 |
Don
Lancaster's Guru's Lair What's New? 2006A Archive |
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
( This is the first portion of the 2006 What's New archive.
You can click here for more recent material. )
July 2, 2006
Beware the eBay Dutch Auction trap!
If you bid on all "n" items offered, you
may end up paying a lot more than you
expect. The rule is this: Never bid on all
"n" items in a Dutch Auction! Always bid
only on "n-1" or fewer items.
Ferinstance, say you are the only bidder on
a ten item Dutch offering. The opening price
is one dollar. Just to be sure of winning, you
bid two dollars on all quantity ten.
If you are the only bidder, you will end up
paying one dollar each for your first nine
items. But ELEVEN DOLLARS for the
tenth item!
More on eBay buying here.
More on eBay selling here.
And bunches more on auctions in general
can be found here.
July 1, 2006
Oops.
A very few of the larger rolls of desoldering braid
we have up on eBay seem to be removed from
service and may end up somewhat shy of their full
length.
We'll be weight checking each roll before shipping.
All shipped rolls are now guaranteed "substantially full".
All braid is guaranteed pristine and fully usable.
June 30, 2006
More on our "scan the baggie" compromise
image technique. After some experiments,
it is real hard to not get lots of "sugar" and
similar poly artifacts when scanning through
plastic.
Worse yet, you cannot sharpen your image
because it dramatically makes the sugar
worse.
If at all possible, remove the items from the
baggie and pile them on the scanner. The
results will be ridiculously better. Even if
you have to open and reseal the package.
With cropping, the final image still suggests
looking through a baggie. Minus the sugar.
A further complication: If you just dump
the items on the scanner, you'll also be
dumping dust and whatever onto the scanner
glass. So, carefully wash all items before
scanning.
Once again, the advantages of the "scan
the baggie" technique are that the photos
can be done much faster. And that you get
multiple views of the item in one image.
June 28, 2006
Speaking of the Alvin Pile, Alvin has his
own website up that can be linked here.
Two current items deserve mention.
The first is a lightly used SunRaise
Thermography machine that almost certainly
will close at a tiny fraction of its $1800
price new. Thermography creates those
"raised print" effects using conventional
print shop rubber based inks. Surprisingly,
the ink need not still be wet. Anything under
an hour after printing works just fine.
The other item is even more intriguing.
This is a Baxter hypothermia machine
which normally costs many thousands of
dollars and is used for cold water treatment
of physical therapy. Unlike ice packs, the
circulating temperature is carefully regulated
preventing frostbite and similar problems.
The non-medical uses are even more
intriguing. What can you do with a
circulating source of carefully controlled
cold water? Environmental chambers,
chillers, etc etc etc...
This one is likely to go for a pittance.
Two are available and they are apparently
unused military surplus.
You can contact Alvin directly for more
info.
June 27, 2006
Started listing our electronic distributor
components on eBay, with the first 40 or
so items listed and three already sold out.
This is a liquidation, so one box at a time
gets opened and triaged. The best stuff
goes to eBay, the seconds to a holding
area, and the thirds to the Alvin Pile.
These are mostly "new old stock" conventional
electronic components by major US name brand
suppliers plus some foreign. Some of them are
a tad dated, but I will not list anything that is not
still genuinely useful.
Prices are presently between one-sixth
and one-tenth of normal. We ask that you
combine orders as much as possible to
permit continued use of low unit pricing.
In general, all components are guaranteed
to be useful and most are in "as new"
condition. Outer packaging, however, may
include mild to moderate storage
cosmetics.
A lot of onsie twosie items will be offered
as collections in 50 drawer cabinets. Any
item that goes into these assortments is
absolutely first class and mainstream. No
salting or junk is added. If for no other
reason, we have great heaping bunches
more first rate components than we do
storage cabinets.
We will be most happy to find the best
combined shipping rate for you. We can
often beat the UPS calculator on eBay
because we have daily pickup.
Be sure to email us for the best possible
shipping deal.
June 26, 2006
A reminder that our web pages are intended
for "medium" type size and no underlining.
Be sure to check your browser settings if
anything doesn't quite look right.
And please report any typos or obvious
problems by emailing me.
June 25, 2006
Refurb Log:
Finding the value of ultra small components
can be quite a challenge. One route is to use
a modern DVM and actually measure the
resistance or capacitance values.
Many capacitors use a three digit plus letter
code. The first two digits are the value of
the capacitor. The third digit tells you how
many zeros to add to the first two. And the
final letter (when used) can tell you the
tolerance.
Ferinstance, a 225K capacitor would be
2200000 picofarads or 2.2 microfarads.
With a tolerance of ten percent. Things
can get confusing for very low values.
A 100K would be a 10 picofarad cap
while a 101K would be 100 picofarads.
The only tiny problem is that caps have
become so small that there is no longer
any room on them for four letters.
One tip on DVM capacitance measurement:
Chances are you will get a nonzero reading
from the probe leads and strays. Be sure
to "fixture compensate" and subtract this
value out when making low pf measurements.
Avoid any resistive loading of any cap
being tested. Especially from fingers.
June 24, 2006
Another advantage of our "scan a baggie"
eBay photography ploy of a few days ago
is that you get a half dozen or more aspects
of the items being offered all in one image.
It's real tricky to get something like a rocker
switch to reveal all its features in a single
image. But a baggie of them in a group portrait
works like a champ.
More eBay photography secrets in our
Auction Help library page.
June 23, 2006
What are the engineering "magic numbers"
for baseline calculations on electric and
hybrid vehicles?
A useful electric car summary appears here.
Firstoff, a kilowatt of power is pretty much the
same thing as a horsepower. While a "real"
horsepower is only 746 watts, the efficiency
losses of the motor, controller, and wiring
can make real world horsepower and their
input kilowatt hours very nearly equal.
A "typical" electric vehicle under reasonable
road conditions would normally draw something
centered on 20 kilowatts. If you got 40 miles
in that hour, your electrical energy consumption
would be half a kilowatt hour per mile.
Thus a pure electric car with a range of 300
miles would need something like 150 kilowatt
hours delivered from the batteries. Or more
like 250 kilowatt hours at the input to the
charger, allowing for charging and battery
inefficiencies.
A normal home electric system is something
like 100 amps at 220 volts or 20 kilowatt hours
per hour if used at full capacity. Assuming
that you have other uses for your electricity,
it would thus take the better part of a day to
recharge a decent performing electric vehicle
at home.
While the five cents per mile sounds rather
attractive, you also have to add in the battery
amortization costs, which are likely to remain
enormously higher.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
June 22, 2006
One of my earliest research projects was
for an automotive miles-per-gallon meter.
Way on back in 1962.
In those days, all we had were germanium
transistors (uphill both ways barefoot in the
snow) and slide rule accuracy was something
you strived for but never acheived.
