Power Supply Engineer - National Instruments - Austin, Texas

Had an application that required small low turns-count transformer winding structure. Cut out one with tin shears in copper foil. Worked.

Mech dept chief repeatedly refuses to send out for tooling quote for rough mech dwg. Reasons - too costly/ waste of time / not wave solderable.

Eng mgr gives ok to send out for quote directly. Turns out to be cheaper than bobbin structure it replaces. Turns out to wave solder like a charm. Finally tooled up for 3+ variants, used in many other projects that I had nothing to do with.

Never got a sensible mech package, or sensible word (if any) out of Mech Dept chief for any project I was involved in, from that day on. He's still there; I'm not.

What's the lesson here?

RL

[...]

Ha ha - I know how I would have done it in the 80's. Dual-gang motorized pots. My PPOE sold come controllers using them. 10 turn precision wirewound pots with these 3 digit mechanical dials on the front. They turned themselves up or down as commanded, quite funny to watch. Especially if you don't realise they are motorized :)

--

John Devereux

As mainly a cyclist and pedestrian, It soesn't make sense to shave in the winter. At the same time, it can be stupid not to shave in the summer. I generally don't shave between thanksgiving and April Fools' day, unless there are other issues.

Wow. What decade are you living in? The unspoken rules still rule in most 'hiring' circles, if not more so now than ever ( IF you ever make it past the 'automated character evaluation' interface of the hiring process).

RL

Hard to surface mount.

There was a DVM once, Digitec or something, that had a 10-turn pot and a motor inside and a digital clock looking mechanical display. When you changed the voltage, it would spin like crazy and stop at, or sort of hover around, the new value. It was a classic self-balancing null potentiometer thing. Really cool.

Previous to that, DVMs were big rackmount things with telephone-type stepping relays in a Kelvin-Varley setup. Expensive and noisy.

--

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

Wow, a digital analogue computer. Kewl. Your next assignment is an analogue digital computer. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

rs

o a s .

That company is going to go bust. Read C. Northcote Parkinson on "injellitis".

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I haven't shaved since I moved to Vermont ('93). Beards are quite common, year around, there. Since I've moved South, I still don't see a good reason. What's the problem with beards in the summer?

Nonsense. Do any design engineers wear suits and ties today? I se

*far* more in grungy T-shirts, shorts, and sandals (though I wear Oxford shirts, black slacks, and black sneakers ;-).

A bit old fashioned, even then. When I got stuck with the same problem in 1975, I used a pair of CD4040's to make a 10-bit PW modulated waveform, and low-pass filtered the hell out of the output. A couple of NiCd cells froze the phase relationship between the two counters when the power was off.

Motorised pots are cute, but long past their sell-by date. In fact I was replacing a motorised LVRT - which didn't suffer from brush wear.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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This is not good advice. Nobody attaches much value to anything they get for nothing. If you take the attitude that your contribution is worthless, the people taking advantage of that contribution are likely to share that attitude.

I'd prefer to negotiate a price up front, perhaps with performance penalties and incentives, but you can't have one without the other.

New employees don't have much of a track record, and correspondingly little leverage when bargaining. Experienced engineers have rather more to offer.

Of course you have to find somebody interested enough to want to negotiate in the first place, and I've yet to get even that far.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Well, excuse me. Clearly you know more about finding customers and employers than I do.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Yes probably a bit old fashioned, designed 10 years before that I expect. I think it was a retrofit to an existing controller, so it needed to replace an existing manual control with that same (but unmotorised) dial-pot on the front panel.

It did have some advantages. The motor could be switched off and the same control used manually, it was easy for the machine operators to understand what what was going on. Well, once they stopped blaming the night shift for changing the setting!

--

John Devereux

--
I quit in 1968. 

news:6rup989h7paro6748p5q3no22dp8jppt4g@4ax.com

--- You're right, I'm not ;), but even if I were, it wouldn't be any of your business, and I'd have to deny it in order to keep loose lips from sinking ships.

But, just for your engineering enjoyment, here's a little freebie I did a week or so ago for a mate across the pond:

news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com

Need a BOM?, ECNs?, manual?, Gerbers? mechanical drawings?, assembly instructions?, circuit description? ;)

-- JF

How many different employers have you had since you graduated? I may well have found more of them than you have.

Finding customers as an established business is a rather different task from finding customers for a start up.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Six, plus two before I graduated.

You'll never know if you don't try. As a consultant, with your presumed skills, I'd think it would be fairly easy to get a goodly amount of interesting work. It's your attitude that prevents that.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

This was more than a decade ago. The company and Mech mgr are both doing just fine. The Eng mgr cleared out shortly after I did, to academia.

I never had the sheepskins.......which may have had something to do with it, but including this info would have made the tale and any attached lesson much too obvious. If you're not a wolf, why would you need 'em?

RL

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Eleven, plus two before I graduated.

Being realistic is inhibiting. I've had to cope with that all my life.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I just love those skyhook power sources. Especially when they're monitoring and indicating mains power failures.

RL

--

My "client" understood Vcc is supplied by a 12V battery; part of an 
alarm panel. 

The rest of the world? 

Well, it's certainly OK to ask... ;)