Who is your favourite electronics guru?

It's not only true but also obvious - put a diode in series with the charging or discharing resistance, and the capacitor is effectively ramping towards the rail voltage minus the - loosely toleranced and temperature dependent - diode drop, which makes the monostable period less stable and less predictable. Your switching thresholds are still directly derived from the rails by those shoddy diffused resistors ...

pitfalls

designer.

Since you seem to be blissfully unaware of the problem, I wonder where you find your equally undiscriminating customers - this doesn't sound like a party it would be safe to attend.

Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the 555-circuit designers party ?

No, it fits right in. He claims that people always get existing circuits and tweak them slightly. Spice is ideal for people who do that; you don't have to imagine anything, create anything, or understand anything. And, as he suggests, it's not a lot of fun.

John

In message , dated Tue, 15 Aug 2006, John Larkin writes

Oh, I don't know; I don't expect to re-invent many wheels. I like to make better and/or cheaper wheels.

Strong emotions (fear, anger, love, etc) release some kind of hormones that stimulate synapse growth.

Cheers! Rich

Someone with an adequate comand of the language would have written

"Well, even if it were true that I don't seem to be aware of the nasty side-effects of the magic diode, you seem to think _you_ ARE,"

What was actually posted was

">Not likely - you don't seem to be aware of the nasty side-effects of >the magic diode.

Well, I'm a circuit designer. So that's what I do. I don't like to copy anybody's circuits, including my own.

John

Sure I do. I've done a spot of textual analysis and you are now trying bluster you way out of what you originally wrote.

As it was. You can twist all you like, but you've skewered yourself.

I leave that to the rest of the group. "Cute" technical tricks that screw up the stablity and settabllity of the device should come with customer health warning - this trick has side-effects.

The OP didn't specify the precision he wanted, which doesn't tell you anything about the precision he needed - that sort of information has to be extracted from the customer, which can be a tedious and frstrating business.

re-education - I spent a while playing with the part back in 1974.

Hans Camenzind developed the device back in 1971, so you might have got in first. Not that it was prime real estate, even back then.

That cried out for it in a voice that only you could hear.

did, so I

Your problem is you think that the 555 and its near relatives are the only tools available.

I'd be most unlikely to use a 4047 or a 555 in almost any application - I've not done so in the past, so the chances that I will do so in the future are equally low.

The reason isn't that I've got a pathological fear of the 555 - far from it - but that the applications I've had to deal with don't call for devices like the 555 or the 4047.

The fact that you seem to run into such applications regularly may say something about your environment, but probably says more about your work habits.

In the Claromexico thread, you just told the OP to use google - where both John Woodgate and I did use google before we posted and mentioned that it didn't come up with anything useful - exposing a certain lack of enterprise on your part.

the pitfalls

designer.

I'd be surprised it anybody who was looking for your kind of expertise would search for it outside of Texas, let alone outside of the US. The fact that they haven't search long enough to find someone better than you doesn't say much for their persistence or their search skills.

You got the gender wrong, and she will punish you for it.

In message , dated Tue, 15 Aug 2006, John Larkin writes

I can't see the logic in that. One of the things I do often is a precision full-wave rectifier for audio signal. Should I try to find a new way of doing it every time I need one?

In message , dated Tue, 15 Aug 2006, John Fields writes

I don't agree; it's a case where it's quite OK in English to use the 'generic' verb 'do'.

But haven't you exhausted this spat?

Forrest M. Mims III :)

T> Hi all,

at 8Mhz it looks kind of slow.

ATTiny2313 does 20Mhz and multiplies 8x8 in 2 cycles (most op-codes are 1 cycle)

no 16/8 divide though - that'd take 40 cycles or so in software.

Yeah the architecure looks much like the 68hc11.

This isn't about which verb is correct, its about verb agreement between phrases within the sentence. John Fields wants to claim that he didn't mean what he said, but his attempt to expand his original sentence into something unincriminating falls down on verb agreement.

You are quite right about the spat having gone on too long, but John Fields is seldom gracious enough to stick his neck out quite so invitingly.

So does serious repetition of any very specific movement, (golf swing, bowling throw, card handling) produces synapse growth. I suppose you have heard of "practice promotes proficiency".

Logic? Design isn't logic, it's a spiritual experience. [1]

John

He seems to be in that "Don Lancaster" camp where clearly he knows a lot about electronics and can communicate clearly and reasonably eloquently (but doesn't come off as a bit of a crank as Don can :-) ), yet I don't think he's in that "low-level circuit designer" category that John Fields, John Larkin, Joerg, Jim, etc. are -- he's working "one level up," so to speak. Oh, and he uses plenty of 555's, so that's sure to piss someone off.

Anyone remember Mims' "amateur home scientist" magazine, whatever it was called? Neat idea, although somewhat short-lived... in retrospect it almost seems like a forerunner to the current O'Reily Make magazine.

Hmm... anyone have an opinion on Joe Carr? It's hard for me to get a handle on his level of technical expertise, since he seems to copy and paste not only his own designs but many others into the books that he seems to release on a very regular basis... Carr reminds me a little of Colin Mitchell of Talking Electronics (Australia) fame, who wrote such rot some years back about how compact fluorescent lights would never become commonplace becasue they cost too much and produced too little light!

I'd vote for Doug DeMaw being a very good circuit designer/guru.

---Joel