Doing any kind of division got tricky. The
approach was to sense speed with a
highly modified dc motor that went between
the speedometer cable and the speedometer.
In which every third commutator bar was shorted
and everything else eliminated.
The flowmeter was a paddle type design that
had enough problems that the project got
shelved. But the theory was that you step
charged a capacitor in up to 40 (wow!) levels
for a readout of 0 to 40 miles per gallon.
What really amazes me is that we still do
not have miles per gallon meters available.
Yet I strongly feel that proper use of such
a meter could make as much as a TWENTY
PERCENT savings in your gasoline costs.
These days, all of the needed input data
should be kicking around inside the MPU,
so the implementaion cost would be rather
trivial.
Possibly three readouts: a digital one with
actual MPG to a tenth, a large LED whose
color varied from red to green, and an
optional sound feedback system.
Biofeedback at its best.
June 21, 2006
Here is the recommended and certified
test procedure for cowboy camp coffee:
Drop an anvil in it. If the anvil sinks, the
coffee is too weak. If it floats, it is just
right. If it dissolves, it is too strong.
Similar ongoings in MARCIA.PDF
June 20, 2006
Just barely started listing all of our
new electronic components inventory
to eBay.
One of the dilemmas is that many of
these items are either low cost or
one-off, and that I simply cannot
justify the time for our usual very high
image quality.
Here's a compromise method that
looks like it will barely be acceptable:
Carefully clean both the scanner
glass and the parts baggie. Put
the best surface down and scan.
Bring the image up in Imageview
and center on a very nice typical
component. Rotate the image so
this component is sort of right side
up, but preferably at a 20 or 30
degree lean.
Crop to somewhat beyond the
typical part. Do a minimum retouch
on the part itself, but very little
more to the background.
Follow up with the usual gamma
correction, size correction, a very
minimal sharpening, and JPEG
conversion.
Here's an example.
And here are several more tutorials
on professional image prep.
June 19, 2006
How much energy is needed to move
an automobile? A good summary can
be found here. And a good metric to
english converter program here.
You first have to split the problem at
the wheels. External losses are the
rolling resistance, the air resistance,
accelleration, and hill climbing.
Internal losses are whatever happens
between the raw fuel source energy and
what actually reaches the wheels.
They use a Porsche 911 Carerra for their
examples.
The rolling resistance of tires and such
is surprisingly independent of speed and
typically might be 180 Newtons or 40
pounds of force.
The wind resistance varies with the square
of speed and might range from 40 Newtons
at 22 miles per hour to 360 Newtons at 67
miles per hour.
Combining the two translates to about 2.9
horsepower at 22 miles per hour up to 22
horsepower at 66 miles per hour.
The power for accelleration is very much
higher. For their example car going from
0 to 60 mph in six seconds, 100 additional
horserpower are needed.
Additional power is needed for hill climbing.
For their example of a 5% grade at 66
miles per hour will demand an additional
24 horsepower.
A reminder that these figures are at the
wheels. An ICE runs about 33 percent
efficiency, but after accessories and
drive train losses, only 15% or so makes
it to the wheels.
Electric and fuel cell vehicles have their
own restrictions. Figure 90 percent motor
efficiency, 85% controller efficiency and
97% wiring efficiency for a gross efficiency
of 74% before acessories and drive train
losses. Plus weight and range penalties.
Fuel cells based on hydrogen have a maximum
theoretical efficiency of 83 percent, but none
available today even remotely can dream of
approaching this figure. Note that fuel cell
inefficiency compounds against motor, controller,
and wiring inefficiencies.
I feel that practical fuel cell systems are unlikely
to end up more than a very few percent more
efficient than the latest of ICE designs.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
June 18, 2006
Updtated, corrected, and expanded our
Offsite Resources Home Page feature.
June 17, 2006
Those Walmart Auctions are an interesting
variation on a theme. Every few weeks or so,
an old Walmart gets replaced by a new one.
Something like three months after the old
store or distribution center closes, an auction
of all remaining fixtures and dregs gets done.
Bonnette is the usual auctioneer. Stores in
rural locations tend to be underattended.
No inventory is ever sold. Only shelves,
pallet racks, auto shop machines, displays,
snack bar stuff, and similar items.
The auctions tend to move very fast and
in large lots. A very few regulars travel
around the country and scoop up unheard
of bargains. IF you happen to need great
heaping bunches of larger and longer
specialized used store fixtures.
Loading and shipping are major problems,
and removal times are sometimes sorely
limited.
One exception to the very low prices are
the food prep stuff. Things like popcorn
machines and hotdog cookers go for many
hundreds of dollars.
As with all auctions, the opportunties
lie in what others miss. Most of their
white elephants are a perfectly normal
gray elephant color.
Ferinstance, highly specialized display
light fixtures are easily converted into
light box tents for eBay photography.
A huge and utterly grotesque retail bicycle
display system can be bought for $10 and
then stripped for fifty ready-to-sell and
individual bicycle stands.
And the $15 complete set of clothes
changing booths has panel after panel
of imitation wood that is easily converted
into a backyard shed or whatever. After
removing the sellable large mirrors.
The totally stripped checkout counters
went unsold. And easily could have been
gotten for $5 total. They still had perfectly
good motor powered conveyors in them.
As always, opportunity is where you find
it. And is greatly enhanced by seeing
value that others miss.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
June 16, 2006
A useful strategy useful for both eBay and
live auctions can be based on the fact that
nobody likes to break a twenty, and people
will go far out of their way to avoid spending
a hundred or two.
Thus you are often best off setting the max
price you are willing to pay just above a
currency threshold, rather than just below.
Ferinstance, a bid of $103.50 is much more
likely to win than one of $97.00. Always
using oddball penny amounts when suitable.
Some Arizona auction houses are found here,
with a tutorial here, additional auction help here,
and your own custom regional auction finder here.
June 15, 2006
Those alphametic puzzles we provided you
with "instant" solutions for in PUZZLE1.PDF
can be monumentally insidious time wasters
when done the old way.
Per this infuriatingly interactive web site.
Surprisingly, the classic started-it-all problem
of SEND + MORE = MONEY has a totally
deterministic solution requiring no permutations
or trial and error at all. Thusly...
M must be 1 because of a forced carry4.
S + carry3 + 1 must equal 10 but not 11.
S is thus 8 or 9 but O must equal 0.
Column 2 must carry and N must equal
E + 1. This also forces S to 9 only since
column 3 cannot carry. Substituting (E+1)
for N greatly simplifies understanding
this step and the ones that follow.
For column2 to work, R must equal 8 with
a Column1 carry.
Leaving D + E = Y. Y min is 12 or 13 since
a carry is needed and 0 and 1 are taken. E
cannot directly be 8 or 9 and cannot be 7
because N = E +1 also cannot be 8. An E
of 6 makes D an illegal 7 bcause of N.
E values of less than four cannot force a
carry. Thus, E is 5 and N = 6 and D is 7.
