Factless

Here is a laundry list of online learning resources about electronics.

Lessons In Electric Circuits (which All About Circuits is derived from)

MIT OpenCourseWare 6.002 Circuits and Electronics (Fall 2000)

Bob Pease Analog Engineer and thinker from National Semi

Op Amp Applications by Walter Jung is either available in print (2005 ed) or as a free download (2003 ed).

A Designer's Guide to Instrumentation Amplifiers from Analog Devices by Charles Kitchin and Lew Counts

Basic Analog for Digital Designers (Intersil AN 9510 PDF)

An audio circuit collection, Part 1 (TI)

Op Amps for Everyone Design Guide from TI

Understanding Basic Analog - Ideal Op Amps - Several examples of amp circuits are described.

Single-Supply Op Amp Design Techniques

Analog Electronic Design in a Day! free online course from TI

SwitcherCAD / LTspice III - a free full featured SPICE program from Linear Technology

Eric KE6US has a page about SPICE for Hams (radio amateurs).

Posted by mctaylor at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I've been watching "Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness" on PBS (KQED out of San Francisco, CA, USA).

In it Alain de Botton looks at six philosophers, Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and what they had to say about happiness and topics relating to happiness, such as love, pain, angry, thinking, and desire.

While not earth shattering, they are fairly well done episodes, cutting through the cruft of word-play that is annoying and makes philosophy concerned irrelevant in popular culture. At times the format gets in the way of the message, but in general I was happy with the five episodes I've seen.

Addendum: The ABC (Austrilian Broadcasting Corporation)'s DVD series includes the best description of the six episodes. Note the DVDs are PAL format DVD Region 4 (Aus), so will not play in most (99%) of DVDs players without region code hacking.

Posted by mctaylor at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well I finished my Solarbotics Sumovore finally. I had a soldering or IC socket problem by the results of my debugging with a soldering iron.

The only disappointing thing is that I don't know of anyone else with a mini-sumo robot locally, so I haven't tried mine in a competiton yet. Perhaps I can make it to an Ottawa Robotics Enthusiasts meeting to play-test my stock Sumovore.

I also purchased a Pololu five inch Round Robot Chassis with Tamiya twin-motor gearbox with DC motors, Tamiya truck tires, and Tamiya ball castors from Robotshop in Montreal for $33 Cdn. I think that is one of the better prices for a simple robotics mechnical platform. Using this photo assembly guide for the Tamiya 70097 twin motor gearbox (784KB PDF, local mirror) from Camosun College (Victoria, BC) assembling the gearbox is easy, rather than trying to read the mostly Japanese instruction sheet.

Posted by mctaylor at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally people complain about their experiences with warranty replacement, so I wanted to share this seemly unique painless experience of getting my DVD player replaced under warranty by Toshiba Canada.

I had purchased a Toshiba SD-5970 DVD player with HDMI Video Upconversion (better resolution for displaying on a HDTV display) and 3:2 Pulldown from Future Shop (why does it seem that every time I buy something from them, it turns out to be a bad idea?) in the fall of 2005.

Earlier this year the display panel on the DVD player died, at first I thought I had dimmed the display so I couldn't see it. But after a while I dug out the manual (ek gads) and tried to reset the unit, still no display. Since the remote was pretty sad from day one, and while I could use it to play back discs it was annoying for music CDs where I wanted to know which track was playing.

So called Toshiba, well I did after I found their current toll-free number, the one listed in the manual for warranty calls didn't work, but I quickly found the right phone number on the web site. Once I had the serial number and found my receipt, I scheduled a pickup and Purolator came and picked up the unit in its original box with the remote (I was reminded to include this). That was a Tuesday I believe, on Friday I received a replacement SD-4990 unit with all the same features, plus some trivial bonus features (DivX playback). So I was impressed with Toshiba who answered the phone quickly, with a person in Canada as far as I could tell, and got the replacement unit to me in a short period of time with no hassle.

Now back to enjoying my home theatre setup.

Posted by mctaylor at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)