Electronic Design Guidelines.

"The Art of Electronics", 2nd Ed. Horowitz and Hill.

A bit dated in the microprocessor section, but still the best available. You'll not regret buying it.

Some things you just get from experience too, particularly if you had to repair older stuff that came back.

For example placing electrolytic caps beside a heat source such as a regulator is a problem in a couple of years..... heat dries up cap, capacitance goes down.... failure in some years. Parts that produce plenty of heat are going to expand/contract/expand/contract as equipment is turned on/of constantly.... I've seen loose connections where the solder joints twisting apart due to metal fatigue. Not so bad with thru/hole parts, but now with ceramic parts, there is very little space for flexing. Just because a part is rated for 1/4watt doesn't mean you should put 1/4watt thru it, because in a couple years, possibly, the solder joint is open.

Some things you simply have to gain from experience. Pity to the engineers who don't get their hands dirty once in a while and see what happens in a production environment but have only staed in the lab... never seeing the results of their work. :-( If you have access to manufacturing and repair, I highly suggest taking a wander thru them every now and then, ask questions of the people doing the work ;-)

Hope that helps. Cheers!

"Amused" wrote

Amen to that!

Perhaps:

"The Design analsis Handbook; A pracitcal Guide To Design Validation" N Edward Walker Newnes publication ISBN 0-7506-9088-7

I found it to be a good hands on introduction book.

regards rob

Absolutely.

I fully agree. My own experience support this as we work as close as possible with service and manufacturing people (though the plant is in Manaus and I am in Sao Paulo :-) ) when designing. Not to mention field research to check on problems which we learn a lot from.

Yet it's quite easy to forget some important things when writing a guideline document.

Thanks and Regards.

Elder.

That starts with the profession. While electronic engineers tend to stay well below the rated specifications, physicists tend to allow 10, 20% more than specified. The later care less about the lifetime and have it repaired by someone else.

Rene

Try "The Circuit Designer's Companion" by Tim Williams.

TomD

Mad@Spammers wrote:

Don't knock the dead tree medium. A short while ago I bought a book dated 1854. Immediately accessible using current hardware/ software setup. Try doing that with almost any electronic medium from 1974. (punched tape anyone?)

Paul Burke

Once you are familiar with the hex codings for the ascii char set, it is fairly easy to read 7 + parity punched tape with the Mark I Eyeball. I haven't practiced this for some time, though. Parity errors tend to slip through.

Now, 7 track 200 BPI mag tapes ....

I don't think he was. When I really need to comprehend a file, I print it.

In school I programmed a Bendix G-15 tube computer to punch 5x5 dot matrix characters (I even generated the character set) onto 5 channel paper tape, then wrote a scroll to my girlfriend. It would still be readable if it was saved (not likely).

I once saw a viewing device that looked similar to a liquid crystal panel, except that the liquid had magnetic particles so that you could view digital mag tape recordings! It was basically a go/no-go kind of indicator. You could locate the inter-record gaps and tell if it was recorded with 7 tracks or 9 tracks. I doubt I could read the characters, even at 200 bpi, although you could probably spot a string of blanks.

Thad

Wow! I wrote mine to punch 5x7's and wasted altogether too much tape. I still have some of my old G-15 tapes - including an Intercom 1000D program used to plot a heart on a Calcomp drum plotter for my then-girlfriend.

Somewhere in storage I have a tape splicer and a bunch of mylar splices ( just in case the technology makes a comeback :-)

BTW, I (still) type (s)c7q89vz faster than any other character sequence.