USB microscopes for very small SMT

Hmm... what did you ask for at Christmas? Sweaters and socks? :-)

---Joel

Lulu.com is your friend? I seem to recall first hearing of Lulu from John Larkin, so perhaps that's where his books will end up...

I've personally purchased just one book from Lulu, but the quality was fine and the price reasonable.

---Joel

As an author you do have to pay some fees there. But hopefully those won't be too steep for someone who is retired or semi-retired.

Actually I rarely asked. On occasions where I did it was things like a Philips Experimenter's kit when I was a kid. Asked for the small one and then Santa got me EE-20, the big one. Yeehaw! My father had a good sense of what a kid on the more nerdy side needed. One of the best presents was a Texas SR-50 calculator. That blew me away because it was freaking expensive back then. I had already mentally prepared myself for having to use ye olde log table book for another five years or so. No more ... and now my projects really took off since this calculator slashed the number crunching efforts, big time. Before I had the calculator I'd often be lazy, eyeball an LC resonance, was off by a factor of x and

On a sunny day (Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:08:44 -0500) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :

Been online much longer then 10 years. Things stay, sometimes even if you do not want it. Had to threaten an old ISP with a law suit because they removed the old site by just removing 'index.html' in the root, and leaving everything else, so people started downloading old version of my programs via google links... Then people will store on hard disk, google keeps things, and I have most programs of ftp://sunsite.unc.edu, and I noticed a lot of stuff there from others from 1998 etc.. Look at the dates: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/electronic-publications/ Books, forget about books. I buy no books.

And there is excellent test equipment on ebay, things that were $30k boxes when I was first learning some electronics. Stuff I only dreamed about having when reading Art of Electronics, ~25 years ago!

There's LTSpice too. That should be a great, free learning tool (provided of course it is backed up with hands-on experiments with real circuits).

I can tell. ;)

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Yes, but as a hobbyist you've got to have the space. Plus an understanding spouse, considering that the good stuff among such gear still fetches a few thousand Dollars. Also, be prepared to search for the non-volatile RAM battery and to do some gross "debulking" in that area. Cleaning a caked-in frying pan is nothing compared to that. The gear has often been shelved for a decade and nobody bothered to power it up once in a while.

Handle with care. Often I've seen people using sims too much and then I heard things like a loud bang and "Oh s..t, those ferrite transformers kill my FETs like flies!"

On a sunny day (Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:38:29 -0500) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :

hmmm, I learned electronics at a special school. They had no books, just printouts, at that time stencils. You can argue against that, but he field moved so fast even then, that that was a clever thing to do. And it was cheaper too. I have shelves full of books, and magazines, but more then 10 years old. Also old data books, and some nice stuff like the National Audio handbook. Nice stuff about programming, and hardware, 'Microprocessor Interface Techniques' for example. And some stuff about financial markets.

No, I would not buy any book, neither would I go for a text cut in stone, a la Flintstones. And think about them poor old trees, and the fire hazard all that paper is ;-) And the dead weight. This is the age of the Internet, think of your computer as a terminal to a huge database. If you want to read literature: ever heard of Project Gutenberg?

I seem to have reached the other side of that age thing... people comment, "You don't look that old".

I hope they're not lying :-(

Wa-a-a-ay back when my daughters were around 10 and 12 (around 36 years ago), one remarked, "Dad, You look so extinguished" ;-)

(For really, that's the word she used ;-)

I started getting my beard "tinted", then the hair... then I kissed it all off... what you see is what you get... I'm 100% "silver" ;-)

From my past...

Newsgroups: alt.binaries.schematics.electronic Subject: Micro-Rel Badge - Micro-Rel-Badge.jpg Message-ID:

...Jim Thompson

of

microcontrollers:

run

on

it

even

day

Ah but they do. Witness this sub thread.

most

stuff

According to the dealers they are not buying again. Bet they are just driving them again.

I know :-(

I'm still a couple of years from graduation, but the real problem is we are litterally an ocean apart. But thank you, i might just do it anyway!

I apologise.

I said book, but is not really "book" "book", sorry, for that, i wanted to transmit an idea, that's why i mentioned the HP Journal, instead of a full blown hard-cover book, i sugest someting like "articles", small snipets, that are self contained, whith a whole story, tutorial, insider look, aproach, whatever, that you can write in a few hours and put it on the web, or on your hard disk with instructions for it's release. That way it's done while it's fresh and you have the details on your mind.

Setting yourselves to write a real book is a task that will be delegated until "i have time" but, by then many ideas will have faded/forgotten to provide enough material.

Best Regards Steve Sousa

On a sunny day (Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:08:44 -0500) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in : For 10 years, then *phut*. No archival copies. Old books are always

And the times, they are changing: The European electronic library was taken offline again, because the servers were overloaded: They are soon starting up again:

Steve Sousa expounded in news:49408704$0$33702$ snipped-for-privacy@auth.newsreader.octanews.com:

..

..

This also seems to be a problem in the software world as well.. no kids graduating want to do software. They want to go straight into management if they go IT at all.

So when the rest of us are left on life support systems, both the electronics and the sofware will be suspect...

beep beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep...

Maybe they'll be doing us a favour ;-)

Snark.

Joerg expounded in news:XNb0l.6463$ snipped-for-privacy@flpi149.ffdc.sbc.com:

..

We had Poly Paks. Remember them? I bought my first stereo FM receiver from them (I think) busted in half. I actually bought two of them, and somehow managed to piece one back together.

I wasn't clever enough as a kid to do much RF stuff, but my mother sure got tired of me dragging TV sets home from the end of someone else's driveway, on the way home from school! I got a lot of parts that way. We even used to have a tube tester at the corner, inside the local gas station. People would find that inconceivable these days ;-)

I do feel that things are very convenient now. We now have powerful computerS (we didn't even dream of one at home when I was a kid), we have the SPICE simulator, uCPU on a chip, memory sticks and free operating systems with source code.

I'm just getting back into building myself, after a long hiatus raising kids. I do software development as my day job, but I miss my quality soldering iron time ;-) I am also a presently inactive ham.

I'm currently building an analog synth, a la Moog. It combines uCPU (midi) and the analog. I haven't had this much electronic fun in ages. The Arduino project makes it easier than ever for the digital end of it.

The Internet was something we also didn't dream of as kids. What a wonderful information resource this is! Pinouts and specs at the drop of a hat! Schematics, ideas and advice (good and bad).

Snark.

Jim Thompson expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I'm a long way from 70, but I felt really funny getting my first senior's discount the other day. (I'm not a senior yet). Stupid girl! ;-)

Hilarious.

Snark.

I grew up in Europe, all we had was Heathkit. That was expensive so we built everything from discarded consumer electronics.

Same here. Every other month there was a bulk waste collection. I always knew exactly where and when that happened and then told my mom I'd be coming home from school a bit late.