Thinking process involved when designing analog electronic circuits

Either you do not have the right smiley for that or your suggestion is out of line. 'scopes am full of tricky stuff. The whole point of [hobby] kits is to have easy early success.

If they are ever going to be any good, they must build a few things. I have tried to teach SPICE crippled fools too often.

LTSpice has good value. It is far from the best. The included libraries are obviously targeted at increasing sales. Nor does it have even nearly adequate modeling tools. Nor does is it conveniently do hierarchical designs.

Quick translation, no smoke when you make a mistake, no reward when you correctly handle the real world. Such is simulation.

For a lot of people that is far quicker learned experimentally than through countless imaginary situations.

You would not miss some good candidates is you more generically required SPICE files with _all_ device models included. You would probably catch some superior ones this way.

Fun -- just a couple ten miles south of me. (Not at liberty to divulge the party, I suppose?)

Tim

On a sunny day (Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:30:05 -0800) it happened JosephKK wrote in :

Why, building a simple scope is easy. I have done several.

OK, in that time you used a statically deflected tube,

So, yes it is easy to make a basic scope. These days with a FPGA you van make a nice 100MHz digital scope:

Not to mention tools like measuring sticks (triangular scale), parallels, PMP arm, and templates for speed. By the time i got to do serious drafting, many years ago, they were switching out vellum to chronoflex. And xerox type photocopiers were making inroads on the ozalid process at 22 by 34 and 24 by 36 inches.

Hamilton Sundstrand, with a couple of P&W guys there, too. I have never met a doofus or a jerk from either company... I don't know how they do that.

John

The need for that tight of tracking is topology dependent. Not really needed for any smart choices of topology.

Samplers can get a little tricky.

Sure, after 5 to 6 figures of NRE. Kind of makes it real important to have good models and get it right before committing to silicon.

Just on the side, i like nice schematics so i use CAD. With the right packages SPICE and some other simulators are included (or more often the other way around). Either way, i get the tools together. Though i can do it with a pencil and paper when i desire. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the tools do not do the design, they are just tools and have limitations.

Must have been situational, at least i had serial line 300/1200 baud modems when i started. A few years later i put a new (at the time)

Hell, you almost sound like Jeff L. 'e hosts "LearnByDestroying".

Crap? The Digikey catalog is the best toy box ever invented. The "crap" we see is most often linear and mixed-signal ICs with bugs... bizarre behavior, latchup, bad documentation, sometimes outright failures.

A lot of board design is connecting boxes. But there's still a lot of component-level stuff going on, at the pcb level, especially for power and high-speed applications. Those cheap gumdrop ICs enable us to simplify the easy stuff and either do more radical discrete circuits, or move up the abstraction stack.

John

You need a reference at least as good as what you're measuring.

Not to mention TAT.

transistor.

Gosh with all that wonderful success why don't you go into the business of making hobbyist kits? Who knows, you might become the next "Heathkit". Try it, why don't ya?

On a sunny day (Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:59:33 -0800) it happened JosephKK wrote in :

transistor.

Idiot. PLONK

The first time I saw one of those, I asked the guy, "Is that so you can make 100 mistakes a minute?"

He didn't laugh.

Cheers! Rich

A personnel guy who knows his elbow from a hole in the ground? ;-)

Cheers! Rich

On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:22:11 -0800, Ken S. Tucker wrote: ... It's function is to communicate.

This sentence two verb.

Cheers!