the high voltage pulse generator

What is this "mil" you refer to here? It's certainly not a millimetre from what I can gather. Is it a slang term of one hundreth of one of your ancient & obsolete inches?

I would get shot. It's two boards, pretty small, poker card size.

Guns are better at degaussing stuff. A loop or two of #12 wire works wonders. ;-)

For the imperially challenged, as Phil Hobbs once put it: It is one thousandth of an inch. Machinists often refer to is as a "thou".

Nothing obsolete about that. When you work in aerospace it is used even overseas.

It's 1/1000 of an ancient and obsolete British unit.

Which we used to invent ancient and obsolete things like light bulbs and lasers and airplanes and ICs.

In the IC layout business, it was once a standard that there were exactly 25 microns per mil.

Then it's high time you adopted the Metric system which is superior in every way. We use nothing else in the most technically-advanced nations like Germany and Japan.

Why? Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean the unit doesn't work.

Face it John, the world is confused.

The smart money adds a layer of conformal coating.

We use SI units for all scientific and engineering calcs, except we still use inches for PCB layout and sheet metal design. We still cook in imperial units.

Maybe some day we can be a technically advanced country, too.

I suppose Volkswagen did all their cheating in metric units.

That's expensive and messy and hard to probe or rework. The part data sheets didn't specify coating when they did the voltage ratings.

It is when it comes to creepage. The datasheets assume clean surfaces with no oil monolayers or humidity layers plus dust , whatever.

Conformal coating is just a buzzword, what you want is an insulating layer over the conductors, keeps crap on the other side. A spray can of Krylon will work fine, Clear Polyurethane, etc.

Yes, and you Germans and Japanese did well putting a man on the Moon. Oh, right, that was us backwards imperialist. When we mixed metric and imperial, we crashed.

Wishful thinking; several kinds of inch-dimension fasteners are still NATO standard, and Germany, quietly, HAS adopted 'em. The '7.62mm' markings on lots of thirty caliber goods is called a 'soft conversion' from inches.

Reflect, too, on all the DIP packages with 0.100 inch pin spacing, 7.62mm between rows...

Yes, but you keep some handy units around. Remind me, what the colloquial name for 500g? Pound or something similar.

In the UK in the building trade we have the worst of both worlds: hard metric and soft metric. Wall tiles come in either size: hard metric is 150mm, and soft metric is 154mm=6".

In 1971 the UK we converted currency from LSD to decimal. There was a concern that old people wouldn't be able to cope. The best suggestion was to let them all die before converting; looks like that approach is being adopted in the building trade!

I remember pricing up my toy train collection just before decimalisation. I rapidly became very very grateful I hadn't used LSD, because I would have died of boredom before finishing.

The only disadvantage of decimalisation was that you no longer had the pleasure of looking at the coins in your pocket and finding some that had been in circulation for over a century. The earliest I found was minted in 1863.

I think you mean /extra/ /unprofitable/ /boring/ work. Do you still measure capacitance in Jars? 1Jar = 1111pF.

And let's not think about about the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Was that stopped by the Mars Climate Orbiter after 1998?

Unfortunately /all/ car companies have been gaming the tests.

Classic example when measuring the fuel consumption is to carefully choose a day when weather is "right", to remove wing mirrors and tape up all gaps (e.g. round doors) to reduce "form drag".

Ouch! I'll bet that stung! :-D

On 27 Mar 2016 17:58:26 -0700, Winfield Hill Gave us:

We coated or potted anything over a 1000 V.