Leaving you with a Y of 2.
Only eight of the ten digits are used,
with 3 and 4 absent and unneeded.
June 14, 2006
Just bought the entire inventory of a classic
electronics parts store. Most of this will be
third partied out. Tons of stuff.
Not ROHS, of course.
Plesae email me with your needs.
June 13, 2006
GuruGram #67 is on Puzzle Solving with
PostScript.
Sourcecode is found here. Much more is in
our PostScript library.
June 12, 2006
Despite the record number of recent and
upcoming auctions on the Arizona Auction
Scene, there really hasn't been all that
much that great for me recently.
What made for good auctions in the past?
Huge ones certainly where multiple days
and thousands of lots utterly overwhelmed.
Belden and Rubbermaid in particular.
Auctions where the auctioneer made a
really stupid mistake, like moving a high
tech telecom auction to a remote Arizona
rural community nobody could get to.
Auctions where others failed to recognize
value. Such as the quarter million dollar
pile of Adept sliders that everybody else
thought were home electric draperies.
Auctions misdescribed where a "sewing
machine" auction really had bunches of
robotics and automation gear and great
heaping piles of inventory as secondary
lots. And I was the only tech bidder.
And one time gambles, such as a zillion
boxes of water soluble swimsuits, gotten
from Holloman AFB in a half price offer
when it failed to make the minimum bid.
Ultra tedious and hot auctions that went
waay beyond reasonable times. And whole
rooms of stuff were literally given away
to the very few bidders still present.
But mostly plain old blind luck.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
June 11, 2006
The "add six inches to your mortgage" email
spam scams seem to be coming out of the
woodwork again. One offers a $241,000 for
$232 per month @ 4.1 % interest and similar
"opportunities".
How can you spot these scams and how do
they work?
Firstoff, mortgage calculations are not rocket
science, and there are dozens of websites that
will do this for you at no charge. My favorite
here is http://www.hsh.com/calc-amort.html
Where we see that the payment rate for a
conventional fixed rate $241,000 mortgage
at 4.1 percent interest for 30 years would be
$1164.45 per month.
For an "interest only" or "infinite" mortgage,
you can simply use the first month's principle
payment. Or $832.42 in this case.
There are many different ways to scam a
mortgage. The simplest involve hidden
charges, adjustable rates, overappraisal
ploys, or balloon payments.
But whenever the monthly payments are only
a tiny fraction of true costs, this should be a
red flag warning that you are about to be had.
Two of the more blatant scams are to not be
a mortgage company at all. Instead phishing for
sensitive financial info on applications to do
an identity theft. A second is to deny receiving
several month's payments and then forclosing
to steal the property.
As some sucker said, "There's a P.T. Barnum
born every minute". Watch out for them.
June 10, 2006
Added several new Craig's List entries to our
Auction Help page. Made some other updates
and corrections.
June 9, 2006
There seems to be more press interest in new
compressed air powered cars and scooters.
Unless some genuine breakthroughs can be
brought to the table, these seem to me to
be wishful thinking, a total lack of understanding
thermodynamic fundamentls, or outright scams.
The energy density of compressed air is very
low, possibly in the 15 watthour per liter range.
This compares badly against lead acid batteries
at 30 watthours per liter, and gasoline at 9000.
The efficiency of compressed air is very low.
On the generation end, no means of efficiently
isothermally compressing air is known. Elaborate
multi-stage compressors and intercooler exchangers
are needed to even approach decent efficiency. And
those invariably have giant heat fins for their losses.
The trick is to compress air without heating it.
Similarly, most compressed air motors are horribly
inefficient, typically in the 30 percent range. And thus
worse than an ICE. An efficient compressed air motor
would likely have to have many stages or variable
displacement. Or exotic control of injection volume.
It would have to exhaust its air silently at room
temperature with zero positive pressure. For
all possible loads.
And there is also the exergy problem in converting
high value kilowatt hours of electricity into low value
kilowatt hours of stored air. Instantly and irrecoverably
destroying most of the energy value and quality.
As is guaranteed
by thermodynamic fundamentals.
The experiences of long term players in this field are
telling. The fire service has hesitated in going from
150 BAR to 300 BAR for its airpacks because of the
law of diminishing returns. While the fire service
would dearly love to use compressed air for vent fans,
fast cutters, rescue saws and such, they have not
been able to do so because of the ridiculously low total
energy in an air pack bottle. Yes, we can inflate a lift
bag or run a tiny air chisel. But that is about it.
Machine shops welcome compressed air solely
because of its portability and convenience. But
any time that serious tail twisting is required,
hydraulics is substituted. Even with its pathetic
energy density, most shop air is produced on
demnd. With the compressor kicking in after
only a few seconds of use. Note that shop air
is under 1 watthour per liter energy density.
Safety is a serious issue. Both the fire service
and the scuba folks require extensive certification
and training to use compressed air. Even then,
filling a Scott or MSA air bottle remains one of the
scariest tasks on the fireground. Turning this
technology loose on the unrestricted general
public seems utterly insane to me.
Much more in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
June 8 2006
When they marianade shrimp, how do they
tie all those little strings on?
June 7, 2006
The Arizona Auction Scene has just gone bonkers.
Unlike a normally quiet June, there's something
like two or three auctions per day for the entire
month. Everything from airplane parts to walmarts
to machine shops to distress electronics done in
by ROHS to great heaping bunches of the usual.
Your own custom regional auction finder service can
be created for you per this link.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
June 6, 2006
Refurb Log:
Apparently the internal connector on many
Tempsonics sensors is a 7 pin Molex Microblade
2 mm with six pins in use. Direct access simplifies
finding older strange or expensive connectors.
Connector is part 51004-0700 and crimp terminals
are 50011-8100. We are still working on finding
some useful test setups so we can relist the dozen
or so older and longer sensors we have in stock.
June 5, 2006
Several researchers have asked about
the effects of clock stability and jitter on our
Magic Sinewaves. While not fully investigated
to date, stability issues are not expected to
become terribly significant when forty or fewer
harmonics are forced to zero.
Which does raise an interesting possibility:
What if the clock is intentionally FM modulated
at the first uncontrolled harmonic frequency?
Can this do some sort of cancellation and
ease filtering requirements?
A related question is whether Magic Sinewaves
can be developed "backwards" to simplify or
improve power factor correction and quality
upgrading circuitry.
Much more in our Magic Sinewaves library.
And in this tutorial and this development
proposal.
June 4, 2006
One of the problems in bringing older service
and repair manuals and such to the web might
be called copyright limbo.
In which the original owners have gone bankrupt
or merged, or simply could not care less about
their older products. Yet the legal threat remains
that somebody somewhere owns the copyrights
and might cause all sorts of problems to anyone
freely posting their content on the web.
Tektronix has long ago carefully placed all of their
obsolete test equipment manuals in the public
domain, and these are readily available on CD's
at low cost from a dozen web sources.
