M Simon
Designing just for fun
December 20, 2012 3:58 pm | by M. Simon, Technical Contributor | Blogs | CommentsI'm in the process of designing and building a 10 MHz time/frequency receiver to pick up the WWV signal and to see if I can accurately reproduce the signal frequency for general lab calibration purposes. Yes, there are better ways to get accurate frequency calibration.
Exploring the potential of watch crystals
December 14, 2012 9:14 am | by M. Simon, Technical Contributor | Blogs | CommentsWatch crystals are amazing devices. Typical 32KHz clock crystals are very stable in frequency if you can keep them close to their turnover temperature. If you can hold the crystal to within 1 degC of the turnover temperature, it is +/-.04 ppm from the frequency at turnover.
UN looks for an Internet "fix"
December 6, 2012 3:45 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsQuite a few of the member states (colloquially known as "Dictators 'R Us") of the UN want to change the rules of the game. The Internet Game. They want to be able to shut down Internet traffic at will. And they want to do it legally. Whatever that means in the context of nations. Anyway, here is what they ( the miscreants) are proposing.
“Sustainability” is inherently unsustainable
November 29, 2012 9:50 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI recently came across a site (no link will be provided for reasons that will be obvious shortly) that proposed that engineers design products for sustainability (how long is that?). They also propose going one better for really advanced products. Those would be products that pose no risk to society.
Long lines on a PCB
November 28, 2012 12:17 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsOn a list I belong to (which prefers to remain anonymous), there has been a long discussion on how to terminate lines on a PCB that uses parts with fast rise times. Of course, circumstances vary and it depends on the rise time, but for rise times on the order of one nanosecond (TTL, AHC, LVC, etc), a resistor from 22 to 50 ohms in series with the source seems to work well.
Giving thanks
November 21, 2012 9:12 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsM. Simon, freelance writer extraordinaire, shares some of the things he's thankful for this holiday. "A few of the things I'm thankful for this holiday. In quasi random order": Atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison and his assistant Nikola Tesla....
The future of nanotechnology is now
November 16, 2012 8:57 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI count several popular science fiction writers as friends. I share a political/whimsey blog with one of them, Sarah Hoyt. I was visiting Sarah's personal blog, and the question of the future of nanotechnology — given the upcoming fiscal cliff — came up in the comments. Sarah was of the opinion that the technology would be delayed indefinitely.
It's about time: Timing and frequency issues in engineering
November 13, 2012 9:30 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsTime and timing have been long term interests of mine. Especially so since I got my start measuring tenths of a nanosecond in 1967. I was looking around the www for information on time and frequency and came across a group of amateurs interested in time standards. One of the favorites of these amateurs is buying surplus rubidium clocks on ebay and bringing them to life.
Companies I enjoy doing business with
November 9, 2012 9:20 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsMy very old Ungar 8800 soldering stand had a cracked ceramic iron holder from decades of use/misuse. So I went looking for Ungar on the www. They are no longer with us. But I found that they are now owned by Weller....
They are bringing back tubes
November 6, 2012 5:50 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsYes, tubes are coming back. No, not the thermionic space bottles of my youth. These are a different kind of tube. Made of small bits of graphene. Carbon nanotubes. IBM reports on their progress in the area. And it is amazing.
Kickstarter, HP calculators, and PCB land patterns, oh my!
October 29, 2012 5:27 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsGabriel of Gabotronics asked me to promote his kickstarter project as time was running out and he had not yet met his goal. Due to some technical difficulties I was unable to get to the project promotion until today. Sorry Gabriel. But Gabriel is not sorry.
Power up
October 22, 2012 9:36 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsAs the weeks and months go by I am going to be doing a number of hands-on projects. OSH Park will be making boards for those projects available for those of you who want to build something. But it does no good to build something if you don't have power to power it.
Preparing for the wrong catastrophe
October 17, 2012 9:26 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI was excited by a report at ECN saying that the world matched the hottest September temperature again this past September. Well that got me to thinking. CO2 is still rising and hot temperatures are only being matched? Doesn't the theory run - more CO2 makes the climate hotter? What happened?
