X5R vs X7R MLCC

WHERE IS PIN 1 ???!!!!

Not today's undergrads, though. Probably not even today's post-grads.

the defect was in making it compulsory rather than an option. Understanding the physics inside a transistor is zero use to anyone that doesn't design ICs. I already knew what my chosen area was.

It was a big improvement on what I saw of the Cambridge course though, which seemed to consist too much of proving the theorems that are the starting point for electronic design. Mathematically proving them is not relevant if you want to design circuits.

no, it just went over old ground. Weird that you missed that.

I don't resent it, I needed the paperwork, it was just very wasteful.

no, just the maths & solid state physics.

seems so

too long ago to remember.

Not one I've seen in a textbook. I know it had a diode in it. Twas a long time ago.

exactly. You need both.

NT

Design isn't analysis. Original design requires instincts for electronics, which is best learned young, certainly before college. It's like learning languages, much easier for kids.

My uncle Sheldon had a TV repair shop and a shed full of stolen military electronics. He liked me and we built crystal sets, power supplies, neon oscillators, all sorts of stuff. Parts were basically free. When I got to EE school, I already *felt* things and the math was a revelation. The other guys in the class just kept their heads down, took notes, and forgot the stuff after finals.

There is certainly genetic predisposition for electronic design, as there is for languages and sports and most other things.

There is a private high school around here, tuition around $60K or something crazy like that, where electronics and machining and welding are mandatory courses. Everybody should have some familiarity with that stuff.

We sneaked out early and faked a lot of our lab results. Knowing how to convincingly fake an experiment is as good as doing it. In our case, better.

In 1900, something like 1% of the US population went to college. Now about 65% start at a college, and about half of those get a batchelor's degree. In the last few decades, colleges (and the associated subsidies and the student loan industry) have transitioned from being academic to being big-money degree mill businesses.

Barristas and shoe salesman with degrees. Welders and plumbers make many times more.

You can equip a good home lab for well under $1000. Probably better than the average EE school lab, and you can put in all the hours that you want, any time that's convenient. If something in the course work is interesting, but there is no assigned lab to follow up, do it yourself. I did and learned a lot. The key here is the interest, not the equipment.

When tuition is $60K, a grand is peanuts.

Even new stuff, Rigol and Extech and such, is good and cheap.

My Omega thermocouple meter developed a bad connector so I bought a replacement from Amazon. It's better: two channels, delta-T display, multiple t/c types, min/max, and lower EMI sensitivity, for $20, about

The only books we couldn't get were in a small "adult" section. Why would anyone not allow a kid to read about electronics?

And about instincts. Colleges furnish the math.

LT Spice is wonderful. I've designed radical things by fiddling with hunches, simulating first and understanding later. We make some great products that I still don't understand.

I took two semisters of EM field theroy, and we never considered stuff like propagation in multilayer planar structures, even microstrip-like geometries. Free-space, tensors and divergences and curls, was hard enough. They did mention waveguides.

We want names and model numbers.

It's silly to diss math. It was the math that enabled me, with my brand-new physics-and-astronomy degree and only a hobby electronics background, to do 75% of the time-and-frequency boards for the first commercial satcom system, circa 1981. I'd heard of PLLs but had never seen one and certainly had never designed one.

I'm forever grateful to that place (Microtel Pacific Research, RIP) for believing in me enough to chuck me in the deep end like that. I could never have done that without the math background. (I then went off to grad school and did a bunch of RF stuff for laser heterodyne microscopes.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Roight.

And is pin 2 across from it, or are the pins numbered counterclockwise like ICs, or is it down one side, back up, and down the other?

I've seen all three, but the drawings don't make it very clear!

Headers are

etc.

D-subs are

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Today, sure. I paid $400 1973-dollars for a calculator (IIRC, you did the same). A decent oscilloscope cost 20x more at the time. I suspect few college students have room for a lab in their dorm rooms, though. I was never in a dorm, so may be wrong. I guess it's about priorities - who needs a bed, anyway.

It's amazing what a "feel" for the subject does on an exam. I never got chemistry so sucked wind both semesters. I guess the semester of QM and optics (really!) was about the same.

Four of forty? My graduating class was 100x that.

Our labs were _very_ well equipped and stocked. I had keys to all of the EE labs, so...

Slums have nothing to do with it. I have zero interest in ever visiting China or 90+% of the rest of the world, for that matter. I've managed to avoid China, professionally as well. I barely escaped (medical reasons) a three week hell in Japan last year.

Right. I didn't consider that anyone actually made SMT stuff without P&P.

No interest.

I don't see that happening. Perhaps some push-down for very high volume applications but not as a general case. There will always be a premium for custom IC processing. Maybe less of a premium with time but never zero.

Amazingly, pin-2 is almost as hard to find.

John Larkin talking about design is like a blind man talking about colour.

And you've got twin studies to prove it?

show that we now have enough data to show that psychological behavior is about 80% heritable (which means about half of what you see is inherited).

We also have enough data to know that there are a huge number of very small genetic difference that add or subtract, so what make one person good at electronic design isn't going to be the same collection of tiny advantages that makes somebody else good.

Perhaps. I got wood-working - my great-grandfather was a builder and joiner, and some family influence worked through - but many people aren't handy with tools, and it's not altogether clear that everybody can be.

unaware

out it.

eaching.

at

I'm

side,

ou ignore either one of theory & practice. When students sit in lectures he aring about circuits they fail to relate it to things they know, and fail t o grasp much of what's being said, and forget it soon after. It's just not an approach that works at all well.

incompetent. Schools especially need a total overhaul from top to bottom.

nt approaches. I don't relate to the learn it all in uni then practice a li ttle style, and watched people that did look like rabbits caught in headlig hts when asked to design & make something.

g in the lab was a huge waste of time & did the project at home. From the l imited amount I've seen of unis they seem to miss out that cost effective w ay for students to learn. And they entirely fail to motivate students to do so.

Not true. Faking an experiment requires different skills from doing it - th ey can be useful skills, but you weren't doing the experiment to exercise t hose particular skills.

They may be useful in a business environment, until you get caught, and whi le Trump's businesses have a nasty habit of failing big-time, he doesn't se em to have been caught yet.