HP/Agilent has instead chosen to freely post many
of their early equipment manuals on the web. But
sadly, not everything is available. While certainly
positive and welcome, this sort of compounds the
problem with their clear statement of IP intent.
Radio Electronics (Poptronix, Popular Electronics,
et al...) has made free reprint rights available for the
web available at least to certain webmasters. This
site does hold downloads of many of my earlier
construction projects.
As we saw a few months back, older electronic
data sheets are now being made available from
such sources as...
http://www.partminer.com (12 Million)
http://www.datasheets.org.uk (5.20 Million)
http://datasheetarchive.com (2-3 Million)
http://www.alldatasheets.com (1.07 Million)
http://www.chipdocs.com (701,010)
http://datasheets4u.com (523,031)
http://www.datasheetcatalog.com (280,758)
http://chipcatalog.com (253,733)
One obvious remaining problem is Heathkit. As
far as I know, there has been no formal release of
copyrights on Heath manuals and other docs. The
same goes for SAMS photofacts.
It sure would be nice to have a master clearinghouse
for all early technical info on the web. While at the
same time fully respecting any current and any
aggressively enforced valid copyright claims.
June 3, 2006
Found an interesting FINDCHIPS.COM website.
Enter any integrated circuit part number and it
checks several dozen major electronics distributors
for availablity and (often) actual pricing.
June 2, 2006
And what gets worse in going from a printed
story to a web document? Perhaps in comparing
and contrasting MUSE153 against MSINEXEC.PDF.
(continuing our previous posts).
While screens and printed pages are now pretty
much comparable in convenience and legibility,
we do not yet have the killer ap that is going to
completely blow both ebook readers AND all
books and magazines out of the water But
we can expect its arrival very soon.
The web signal to noise ratio is utterly appalling.
As a magazine column author, sought out and
possibly sole source unique material was a norm.
On the web, you have 350 million competitors,
almost all of whom huckster worthless trash.
Author payment rates for magazine columns have
long become utterly abysmal. Compared to totally
nonexistant on the web. Alternate (and usually
indirect) payment methods are now a must.
Printed story authors were usually treated with
extreme respect. Web authors are invariably
attacked by clueless and tactless individuals
making ad-hominum challenges from their
unhousebroken newsgroup venues. None of
whom ever post factual critique.
While deadlines may have been the bane of
author and editor alike, the "Oh boy, my
latest copy of Supermag just arrived" created
a strong expectation in many readers. There
is no comparable web experience, except
possibly for RSS.
The perceived value of a web file is much
lower than the printed word; It is also much
more easily stolen, and anything even
remotely approaching IP solutions has yet
to be found.
A whole era of useful printed documents just
before word processing became common is
likely to be lost entirely because of the cost
and commitment needed to convert them
electronically and bring them up to current
web standards.
Nobody builds anything electronic on their
own any more. It has become impossibly difficult
and not in the least cost effective to do so.
Heathkit is gone, colleges have dropped most
electronics programs, and ham radio is a
ludicrous geriatric parody of what it once was.
Previous gatekeepers of valuable technical
information have priced themselves out of
the market. To the point of which bad content
drives out good.
Your thoughts welcome. email me.
June 1, 2006
The new LED Journal "the magazine of solid
state lighting" is now in print and freely
available. Temporarily forgetting that all
trade journals are clearly doomed, this one
seems off to a good start.
The journal is also directly downloadable
as a .PDF file.
Meanwhile, Maxim is newly offering highly
efficient LED Drivers with power ratings
to 150 watts and beyond. Both DC and
ac power line operated.
Some color and lighting fundamentals
appear here and here. And a "lots of
LED's from a computer port" sneaky
stunt here.
May 31, 2006
So, what gets better in going from a printed story to a
web document? Perhaps in comparing and contrasting
MUSE153 against MSINEXEC.PDF.
A profound but seemingly trivial difference is that
web documents are landscape and printed magazine
pages are portrait. Horizontal scrolling is difficult on
the web but convenient on the magazine page, and
vice versa.
A magazine page set very specific size limits on
how big something had to be. There is no such limit
on the web, provided you use the minimum space
needed to do the job. And avoid excess.
Magazine articles often needed a coalition of readers
that demanded a variety of topics per story. The web
lets you tightly focus on one specific concept.
Magazine stories demanded narrow colums for
ad compatibility. Much time was involved in layout
and column text justification that could have been
much better spent in reaserch and content creation.
There is little point or benefit to fill justification on
the web. Because single columns are the norm.
With care, even the need for hyphenation can be
completely eliminated. And new vertical leading
can easily be added to make each paragraph
an easily conceived bite sized chunk.
Tight positioning of text and figures is very difficult
in a magazine article, while a web file lets you
intimately relate any figure to its corresponding
description. This is an exceptionally profound
improvement.
Many of the more obvious web benefits are, well,
more obvious. Color is free and the norm. The
info is available forever if you want it to be and
can be corrected and updated at any time. You
have a worldwide audience 24/7. Full document
searching of every word is easy, and most any
need for a detailed index is gone.
Linking to anything, anywhere, anytime is another
biggie. Particularly for supporting or background
info. Or to provide more or less detail. And web
files store in much less space, do not normally
degrade with time, and are rarely misplaced or
eaten by the pup or out on loan to a single user.
As is the turnover time going from concept to
publication. Which has dropped from months to
minutes. Figures are easily mangified for more
detail and disability aides such as additional
magnification or text reading are easily done.
There is no particular deadline tyranny in that
anything can usually be published at any time.
You are also free to make your own mistakes,
rather than having to pay an editor to make
them for you.
Your thoughts welcome. email me.
May 30, 2006
NEWBIE.PDF passed its group beta test last night
on a batch of unsuspecting volunteer firemen.
Natually, firemen being firemen, the high points of
the evning were the giraffe humpings.
As a group or class project, this seems to work
best by copying the problems onto mystery cards
(orange for simpler absolute newbie problems and
red for for the slightly more difficult questions for
those that have surfed the web at least once).
Teams of four to six per workstation seem about
right, becuse interaction is super important..
And the giraffes didn't seem to mind at all.
Many thanks for the several emails suggesting
corrections and adjustments. Some of these have
already been made to the story.
May 29, 2006
GuruGram #66 is a Newbie's Intro to the Web.
Sourcecode is found here. Much more in our
Webmastering library.
May 28, 2006
Got to remembering some curious incidents way
back in the early sixties. Where the technical
editor of ELECTRONICS NOW repeatedly
kept warning me not to put too much text into
the figures for my stories.
I will admit at times that there were as many as
two paragraphs that might have gone as long as
eight to ten words each. At that time, it was
enormously expensive to put words into line art.
Any story would get split into two channels - one
for typeset text and a second for art. The only
time they got back together was during final
pasteup. And then, of course, the pasteup person
(often a student on summer break) would be
working upside down.
