On Friday, October 29, 2010 08:26:57 pm Kent A. Reed did opine: > Andy Pugh wrote: > > Even if Chris is right that there is no interpolation, at $20 an > > Arduino is a very simple way to measure 6 analogue voltages, threshold > > them, and pass it to digital. > > For those of us who grew up in the middle of the last century, this is > the most amazing fact about today's microcontrollers. > > They are nearly always the most cost-effective solution to the problem > at hand, even when the application seems too trivial to waste one on it. > No matter your favorite microcontroller family, everyone should have a > drawerful of different capability chips on hand. > > Now that I'm over the hill, I think about the number of times in my life > I implemented yet another purpose-built, multi-package, hybrid, > analog-digital solution where a single microcontroller would do. I also > think about how many more things I could have achieved had I not had to > spend so much time getting each hybrid solution right. Sigh. > > My vacuum tube-era engineer-dad once said to me, "you whippersnappers > will never know how good you have it." I wonder what the technology > will be like when you find yourselves saying it to those who follow you. > > Regards, > Kent > I would liked to have met your dad, Kent. He sounds like an old warhorse I'd like to trade battle stories with.
For some things, it wasn't till we shut down the analog transmitter 18 months ago that the last vacuum tube was allowed to cool down for good. I saved a dud, non-rebuildable final tube from our old GE transmitter just so I could show it off to the younger set who will today, cheerfully use 8192 transistors in parallel to do what this tube did when it was fresh. A water cooled anode that required deionized water in the coolant system because the tubes anode had 7200 volts on it. This tube was rated to make 85 kilowatts (sync tip peak) of power in the low vhf band, but our transmitter let it relax with its feet up on the coffee table because we only needed 26.7 sync tip peak to make our power. Most 'engineers' don't know how to baby those big tubes & use one up every 6 months at $7000 a rebuild. In the time since I became the CE at WDTV in 1984, I only used 3 of them. That was a significant reduction in the stations C.O.D.B. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) This PORCUPINE knows his ZIPCODE ... And he has "VISA"!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
