My thanks to those who answered.
Declan Moriarty writes:
>My admiration for any blind electronics guy is sky high! How do you know
>if you passed the 'smoke test'?
My nose still works. Actually, I do check continuity or the
lack of same, especially if there is any appreciable power that one
wouldn't want going to the wrong place.
I have been interested in this stuff all my life and about 30
years ago, one could buy little PC boards on to which one could solder
a 16-pin DIP IC socket and play around with that, but my favorite
technology for building small numbers of devices has been wire-wrap
and perforated boards. I usually solder the wire-wrap wire to
resistors and capacitors and other components because the round leads
do not have anything that prevents the wire from unwrapping which it
begins to do almost immediately. For that, I like to use a Wahl
cordless miniature gun with the smallest tip they sell. It heats up
relatively fast and, if the batteries are good and properly charged,
it gets very hot and helps you make a nice clean joint.
the wire-wrap socket pins are square and bite in to the wire
as you wrap which holds indefinitely. I have a few things I built
over 20 years ago and the wire is still there.
> How do you read a meter or 'scope
Excellent questions! The ability to measure is essential.
Before digital meters came along, there were various analog devices
that worked on various forms of Wheatstone Bridges and or voltage
controlled oscillators. The usual game was to connect the device
across the meter movement in an analog meter or totally replace the
meter movement with an analog device that electrically behaves like
the meter it replaces.
There was often-times a scale on the face of the device with a
pot having a pointer knob. To "read" the meter, you either turned the
knob until the pitch of the tone dipped or nulled out. Whatever the
pointer pointed to was your reading.
Digital meters theoretically are easier to read, but there
have only been a few talking multimeters made. Radio Shack sold one
about twelve years ago and I bought one which I still use.
Any multimeter that hooks up to a computer can sure be made to
give out its reading in any form the user wants to receive it.
There is no practical way to use an oscilloscope, but people
including me are playing with various ways to translate wave forms in
to sounds such as higher pitch for a higher amplitude . A sine wave
would sound like an American-style fire siren where as a square wave
would have a two-tone alternation like a European-style siren. Just
think of marching one wave after another past a given point and try to
imagine how it should sound if the Y axis was converted in to a tone
of varying pitch.
Computer sound cards, especially under Linux, can be made to
produce straight 8-bit PCM and the numbers from 0 to 0xFF are
certainly good to look at or to feed in to a program that turns them
in to tones. I admit, I have done a lot more speculating than actual
research, but there certainly are some neat possibilities.
As for your last question about reading Email, I feed ASCII
data in to a box that connects to the computer much like a printer.
You feed in the ASCII and a somewhat odd-sounding male voice comes out
speaking English.
Speech synthesizers must be programmed with the rules for
whatever language one is reading. If you feed it Spanish, for
example, you are better off spelling the words one letter at a time
because the synthesizer is trying to say it as if it was English.
I hope this satisfactorily answers your questions.
One final thing I must say in all honesty. The one technology
in electronics I haven't a clue how to work with is surface-mount.
The parts are so tiny, they feel like sand or gravel and the spacing
between the leads on SMT chips is .05 IN and I have to use my
fingernail to count them and forget about trying to solder them.:-)
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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Author: Martin McCormick
INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
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