Which got me to thinking how much things have
changed in technical communications. I'll try
to look at this in more depth in a day or two.
Meanwhile, you might want to compare and
contrast MUSE153 against MSINEXEC.PDF.
Or against my very first major story. Or
this all time classic.
May 27, 2006
Final Score: Prudes 3, Nudes 0.
The last remaining wild hot spring in the
Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez metropolitan
area has just been demolished.
May 26, 2006
A reminder that many of our "deeper"
files are demos or historical archives.
While we try to properly label the access
on these, a random Google search will
sometimes find them and mislead you
into believing you are viewing current
info or still available items for sale.
In particular, NAMENUMS.PDF is a
historical archive that has not been
updated for many years. The web has
largely eliminated any need for printed
directories of this type.
I've added an Acrobat Note to this file.
I will try to add others that seem to
cause additional problems.
We've left the ads on our older Hardware
Hacker, Tech Musings, Blatant Opportunist,
and Ask the Guru archival reprints as well.
Needless to say, most of these items are no
longer available or may be priced differently.
May 25, 2006
The "water powered car" and "improved
electrolysis" scams seem to be once again
coming out of the woodwork.
Here are the facts...
~ There is a fundamental thermodynamic
principle called exergy that absolutely
guarantees that electrolysis for bulk
hydrogen energy flat out ain't gonna
happen. There ALWAYS will be more
intelligent things to do with electricity
than instantly and irrevocably destroying
most of its quality and value. Especially
from high value grid or pv sources.
~ A kilowatt hour of electrical energy is
ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt
hour of unstored hydrogen gas because its
thermodynamically reversibly recoverable
energy fraction is insanely higher.
~ Electrolysis "efficiency" is largely meaningless
because the "efficiency" gets used to destroy
quality and value. Further, the amortization
costs tend to utterly dominate the total
production costs. Electrolysis is pretty much
the same as 1:1 exchanging US dollars for
Mexican Pesos.
~ Virtually all commercial hydrogen is produced
by the reformation of methane. The only time
electrolysis is even remotely considered is for
extreme convenience factors when the value of
the generated hydrogen grossly exceeds its
stored energy value.
~ Manufacturers of large electrolysizers will
not even tell an individual how much their
units cost, let alone sell them one.
~ It is enormously difficult to correctly measure
the energy content of unusual electrical
waveforms. At the very least, true rms
instruments with credible crest factors are
an absolute must. It is similarly enormously
difficult to properly measure the output fraction
that is in fact dry STP hydrogen gas.
~ A properly designed electrolysizer DEMANDS
the use of often renewed platinized platinum.
Stainless steel designs are worthless because
of the hydrogen overvoltage of iron found in
most any intro electrochem book.
~ Few people realize how rare and unusual an
electrolysizer is. In a decade of attending
industrial distress sales, I've run across
exactly one. Which sold for $1700 and
could only produce a pitiful few cc's of gas
per minute. Try to find one sometime.
~ Electrolsizers raise EXTREME safety issues
that are far beyond what most individuals
comprehend or what your friendly local
hazmat folks will permit. At least one
sci.energy.hydrogen newsgroup poster
tried for both a Darwin Award and the X
Prize at the same time. Sadly, his garage
did not quite reach suborbital status.
And, of course....
~ Faraday's Law ain't broke.
May 24, 2006
One of the more subtle reasons that I've
consistently done a lot better at industrial
bankruptcy and distress auctions rather than
regular "people" style auctions is that there
is absolutely zero of the bad vibes associated
with family deaths, sickness, losing the family
farm, sibling squabbles, et al. And the whole
dismal scene that surrounds them.
Other advantages are that "contents of room"
and "contents of shelf" opportunities abound.
Especially with the unsorted stuff that special
expertise may be required to recognize unique
value. And that much inventory is new or near
new, in usable quantities, and properly cared for.
And that industrial auctions typically get way
behind and entire rooms are literally given
away to the very few remaining bidders who
have the patience and stamina to make through
it to the bitter end.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
May 23, 2006
It is super important to be aware of the math
limitations of any digital computing platform
you are working on. If quantization and roundoff
errors become significant, you get deviations
in your answers. If they dominate, you get trash.
PostScript, of course, is my favorite general
purpose programming language. There's also
a rumor out that PostScript can also sometimes
be used to dirty up otherwise clean sheets of
paper. Although it is beyond me why anyone
would want to severely restrict themselves in
such an insanely limiting manner.
At any rate, PostScript uses 32-bit math. Which
is more than "good enough" for virtually any
graphics layout need. This translates to an
internal accuracy somewhere around eight
decimal places, and an external reporting
of six.
Two examples: PostScript was more than good
enough for me to discover the fundamental
secret of Magic Sinewaves. But it had the
disconcerting habit of giving me a slightly
different result if you used a reported answer
in a new calculation. So I went ahead and made
up some JavaScript calculators that had a
full 64-bit math capabilities. The fifteen or more
decimal places completely eliminated any
strangeness.
Naturally, I still used PostScript to actually
write my JavaScript programs for me.
My ongoing investigation of parabola minimum
guessing also gave PostScript fits as it gave
me wildly wrong answers if the parabol points
differed by only tiny amounts. The workaround
here was to simply scale the data enough to
give useful results.
It's not clear how much work it would be to
actually write an interpreted double precision
math package for PostScript. It certainly could
be done. But who would use it for what remains
unclear.
May 22, 2006
Just noticed that Apple Assembly Lines is
now up on the web for free download. The
entire and complete set. This was by far the
finest of the "bare metal" Apple II programming
journals.
I do have most of these available in hard
copy if you want to buy them as collectibles.
You can email me for details.
May 21, 2006
Fitting data points to a curve can be
tricky, and we've previously looked
at many options.
Such as a Circle through three points,
a Parabola through three points, Cubic
Spline through four points, Cubic Spline
Circle Approximation, Power series
curve fits, hyperbolic spline fitting, and
Bezier Curve fit through fuzzy data.
Much more in our Math Stuff, Magic
Sinewave, GuruGram, and PostScript
libraries.
I've been reviewing the parabola fitting
to see if it cannot speed up some of our
Magic Sinewave analysis stuff. If you are
very near a solution, progressive moving
of a pulse edge should bring you through a
minimum that is closely approximated by
a quadratic.
The dilemma is that if the curve deviates
very much from a simple parabola further
from its minimum, its predictive value is
useless. Present investigation involves
finding out how far away you can be and
still seek a useful minimum.
At any rate, here is the key math. You
can either verify this yourself with
some simple algebra, or else steal
it from the web. You are first attempting
to have three data points on a parabola...
y3 = Ax3^2 + Bx3 + C
y2 = Ax2^2 + Bx2 + C
y1 = Ax1^2 + Bx1 + C
These are fairly easy to solve for...
