USB microscopes for very small SMT

Maybe I'm having selective memories, but I remember seeing cars get mileages in a really close ballpark as these EPA numbers; they just kept them tuned properly!!

I had a 1.6L Pinto once, and routinely got about 30 on the highway - that's a kinda rough estimate; I had an 8-gallon tank and could go at least 240 miles. Admittedly, it's a small car, but I know how to drive, so it was never in any danger of getting run over. >:->

Cheeers! Rich

But the quality of toasters has improved significantly with microcontrollers: I remember as a kid, it was uncommon to find a toaster that would let you run through multiple pieces of bread without them getting lighter and lighter on each cycle, until by the 4th or 5th cycle the entire toaster was so hot it would only "toast" for, say, 10 seconds before popping up the bread again even on the darkest setting.

To some extent this was probably due to our buying cheap toasters... we probably went through a half-dozen sub-$20 toasters until my mother one day bought a nice Braun unit... but of course in the store you have no way of knowing how good the toaster really is, regardless of the price.

Today most toasters just don't have this problem anyway. It's a case where while, sure, 25 years ago there certainly were good toasters, there was also a lot of crap... whereas today I believe that dirt-cheap microcontroller-based toasters perform just about as well as the best anachronisms you might sitll have around.

They perhaps didn't do much torture testing before they started selling it. I've worked at several places where, if the widget worked at room temperature, you shipped it... and let your customers tell you -- via warranty exchanges! -- thaat it didn't work so well in, e.g., Alaska or Arizona.

---Joel

Two cups of water in a small pot. Bring to boil. Add a bit of butter and a little salt. While stirring, add rice. Reduce to very slow simmer, cover, and wait 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and wait another

10 minutes.

Jasmine rice is best.

That's it.

John

Most programmers spend a lot more time debugging than coding, and still leave bugs. So they are misapplying their resources.

John

That's true. Extreme Programming, test-driven design, and other approaches are designed to reign in the hotshots who Live To Code.

Personally I do most of my stuff in a mixture of fairly archaic C++ style (classes + templates but no exceptions, RTTI, or STL) and scripting languages. REXX is my favourite, because I'm about 10 times faster in REXX than in C++. My big-iron clusterized EM simulator is written that way.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I've become a big fan of my little Zojirushi cooker. It just works. I'd really recommend giving a real [*] rice cooker a try.

But jasmine rice? Oh yes, little elephant, oh yes. Wonderful stuff!

[*] "real" in this context meaning that the wording embossed on the dew cup doesn't use a roman typeface. Black and Decker may make great socket wrenches but I'll go with Japanese rice cookers. ;-)

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

One cup of rice, that is.

John

Of course pointers are dangerous; look at how much damage they do. The real problem with a pointer is that only program history suggests where and what it might point at. If anything.

We need a computing language that is optimized to avoid mistakes. It would look a lot more like Cobol than C++. Programmers would hate it.

Only a fraction of C programmers are competent to program in C. The rest keep doing it.

John

significantly

That's the real problem. Most programmers are entranced by the mental puzzles associated with program flows and structures. The actual application is often just the camel they ride around on. I've seen too many programmers who wrote tons of fancy code without first determining what the program and process were actually supposed to do; they didn't actually care. Finding that stuff out would involve working with people.

I program PC apps in PowerBasic and embedded stuff in 68K assembler. It's tedious, but it gets done quick, runs fast, is brutally documented, and has no bugs. I pretty much hate to program, which is why I get it over with, correctly, as soon as I can. I *read* and tweak the code and comments several times before I run it, and I debug about 5% as much as I code. When I finish a piece of code, I can move on to stuff I really enjoy; a full-time programmer looks forward to more of the same, for the rest of his career, so naturally he is primarily concerned with the process, not with the product.

John

Too many gadgets! If the power goes out in the next earthquake, I can still cook, make coffee, make rice or grits, bake potatoes, fry eggs, do most anything on the gas barbecue.

John

Each to their own, i still do add & subtract to 5 digits in my head,

2-3 digits by 2-3 digits multiply in my head, divide on pencil and paper (up to 3 digits divisor and up to 8 digits dividend and quotient), low accuracy (~2 digits) log, antilog in my head, low grade circular functions (+/- 20%) in my head, and square roots on paper. I used to do much better. Then again, my memorized data tables are dying from nonuse. Just the same i still grab a calculator (or flip to the one on my computer desktop, yes, it is always present) if more than that is wanted.

That barely begins to be able to address the opportunities for analysis that become available by using composition and decomposition. Take any tough problem, break it into chunks that are easier to understand, and then reassemble them and work with the assembly to get to system behavior. This is the very basis of finite element analysis style computer programs. This also describes SPICE in some ways.

The Grand Ole Opry is performing at the historic Ryman Auditorium for the next couple months. t was built long before electronic amplification, and has some amazing acoustics. It was originally built as a revival hall, and designed by the world's best acoustic engineers of the day.

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There are two kinds of people on this earth:
The crazy, and the insane.
The first sign of insanity is denying that you\'re crazy.

On a sunny day (Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:58:46 GMT) it happened Rich Grise wrote in :

One person rice: Small bowl, fill with water, 1 minute 40 seconds to heat it. Now add 3 or 4 spoons rice. Then, depending on the type of rice, White fast cooking 15 minutes at 50%. Brown rice, 45 minutes at 50%. etc. If you took the right amount of water, then the rice will be just right and dry, you can then simply eat it without having to poor of any water.

On a sunny day (Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:44:27 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Are you guys for real ;-)???

been using pointers since I dunno when. Fun is in double linked hashed lists...you really have to think where the pointers in list elements point to.

But that *is* programming. A pointer is just a memory address holding a memory address. If you do not know what a memory address is, then you should not be programming!

You may need to free allocated memory, sometimes freed areas are referenced by other parts of the program causing unexpected results. So you have to be clear in your head what you are doing, just like when doing any other thing. That is part of programming is it not? You do not write random asm either I'd think.

No, John, one day you should start using C too. Porting to some other architecture is so much easier.

Ah, we are getting to the point some here: The dumbest do not learn from their own mistakes. Only learning from your mistakes is not smart yet. The beginning of smart is learning from others mistakes. The journey level of smart learns from others successes as well. The master level is when you embody learning by all means possible and teaching accordingly.

Sadly, the world is now quite deficient of masters and journey level people.

--
What a shame.

Not to deny you your hate of programming, but I love doing it.

Setting up housekeeping, designing the application\'s status register,
allocating space for the variables and the magic numbers, and assigning
the IOs are all, to me, equivalent to creating a living being.

YMMV

These guys make nice fully automatic rice cookers that work that way-- perfect rice every time, and they keep it warm after making it:

I have the Neuro-Fuzzy controlled conventionally heated model... the induction heated ones are probably a further improvement.

They're not insanely expensive-- newegg carries them.

Cheap knock-off types from Black and Decker etc. work okay too, just not quite as nice. As cheap as $14. I bought a National (Matsushita/Panasonic) type in University that still works okay. This type uses a snap-action thermostat to detect (over) heating at the middle of the cooking bowl and shut the cycle down. There's a round combined sprung heater and thermostat that contacts the bottom of the removable bowl. Mine is so old the bowl isn't even non-stick, which I wouldn't recommend.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

nothing else).

audio

pretty much bug free.

tested in the past.

'hardware bloat'.

But it has. There used to be a joke in the IC world "What do you do with a million transistors?" Perhaps a 486dx2? a 512kbit memory? It is within working professionals memory that 1 GB of ram was supercomputer territory, now you need that much for a home PC. Hardware bloat and software bloat are going hand in hand.