Electro-ramblings

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Early last year I took a look at a Cree led - Ledil lens combination and mentioned that it looked like a good basis for a caving lamp.

I also said that I would hesitate to make such a lamp in view of the consequences should it break deep underground.

At the time, a real caver responded
 - a caver who makes caving lights, no less.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Those clever robot designers at Boston Dynamics in the US, together with Sandia Labs, have created a shoe box-sized vehicle that can jump over obstacles 7m high.

For military use, and intended to be finished this year, the Precision Urban Hopper can jump over or on to as many as 30 obstacles that are 40-60 times its own height.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Got stuck on a train in the snow a week or so ago

The driver was great.

He told us exactly what the problem was, and exactly what he was going to do about it, and then he did it.

The problem was that the live rail was icy and the pick-up could not get enough power.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

I take my hat off to those who have to measure to extreme accuracies.

I came across slightly long winded but interesting paper on a US website that shows just what a bugger it is.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

In mindlessly browsing Wikipedia after my last blog on metrology, I came across something that I am hoping is true

In this article on English units of measure, it claims that the length of a barley seed - a barleycorn - was once the standard from which English measurement was derived, and that it is still in use.

As described in Part 1, the decade saw the disaggregation of the semiconductor supply chain which started in the 1980's come to a fully complete state and the EDA industry begin to feel the after-effects of this disaggregation which (ironically) fuelled their growth for the last 20 years.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

The development 'lab' has moved to the kitchen table as the workshop is so cold that there is liquid nitrogen sloshing around on the floor.

And as well as my 'scope, Dr Frustration appears to be in the house.

For two evenings I have been trying to fault-find a breadboard circuit with only four components that is so trivial I almost didn't try it.

And am not even sure I am at the bottom of it yet.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

That push button bistable I have still yet to get going is part of an attempt to replace an led in an existing lamp with a choice of two.

I thought I would reveal the rest of my circuit for scrutiny.  

The idea is that the whole circuit connects directly into the lamp instead of the existing led, stealing a few microamps to run itself.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

I think I have got to the bottom of the 74HC74 hysteresis mystery

The one that meant my LED-controlling bistable switch was not switching properly.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Initial debugging complete, I knocked up a pcb in the kitchen.

I used CadSoft's wonderful free Eagle layout editor to design the board.