A = (y3-y2)/(x3-x2)(x3-x1) -
(y1-y2)/(x1-x2)(x3-x1)
B = ( y1 - y2 + A(x2^2 -
x1^2) )/(x1-x2)
C = y1 - Ax1^2 - Bx1
Finding the zero slope quickly tells us
the minimum (assuming a down-pointing
parabola) will be at x = -B/2A and that
the corresponding y value at the minimum
will (as everywhere else) be Ax^2 + Bx + C.
Other expressions for B are possible by
noting that (x1^2-x2^2) = (x1+x2)(x1-x2).
May 20, 2006
It's literally a little out of our league, but we
picked up a bunch of NFL flag football
goodies from a plastics bankruptcy auction
that include belts and flags, along
with bulk rolls of flagging material.
These should shortly go up onto eBay.
Meanwhile, please email me if you have
any interest in these items.
May 19, 2006
It sure must be frustrating for the
astronomers and their science and
engineering support who are actively
searching for extrasolar planets.
On one hand, the tools and techniques
have dramatically improved in the past
few years. On the other, the search
seems to be the equivalent to rock
climbing while wearing welding goggles,
a bomb squad flack suit and boxing gloves.
Nature Magazine for May 18th describes
a solar system a mere 41 light years away
with three rocky planets and an asteroid
belt. The outermost which, while much
larger than Earth, lies in the habitable zone.
Here's the CNN Summary and the Slashdot
discussion.
Meanwhile, the extrasolar planet total
is rapidly approaching 200, and the new
discoveries are now pouring in at a one
per week and rapidly accellerating rate.
Per this site.
41 light years, of course, is near enough
that "they" could be warily watching
Roller Derby and Captain Video . Not
to mention Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.
It's Howdy Doody time!
My own predictions: We will know about
many thousands of extrasolar planets and
quite a few habitable ones within a year or
two. And that such planets will end up as
common as dirt.
But that the earth-moon systems required
for climatic stability will remain exceptionally
rare indeed.
May 18, 2006
We're pretty much sold out of our stainless
steel hose reels. But we do have three left
that need some fairly minor repairs that we
have up as a Dutch Auction lot on eBay.
This is an outstanding deal, but we are going
to strictly limit it to local pickup only and
commercial shipping unavailable. We are
further going to insist on personal inspection
manditory.
No exceptions.
May 17, 2006
Always remember that you have no friends
at an auction! Least of all the auctioneer.
Listen to everything, volunteer nothing.
Be invisible till it is time to be in the
auctioneer's face.
Dress down to the point of being shabby,
but always wear one very distinct hat or
other piece of clothing. If more than five
percent of your bids win, you are bidding
far too high. Always stop bidding if anyone
is bidding against you and you even remotely
approach fair value.
Always stay for the end of the auction. In
some cases, utterly spectacular bargains
will result. Especially if the area has to be
cleared for a new tenant or whatever.
Sometimes you can also make really great
deals on unbid or unsold items after the
auction or during quiet times.
Don't sweat bidding on tons of garbage to
get one or two items. You can usually find
someone to take (or even pay for) the
dregs after the auction. And abandoining
stuff often is not that big a deal.
Stay alert through numerious sitdown and
meditation breaks, sensible food and drink,
mild painkillers, and frequent restroom use.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
May 16, 2006
There's been some press lately about
huge new pv power plants here in the
desert southwest. At least to me, they
make no sense whatsoever in their
as-promoted form. At least not at the
present time with presently available
technology.
The largest online grid pv facility in the
world is up in Springerville AZ. You can
monitor its real time stats by going to
http://greenwatts.com/pages/solaroutput.asp.
Apparently their graphs require something
IE specific, because they do not show up
properly in FireFox.
At any rate, today's production was an
impressive 17,000 kilowatt hours, which
was somewhat above their daily average
for this month. Definitely world class.
Now, a research facility on an emerging
technology is not in any manner expected
to be competitive or show any profit.
Especially if it has "Hey - we're green!"
pr promotional value written all over it.
Conspicuously absence in their current
figures are their avoided peaking cost
which I'd guess somewhere around six
cents per kilowatt hour.
And their current amortization burn rate
on which I have no accurate figures. But
if you go to an Amortization Calculator,
you'd find that the avoided cost output of
$17,000 x .06 = $1020 per day is enough to
amortize at most only a total facility cost of
slightly over three million dollars.
Assuming ten percent financing over twenty
years and neglecting maint and labor.
I would guess the de-facto costs of running
this plant to be outrageously higher
than this figure. Somewhat telling is that
expansion plans have been put on hold
because panel costs are now much higher
than they were two years ago.
And that, of course, would be for breakeven
only. Where you have an elaborate
smoke and mirrors "paint it green"
situation that in fact uses 100 percent
existing conventional energy. Six cents
of amortization in and six cents of
electricity out is a wash.
The physical and economic facts any huge
new facility would have to recognize are...
~ There are no particularly compelling
economics of scale for really huge pv
plants. Especially on locally cloudy days.
~ Conventional silicon pv never has
been, is not now, and is highly unlikely
ever to become a net energy source
that is renewable and sustainable
under unsubsidized proper total system
full burden amortization.
~ Prices of conventional silicon pv panels
are skyrocketing because (A) their
underlying source of cheap silicon no
longer exists, and (B) because of the
demand caused by individuals scamming
outrageous federal and state subsidies.
~ The latest of CIGS pv technology does have
the promise of moving us much closer to
renewability and sustainability. I strongly
feel that it would be unthinkable for a new
ultra-large long term pv plant to commit
itself to conventional silicon whenever a
ridiculously better technology is imminent.
Much more in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
May 15, 2006
We found some excessive wear on one of our
older rod style Temposonic position sensors, so
we've pulled all of this style devices from our
listings until we can come up with a decent test
sequence.
Our refurb backlog is now quite a few months,
so we are unlikely to relist these any time soon.
May 14, 2006
Finally got a straight story directly from
Cunningham Auctioneers. They simply
leased out their old yard to a second tier
charity auctioneer. They most definitely
will be continuing industrial on-site auctions.
Any loose or leftover items will be sold by
Auction and Appraise on a consignment
basis. The two firms remain separate
and independent entities.
Meanwhile, Auction Advantage is
apparently dropping their house auctions
and going on-site onlly. Their use of an
old church school seemed absolutely
ideal as an auction base site. But I'd
guess the Benson auctioneering market
is highly competitive (American West,
Crawford, Robinson, Tingle, LaGuerre
et al...) and that discretionary income
in the Benson area is largely unknown.
May 13, 2006
One recurring urban lore myth at the
alt.online.marketing.ebay newsgroup is
that using dropshippers is an instant way
to effortless riches.
Uh, a much better term would be dropshitting.
Problems with dropshitting include...
(1) There are far too many fingers in the pie.
(2) The sell/buy ratio is ludicrously too low.
Always seek out 30:1.
(3) Other competitors are certain to panic and
utterly trash prices.
