UptownMaker

I'll attempt a bit of subterfuge and obfuscation here so I don't inadvertently ruffle too many feathers... A friend just sent me a summary of the EE capstone projects from this year's crop of students at a university that shall go unnamed. Bright-eyed young engineers, fun problems, innovative solutions, yadda-yadda-yadda. Pretty much anyone reading this has a pretty good mental image of what might have been in the e-mail, and many of you LIVED it. But then, right at the end, was an incredibly troubling BTW: PS: professor's name here told me that he does not allow Arduinos to be used on these projects, since it makes things too easy (at this level of education, they're supposed to be learning the stuff that Arduino hides from you). Better he was there than me. I'd have lost my shit if an engineering prof said something like that to me. I get what he's saying- that the journey is the point, not the destination- it's just that for everything else...

Elegant (adj.): “I’m being an unnecessarily clever d!ck about this, and that’s going to open up a lorry-sized hole in my design that I won’t see because I’m being too smug about how clever this solution is. Oh, and it’ll be harder to fix, understand, build, troubleshoot, and use, but I saved $.000001 on each unit by committing untold future resources to solving the problems I don’t know I just made. It also took far longer to design than it would have had I done it in a more conventional manner, but that’s okay, because design time is free and per-unit cost is king.” KISS is the alternative to "elegant", and frequently results in designs which are MORE elegant than trying to be clever produces.

In mathematics, a degenerate form is one that cannot be perturbed in some way without being rendered a member of a larger, more complex class.  For example, a circle is a degenerate ellipse- change the constant multiplier of one of the terms and you push the form out of the class of circles into the larger class of ellipses. Next time you're solving a problem, ask yourself: am I solving for a degenerate form?  And, if the answer is yes, is that important?  Let me give an example where the answer to both questions was "yes".  I was tasked once with supporting some motion code which was intended to align a circuit board on a conveyor belt under a camera. The code as written worked fine in the lab, but in the field, customers began to complain of erratic and unpredictable behavior- boards which would be incorrectly positioned at the start of inspection, pushed off the end of the conveyor, etc.  It turns out that the code had originally been written to the dege...

On the heels of a few tweets regarding linear voltage regulators that I passed with a friend yesterday, I think I'll do a couple of posts on voltage regulation. First, the general concept: voltage regulation is the creation of a stable, low-impedance DC voltage source from an unregulated DC voltage source.  Examples of unregulated DC voltage sources are batteries, "wall wart" type AC/DC converters (even though many of these create very good voltages (these days, anyway), you should always assume that you (or someone else) will plug a different supply in), car cigarette lighter sockets, rectified and filtered transformer outputs, solar panels, fuel cells, dynamos, and fruit with pieces of zinc and copper in.  In fact, pretty much anything other than a locally generated voltage from a well-designed regulator circuit should be treated as an unregulated source (for design purposes, at least). This first post will concentrate on linear voltage regulators.  Sometimes you...

Some thoughts below on NDAs, patents, and people seeking project help from me when I'm wearing my freelance engineer hat.  A lot of this comes from having followed the Piclist mailing list for about 10 years, as well as reading quite a bit of Don Lancaster's writings on the matter- as well as a healthy dose of professional dignity imparted to me by the conflation of engineering with other highly skilled professions such as law or medicine during college. NDAs Sometimes I'll get a feeler e-mail about someone who wants to work with me, and they start off right away by saying "if you're interested, let me know and I'll get an NDA out to you right away." I don't mind working under an NDA (under certain conditions), but some things about being hit up by it right away like that scare me: Once I sign this NDA, if I subsequently complete or publish a project which is remotely similar to this person's idea, there is a legal document which could caus...

I tweeted on this a couple of weeks (months?) ago, but it's important enough a concept that I think it bears repeating because it applies to a lot of work that engineers (and, really, anyone) does. For the less historically-inclined, the Maginot Line was a series of defensive fortifications between France and Germany built between the World Wars.  France, tired of Germans tromping through their country every couple of decades, elected to try keeping them out by putting fortifications, guns, traps, and big, strongly worded signs in several languages all along the border with Germany. And it worked- the Germans were utterly and completely repelled by the Maginot Line's defenses.  Of course, they went AROUND them and attacked from the north, but by God, they didn't cross the Maginot Line! In the engineering world, there can be a tendency to do the same thing.  If one manufacturer's product has a defective lot, design them out!  A particular technology (e.g, tant...