Filling the gap
October 15, 2012 1:53 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsGraphene has been getting a lot of press lately touting it as the electronics material of the future. It is a strong single-layer material with high electron mobility. All good things for a semiconductor material.But single-layer graphene lacks something very important for a semiconductor material: a band gap.
Computer-generated art that doesn't look computer-generated
October 10, 2012 10:09 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI went to a city wide art show this last weekend and ran into the most marvelous artists who does computer generated art that doesn't look like computer generated art - at least not the generic stuff you so often see. His name is Barry Reithmeier. He has a feel for the medium. He uses a tool called Bryce which is currently available for free.
Solder wicki
October 8, 2012 11:31 am | by M. Simon | Articles | CommentsI like to do projects. I like to do projects that involve soldering. These days that means surface mount. And therein lies a tale. I design my own boards and get them produced by OSH Park they do great work. I try to make the boards easy to solder. To see the little bits when I do do the soldering I use a pair of Foster Grants with 3.25 magnification...
A roundup
October 3, 2012 9:01 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsGabtronicis has updated their micro e-scopes. You may recall I did an article on them a while back. They also have a Kickstarter project to raise money to do more interesting things. Gabriel (the "Gab" of Gabtronics) likes Atmel XMEGA microcontrollers. Daishinku Corporation (KDS) has been very helpful to me with some projects I'm working on...
A flywheel in the ointment
October 1, 2012 8:51 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI have been big on flywheels for electrical energy storage for quite some time. So it was quite a disappointment to me to hear that high tech flywheel company Beacon Power did a Solyndra and reneged on a government loan because it could not finance its debts from income.
Your dollars are blowing in the wind and burning in the sun
September 19, 2012 10:41 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsMy last column on alternative energy, A blow to wind energy, evoked more than a few complaints. For an engineering magazine writer a number of people thought that I was light on the numbers. So lets do some numbers. For that we will need a baseline. What is the cost of electrical energy in America these days? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the average cost of electricity in the US is 13.5cents per kilowatt hour.
Carbon-based logic
September 18, 2012 9:14 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsPhysics World reports some spectacular advances in turning graphene-based semiconductors into real-world logic chips. Graphene will do some real good for us logic guys because of its carrier mobility. It is over 140 times that of silicon. Plus its heat conductivity is about 10x that of metals like copper and aluminum, and its resistivity is about 2/3rds that of copper at room temperature.
Doing the math
September 14, 2012 9:49 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsFor all you random number lovers there is some excellent documentation on the www about linear feed back shift registers. LFSRs are a way to produce quasi random numbers without too much effort. Why quasi random? Well one number is excluded (all ones or all zeroes) depending in whether you use the XNOR or XOR function for computing your random number.
Stack architecture
September 7, 2012 9:11 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI have been interested in computers with stack architectures for a long time. I wrote a bit about one of the latest versions at ECN a while back: Testing The GA144 Eval Board. For those of you not familiar with the subject I thought it might be a good idea to present some resource material.
Hit them with a lightning bolt
September 5, 2012 3:22 pm | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsAs some of you may remember, I was having some trouble with the Atmel programming tools. Their Studio 6 assembler and simulator are excellent. But their chip programmers leave one or two things to be desired. Well I'm going to do the usual hardware guy solution. I'm going to hit the pins used for programming with lightning bolts.
A blow to wind energy
September 4, 2012 10:13 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsMy local paper says that the wind energy business is likely to slow down in 2013. They explain that it will be bad for a local manufacturer that makes parts for the turbines and who also makes machines to make the parts. When you make 10 ton hubs for the turbines it is best to make them as close to the installation site as possible. Otherwise the shipping costs can ruin your profits.
I ran across a few things
August 29, 2012 11:37 am | by M. Simon | Blogs | CommentsI have started a number of new projects. One of them is designing a simple Forth for the ARM processor. To do that I needed a simple guide to the ARM Assembly language. I like this one written by Peter Knaggs and Stephen Welsh. Peter is quite active in the Forth community, but that was just a coincidence (I'm a big Forth fan in case you didn't know).