(4) Opportunities for personal value added are
sorely limited.
(5) The merchandise is typically overpriced
worthless garbage.
and, of course...
(6) It is YOU that get hung out to dry on the
inevitable no ship, late ship, or wrong ship.
Tested and proven useful sources of supply for
eBay sellers that meet the required 30:1
sell/buy ratio include privitized military surplus,
dotbomb bankruptcies, industrial distress sales,
and community college auctions.
Links and details on these appear on our Auction
Help library page.
A custom resource locator can be built for your
regional area per our Auction Resource
Locator info page.
May 12, 2006
GuruGram #65 is a Magic Sinewave Executive
Summary.
Sourcecode is found here. Much more in our
Magic Sinwave library.
May 11, 2006
Many problems with trojans and malware
and other nasties invading your computer
should be solvable by adding a simple and
effective traffic monitor to your system.
One that plots your usage patterns versus
time and summarizes what was sent to who
when.
Yet I know of no such device. And ISP's
report to me that such systems cost many
thousands of dollars and have complex
use restrictions.
I'd suspect that a simple Ethernet sniffer
with some reasonably swift software would
be all that was really needed.
If you know of any such solution that is
simple and cheap, please email me.
============================
So far, one reader suggested Snort.
I'll have to look into this.
May 10, 2006
We've been getting 50 to 100 "undeliverble"
messages a day lately from email that we
obviously never sent. All from artificially
generated return addresses such as
alex234523453@tinaja.com.
The most probable cause is someone spoofing
our email address. Most likely mid-European
judging by the timing of the messages and the
utterly vapid worthlessness of their copy.
What can you do in a similar circumstance?
First and foremost, NEVER NEVER NEVER
use Internet Explorer!!!! Always use the
infinitely better and (at least so far) much less
vunerable FireFox and Thunderbird free
alternatives instead.
Second, have trojan defenses in place. Such
as a decent firewall and several anti-virus
and malware programs resident and active.
If you are on a cable modem or otherwise
are always internet live, try disconnecting
for all but your minimum and absolutely
essential use times, and see if there is any
change in the number or pattern of emails.
It is of utmost importance to verify that you
are not in fact the unexpected source of
the bulk email through malware running
in a background mode on your own machine.
A final solution presents a dilemma. If
you are running a business, it pays to be
able to accept ANY incoming email
address. Such as orders@tinaja.com
or support@tinaja.com. Without having
to try and guess each and every possible
way a customer may want to reach you.
Otherwise, limiting yourself to a very
few valid email addresses will make all
of these bogus returns invisible to you.
Be sure to communicate with your ISP
and work closely with them. They may
be able to provide other solutions as well.
May 9, 2006
My favorite restaurants? Locally, Toni's Kitchen
is best, but since Toni left, the ambience sucks
and they are a tad pricey. Classic home cooking
with an Italian and mid-European focus. Superb
Pizza.
Best view and buy is Branding Iron's Monday
taco night. Giving profound new meaning to the
term "limited menu".
The Pretzel Rolls at The Breadbasket in Sierra
Vista, of course, are in a class by themselves.
Sadly, these sell out by 07:02:18 each morning.
355 West Wilcox Drive. SE of the fort main gate
by about 400 feet.
Rodney's midblock across from the railroad park
in Willcox is definitely a BBQ with attitude, but
has dropped slightly from his peak. Be sure to
check out the Rex Allen painting on the wall.
Best BBQ in Arizon forever and ever is Joes in
Gilbert. On Gilbert Road just north of all the
fake front business district buildings. Music tends
towards Porter Wagoner and Bob Wills; Avant
Garde stuff like Hank Williams is strictly verboten.
For decades, I've really liked the Siameese Cat
on the northwest corner of Baseline and Price in
Tempe. As well as the superb Dim Sum in
Chandler's C-Fu.
And, while I am not sure of the name or address,
there's a great Italian/Armenian restaurant just
South of Falcon Field in Mesa. Probably some
address similar to 4463 East Mckellips Road. On
the Southeast corner of Mckellips and Higley.
In Tucson, most any eegees is hard to beat for fast
food. Superb slushes. And my favorite Japenese
would be Sachiko. Of the two locations, I prefer
the 3200 East Valencia site.
For a Tucson or Phoenix deli, Schlotsky's is quite
good. This is apparently a nationwide chain.
May 8, 2006
A reminder that there is at least one
source of energy research grants that
aggressively seeks out both individual
and small scale startups. And that the
submission deadline is nearing.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/contracts/smallgrant/
for further details.
May 7, 2006
May 6, 2006
Which is not to say that a quick buck cannot
be made on scrap broken traffic lights.
But it sure looked grim for a while. I bid on
dozens of pallets of "flashers" sight unseen
at a Phoenix auction. Hoping they were
wigwags that volunteer firemen would find
useful on eBay.
The boxes showed up with all of the flashers
being really out-of-date traffic light control cards,
Worse yet, all of the boxes were clearly marked
BAD in large letters.
Such are the vagaries of high margin surplus
speculation. Worse yet, the few items that I
checked at random were either hand-wired
triacs or high specialized and obsolete cards
that would have taken zillions of hours to
repair All units obviusly were smoked.
I was about to admit major defeat and throw
the whole works on the Alvin Pile ( a fully
automatic garbage disposal system that pays
me $200 per month ), when I decided to make
one last check.
Lo and Behold, the majority of the remaining
units held standard ultra rugged solid state
relays! These were easily stripped and tested,
Amazingly the failure rate of the relays
themselves was ZERO with not one bad unit!
We still have a very few of the older relays
up on eBay, but basically they flew outta here
Apparently I priced them waaay too low.
Talk about blind luck.
Some of the fallout was a solid state relay
tester that I'll try to get into a GuruGram
format as soon as I get out from under our
current ongoing projects.
May 5, 2006
As we've seen in Stalking the Wild Paradigm,
some areas are open to individuals and small
scale developers, while others clearly are not.
Obvious examples are anything automotive
(where a MINIMUM of three generations of
SAE membership is entry level), anything
medical, and, of course, anything related in
any manner to personal aviation.
I just turned down what should have been some
fast and easy consulting from an individual who
wanted to "improve" traffic lights. Who did not
realize the layer upon layer of bureaucracy
involved, the chronic budget shortfalls and time
extensions, the few big companies who utterly
and totally dominate the industry (Eagle, Crouse
Hinds, TCT, EPAC, PEEK, and a very few others),
and, of course, the NEMA and UL and other
certification and qualifications that cost many
thousnds of dollars and take years to complete.
If this individual is series about developing
better traffic lights (arcane degrees and very
specialized expertise is involved), they would
best be advised to seek out one of the big
firms and see about working for them.
Modern controllers are incredibly sophisticated
and easily communicate with each others.
Chances are that existing programming options
are waaaay beyond anything an outsider might
be able to dream up.
