I suppose LT make PFC switchers I could load and look at until how the feedback modulation sinks in?
I don't want to start winding custom ferrite power transformers while I have loads of old copper and iron ones to use. Haven't had much success in unpotting recovered ferrites for reuse.
Grant.
On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 11:17:25 -0400) it happened "hifi-tek" wrote in :
Yes 2 milli Hertz would work OK ;-).
You are right, but I have never used that stuff I have done penty of wire wrap, these days I just use old peices of flat cable:
Jan Panteltje disgraced "sci.electronics.design" on Fri, 22 Apr 2011
18:44:24 GMT by spewing:
can solder together in five to ten minutes
Because not everyone has all the parts on hand to play with, is why I used one.
John Larkin disgraced "sci.electronics.design" on Fri, 22 Apr 2011
19:11:11 -0700 by spewing:
That's all mine does! :-)
reliable.
Yikes! Looks like an exotic pasta dish. I don't like the continuous flipping-over confusion, having parts on one side and the wiring on the other. Past simple circuits, I just lay out a 2-side or 4-side pcb and order a few.
I like to solder parts to copperclad, write comments on them, and keep them for future reference.
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/BreadBoards.jpg
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/BreadBoards2.JPG
It really doesn't take long to breadboard this way. I find it much easier to visualize, as compared to the plastic block things with hidden connections and wires all over the place.
The upper limit of this sort of thing is in the 5 GHz ballpark.
This makes a pretty clean 1 GHz, 5 volt p-p square wave:
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/BB_fast.JPG
Try that on a RatShack breadboard!
John
can solder together in five to ten minutes
If I get an idea at 2AM, which sometimes happens, I can Spice it and then go back to sleep. I don't have, or want, an electronics workbench at home.
John
On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 09:35:43 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
can solder together in five to ten minutes
I have one, actually 2, it was 33 C in the lab today, while I was discharging caps in a superconductor... Place is very good thermally isolated, but no airco, space, the final frontier. In the other lab I am editing video atm, and typing this, bit cooler here. Now I am going to test the mpg I just made.
If I get an idea at 2 o'clock at night, I have been known to get up and try it :-) My PIC programmer is now in the living room, is working again, and late last night I programmed a PIC for a multi-I/O device, many analog inputs and some digital I/O.
I was thinking about building a robot, this because the grass here in the garden needs mowing again, just use a PIC to guide an electric grass mover? There really never is a shortage of projects close to the house. Many years ago I build a small robot, it used relays, way before micros existed. I learned a lot from that about cybernetics and human nature, not about electronics. ....
On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 09:30:08 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
reliable.
I dunno, I think most EEs have this mirror thing sort of as a second nature. Just count the pins the other way around :-) I just solder the power lines on the board, then add the wiring later. I like to use IC sockects so I can check voltages before I plug in expensive chips.
Past simple circuits, I just lay out a 2-side or 4-side pcb
Yes that is nice too, at least you can keep those things and use them later.
I have build tuners like that, not on PCB, but on metal, or in boxes like this:
you can solder together in five to ten minutes
What's the outdoor temp where you are? It's 55F here in San Francisco this instant, and 35 at the cabin in Truckee. The heat's on in both places. It's been cold and wet here for approximately forever, in defiance of the "warm and dry" climate predictions.
I do enough electronics at work, so don't want a lab at home. Simulation is my limit!
That's the problem with grass: it grows. And makes people sneeze. I hate the stuff.
John
cable:
reliable.
What I was in my 20s, my visual-spatial abilities were phenominal. I could look at any 3D object and tell you what it would look like from any other angle, or read and write backwards, things like that. As I get older, I'm not as good at that, so I prefer making things easier to visualize.
On the other hand, my signals/systems/dynamics instincts are much better. I was looking at some "noisy" pulse waveforms at a customer site last week and saw what I thought was a random-phase sinusoidal modulation at what seemed to be around a MHz, kind of like the FFT function on a cheap oscilloscope. I had my glasses off so maybe the fuzzy image of the waveforms on the projector helped somehow. Other guys MathCad'd it on the spot and sure enough, there's systematic stuff at 1 or maybe 1.5 MHz. It's filterable! This may be useful.
Almost everything we use now is surface mount, so I have to use adapters, or solder to the tiny pins directly, for fast stuff.
Yeah, most low frequency stuff is predictable/boring enough that there's no reason to breadboard it at all. It's the fast stuff, which doesn't simulate well, that's fun to solder up and play with.
This board included a bunch of versions of a high-speed pulse output driver circuit. One of them actually worked!
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Z250A.jpg
The cool thing about doing a pcb is that you can throw on a bunch of extra stuff that might be useful some day. This had some general LC filters and a couple of strips that could be connector adapters or TDR parts testers or whatever. And some dipswitch attenuators that didn't work especially well. I keep a grocery list of things to toss onto future "breadboard" PCBs.
John
On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 10:12:24 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
It is about 21 C now (8 o'clock in the evening) , but was 24 C this afternoon
Scary :-) Snow, last snow I have seen was about Christmas IIRC.
I do not hate it, I have some nice place outside to sit, a table and chairs, even a bench somewhere in the garden. But it need to be kept under control, that grass. I have actually planted some vegetables, radish, carrots, that will need some work too.
On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Apr 2011 10:37:30 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
cable:
reliable.
Nice, good idea. Mostly at frequencies over 1 GHz it is all magic to me. I should need to get into that TDR stuff one day too. I remember you had this student project as a link some time ago. But I have a big wishlist of stuff I need now, mostly vacuum stuff and very very high voltage stuff.
So, you gave up on the crap you brag about writing?
You still didn't see that the link was broken, with 'Opera'
power.
Everything is dangerous for idiots.
-- You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's Teflon coated.
core material there are :-)
is all different.
with real components.
well try it for real.
Yesterday I simulated a push-pull optocoupler contraption to see if I could get steeper edges without lowering the pull-up resistor. I have the optocouplers but firing up the simulator is quicker. The answers I got where good enough to put it on a board.
A simulator is like a virtual breadboard without broken parts, bad connections, accidental shorts, etc.
Simulating electronics is like driving a car. It does take a lot of practise before you can do it well and interpret the results. But it pays off eventually. I often go back and forth between simulation and testing a real circuit to make sure the circuit does what I intend it to do.
And you can actually do more with a simulator. Real parts always have tolerances and temperature dependancies. Most simulators allow you explore the influences of component variations and temperature within a few seconds. I've used this feature a couple of times to come up with circuits which cancel the dependancies or determine the precision requirements. If you want to obtain this information from circuits with real parts, you'd need to put together 1000 or more circuits and test them all at various temperatures.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
core material there are :-)
is all different.
with real components.
well try it for real.
And you don't fry parts in a simulator... even though you mangled a calculation and you're dissipating 100W ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed
you can solder together in five to ten minutes
Over here the summer came very early. It has never been so warm during this time of year. Even the chestnut tree in the garden starts to show leaves earlier than usual. Unlike Jan I was clever enough to get ahead of global warming and install an airco unit in my lab / office :-)
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
core material there are :-)
response is all different.
with real components.
well try it for real.
I don't know about that, when I kid was going to JW, they used WorkBench (It think?), It liked exploding parts all day!
Jamie
core material there are :-)
is all different.
with real components.
well try it for real.
Anything like this? Optos are cool. Fairchild makes an opto with a 400 volt phototransistor!
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/FetDriver.jpg
John
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