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Marketing inputs can complicate the engineering no end, sometimes legitimately
There was a management guru who held this to be the most important feature of a successful innovative company. Sadly, his most prized examples were IBM and Hewlett-Packard. I've got a couple of his boos, but they are stuck in movers boxes at the moment. We are putting together six floor to ceiling bookcases over the weekend, so we may eventually empty some of those boxes, but it isn't going to happen today.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
-- I trim. ;)
If only. Far from trimming your convictions to the prevailing opinion, you persist in maintaining your idiosyncratic point of view, sometimes over dozens of posts.
I can't claim to be much better, but then again I do happen to be right most of the time.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
That can rather quickly lead into the demise of a company. I mean, what good does it do if you have to judge the performance of a machine when you do not have the specs it is supposed to perform to? Why didn't you go to the boss to tell him "I can't do that job this way"?
I also did due diligence as an employee and would have become rather loud if they hadn't furnished the information I felt that I needed to have. These were not UK companies (well, we did buy one but we were in the US), mostly Germany, Netherlands and the US.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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No JL, yours is in the single digits. Largely due to your incessant chatter with Slowman. And others who yammer incessantly about everything else.
?-)
-- Indeed, since unless proven otherwise I consider the prevailing opinion to be a product of the perfidy of its profferers.
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That one hypothesis. It takes less effort to to sustain than actually thinking about the subject.
But a more reliable one.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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This from josephkk, who has just been making an idiot of himself by uncritically retailing nonsense about anthropogenic global warming which he has soaked up from some streaming heap of denialist propaganda and recycled here.
He wants to tell us that anthropogenic global warming can't be real because it hasn't been going on long enough for us to distinguish climate from weather, when it's been well known since the 1990's that the climate has warmed significantly over the past century and there's no plausible way of explaining the warming that doesn't invoke the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, from about 300ppm in 1900 to about
385ppm now.He's produced more nonsense same kind - not only is he yammering off- topic, but he's spamming us with fossil-carbon extraction industry propaganda. A clear case of a very dirty pot calling the kettle black.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Documentation is what electronic design engineers do; that is our deliverable. Business is why we do it. Both are a big part of what we design and how we design it.
Granted, if you just fiddle with one-offs, and never intend them to be manufactured, and have nobody interested in buying them, those things won't matter to you.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
I believe in bold and sometimes scary leaps. Yeah, in the end there usually is some sort of power plug so I guess since it's electrical you could theoretically call it incremental :-)
I did not mean teamwork. Teamwork is always good and I thoroughly enjoy that. What I meant is when some committee is formed and then they say "We _will_ improve this design by making plans and executing them, no matter what". Occasionally that works. Mostly it goes the way of the famous five-year plans.
Not necessarily in my line of work. And it has nothing to do with guessing. It has to do with ideas.
Most of the time there was either no reason given, as in "This is impossible and we will not be a party to it". Other times the reasoning did not sound reasonable enough, as in "Nobody has ever achieved this level of precision". So? Maybe nobody tried hard enough. Or maybe nobody tried any unorthodox ideas.
But it usually does. Probably like Evil Knievel revving his motorcycle and then looking at that canyon that is just a smidgen wider than the last one, where it got darn close :-)
What is your definition of "full share"?
I prefer the ones on paper, with a Dollar sign in front. Unless it's volunteer or church work, then it's better not to seek any kind of honor or similar attention.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Roger scary leaps. Fun. But carefully calibrated scary leaps. One acquires instincts about that, after a while.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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It makes sense to push the envelope as far as you reasonably can. Somebody else is going to do it in a year or (if there's any money to be made out of it) and you don't want to get trumped by something that you could have developed with only a little more work.
A camel is a horse designed by a committee. Committee are too often constrained by their dumbest and most anxious member.
Too true. One good idea can trump a library's-worth of data.
I've seen that happen.
appy,
Medals are cheap. Money is real and negotiable. Your bonus is subtracted from everybody else's bonus.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Its scarier if they're your own resources at stake. But, hey, I can only suggest that you stick with your guns, if it works for you, even if it's only posturing.
Semantics - if a committee isn't a team, or a part of one, there's something wrong. Sounds to me like your committee is looking for a bold and scary leap.
I've been trying to remember how to spell bureaucracy for too long, but perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
No, we're talking about reasoning and justification.
Getting the reason is important. If, in fact, the real reason is that the man with the money doesn't like the smell of it, then you have to tackle that issue.
If you have a reason to believe that the improvement in accuracy is possible, then you're in a position to convince the nay-sayers otherwise, by presenting those reasons.
RL
90% of the job is documentation and trying to push ropes. You can always tell a hacker because they document nothing. Their projects are always a mess.
Even well documented, an oscillator doesn't take a decade.
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Good engineering documentation is an art form of its own. Well, it's less painful if you pretend it's art.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
No posturing possible in my biz, that would sink one's reputation in due course. My clients want a working circuitry at the end, easy to produce and (usually) low cost.
There are usually no committees in my work life, and I try to avoid it.
Maybe you do but I didn't :-)
As I said, sometimes there is nothing you can do to obtain the reason. Other times it takes too much time to get to it, and may not be worth getting to in the first place. Recently it was transformer manufacturers where several said it can't be done. I did not want to spend the time (meaning my client's EE Dollars) to find out why they thought so and go through their math. I was sure it could be done. Finally we found the solution and then a company that was willing to build exactly what we wanted. Long story short: It works great.
Believe it or not, sometimes they trust me as a person. If I say that it can be improved in accuracy and by about how much they often say "Ok, let's do it then". In the same way that I trust my dentist. He usually tries to describe the medical reasons as best as he can (and he is very good at that) but occasionally he can only say "Hard to say but I think we ought to ..." and then I tell him "Ok, please do that".
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I wonder what krw thought that he was saying here. The oscillator that I'm fiddling with at the moment does represent the culmination of an idea that first got turned into working hardware back in 1986. I revisited the idea a few years ago, and found that LTSpice suggested that it might have been working rather better than I'd originally noticed (and a lot better than it had needed to).
It looked like a good - but not uniquely good - low distortion sine wave source. Sometime in February this year I had a slightly different idea, which looks rather better. After simulating it quite a bit - and swapping quite a few e-mails with my clever friend in London - I decided that it was probably good enough to justify buying the bits to build an example. I got the bits in June and July, and got examples of the the inductor and transformer wound , but the process of putting them together got derailed by the move from Nijmegen to Sydney and they are now on a boat that should get to Sydney early in December.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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My documentations sucks, I keep a running notebook, but there's always multiple projects in the air, and no time to go back and organize. I try to put an index in the front of a notebook (once it's full) that leads to important pages.
George H.
Had an application for a 20kVA medium frequency transformer in a compact package. I knew it was physically possible (in, say, the footprint of a laptop, but the thickness of, say, a loaf of bread... so about 2-3 loaves worth in volume :) ). Must've quoted 20 manufacturers about the thing. Answers ranged wildly from "no quote" to something like size of a truck tire (well, it would sure run cool..) to, finally, one that said they'd give it a go. And prices covered a similar 20:1 span.
Unamazingly enough, the small, cheap one worked great.
Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
That is similar to how i deal with my dentist. We looked at what insurance would provide and what was the best treatment. So i got best treatment out of pocket. About $20k. And i don't regret a penny of it.
The idea is what works best (specifically long term in this case) , how can we do it repeatably and most economically. It follows on to all sorts of challenging electronic devices as well.
?-)
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