There also, amazingly, is quite a bit of traffic
light stuff on the web for enthuasiasts and
collectors. Such as Traffic Light Wizard.
There is even a Traffic Light Web Ring.
May 4, 2006
Made some revisions and corrections to our
Bezier Curve through Four Data Points tutorial
that appears as GuruGram #59.
May 3, 2006
One of the more obscure tools in my Gonzo
Utilities is our Curvetracing Routine.
These use some "fairly weak" cubic splines
to draw smooth curves through any number
of data points. Per this example's figure one.
Data format is [x0 y0 ang0 x1 y1 ang1 x2 y2
ang2 ... xn yn angn] curvetrace. The x and
y values are the current data point, while the
ang is the angle in degrees that you are going
through that current point. A separate tension
parameter lets you further adjust the curve's
smoothness or enthuasiasm.
A few years back, an important addition was
made: If you enter "999" as your angle for
an intermediate data point, then some fancy
code will try to guess at your best angle.
This can be far faster and less tedious.
It does this by temporarily fitting a circle to
the pre-and-post data points and then
finding the needed tangent slope for you.
Also, if your initial data points are 0 0, then
you will append an existing path. Otherwise
you will start a new one. Should you really
need a new path that starts at 0,0 you can
use 0, 0.00001 instead.
The actual latest curvetracing utility can be
found here, along with a demo. At present,
you'll have to manually add this to the start
of your program. I'm a tad gun shy about
making any changes to the original Gonzo
code.
Much more in our PostScript library.
May 2, 2006
Here is an "Oh No, Not Another One."
entry in the wierd new engine sweepstakes.
At present, there is around a 2:1 difference
between theoretical (64%) and actual (32%)
ICE internal combustion engine efficiencies, so
a lot of slop remains, and significant improvements
are almost certain to emerge.
I'd personally give the most credence to those
that split the four cycle or go to six cylcles of
more or less normal construction. And, of course,
to such obvious improvements as electric
valves and on-demand accessories.
Designs with lots of strange geometry or
exotic seals are less likely to make it out
of the starting gate. The key test of course
is whether the proponent is an SAE member,
their father a senior SAE member, and their
grandfather a SAE member emeritus.
No one else need even bother to apply.
One of the interesting side effects of all this
is that fuel cells may now be falling further and
further behind state-of-the-art ICE efficiency.
And just may forever remain so because more
dollars and smarter dollars are being thrown into
improving ICE efficiency.
May 1, 2006
GuruGram #64 is an intro tutorial on using
our Gonzo Utilities to create Engineering
log log plots and graphs.
Sourcecode is found here. The actual utility
appears here along with its demo.
Much more in our PostScript library.
April 30, 2006
A "click to expand" feature can be added
to any .PDF file figure or art cut simply by
using the Linking Tool in any full version
of Acrobat. Clicking takes you to a url of
your choice.
If you are writing your own PostScript code
to be distilled, you can avoid any manual
tool use by building a routine similar to
this one directly into your program...
mark
/Rect [ llx lly urx urry]
/Border [ 0 0 0]
/Color [ .7 0 0 ]
/Action <</Subtype /URI /URI
cururlname>>
/Subtype /Link
/ANN
pdfmark
Here llx and lly are the lower left corner
of the area to be clicked on in current units.
urx and ury similarly define the upper right.
And cururlname is where you want to click
to.
More details in the PDFMark Reference
Manual.
April 29, 2006
April 28, 2006
I've always been a big fan of "rules of thumb"
Which are sneaky ways of quickly approximating
reality.
Ferinstance, calculating the electrolytic capacitors
for a power supply can be a pain. Unless you
remember that in an 8300 microfard capacitor
the volts of ripple equal its amps of current in a
full wave 60 Hertz (120 Hz ripple) supply.
I've also found that "rules" of one percent of
everything that happens in the US happens in
Arizona and one percent of everything that
happens in Arizona happens in the Gila Valley
can be remarkably accurate in estimating
a wide variety of goings on.
But my favorite rule of thumb is the one that
us Hazmat specialists use: Hold your thumb
extended at arm's length and close one eye.
If you can still see the scene, you are too close.
April 27, 2006
Picked up a bunch of classic utility switchgear
that include some superb 110v THREE PHASE
kilowatthour meters, some combined kwh
and demand meters, and some fairly
collectible time overcurrent relays.
These are all "switchgear mount" in
"ammo can" cages, so they are super
easy to interface with ordinary connections
and require no special plugins. Many include
large "paddle style" switches.
email me if you have any interest in these.
The power meters in particular should be
superb for bench testing of VFD motor
drives, alternate energy research, and such.
April 26, 2006
Dr. Jerome F. MacDonald is the senior
member of a design team that has long
been working in the Dairy Science division
of the US Department of Agriculture.
They have come up with a communications
input-output (I /O) and interchange code for
computers and terminals. The coding is
simple, effective, and easy to use. It’s now
spreading rapidly to to other government
agencies and now is becoming an industry
wide standard.
In fact, the code now has an Electronics
Industries Evaluationary (EIE) status and
should shortly go international.
Thus, the old MacDonald farm interface is
now an EIE I/O.
More at http://www.tinaja.com/glib/marcia.pdf
April 25, 2006
This week's Science Magazine for April
14, 2006 seems to be chock full of goodies...
~ A new Books in the Digital Age book
that further develops our "Who Needs
Book Publishers and what have they
done for us recently" theme.
~ Double Perovskites as Anode Materials
for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells lets the cells
operate with natural gas and allows some
contaminents, eliminating the need for
the Hydrogen Ludicrosity.
~ Catalytic Alkane Metathesis are some
newly discovered catalyists that eventually
MAY promise to make gasoline a renewable
resource. But not yet quite prime time.
~ Zinc Oxide Piezoelectric Nanogenerators may
provide a means for generating micropower
electricity from within the human body.
April 24, 2006
Assume you are an intern working on a SETI
program at a somewhat advanced civilization
on Iota Rectuli IV.
Strong evidence of rocky planets have recently
been discovered nearby in a minor arm of your own
second rate galaxy sometimes called the "Milky Way".
A mere fifty light years or so away.
Amazingly, one of these planets suddenly and
recently became a "radio star" with substantial
output at the VHF frequency range. Your recent
careful analysis has shown detailed comb structure
with strong harmonics related to both 60 Hertz
and 15.750 kilohertz.
Between the latest of advanced signal processing
algorithms and some exceptionally rare viewing
conditions, out pops a prefectly lucid and clear
ten second video clip of ROLLER DERBY!
As the sum total of everything known about
human civilization. We can assume that
"Captain Video" and "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie"
are yet to be discovered.
What report, if any, would you submit to
your supervisor?
April 23, 2006
An interesting source of highest quality free
ebooks appears here, with well over a thousand
titles offered. And, of course, Project Gutenberg
now offers some 18,000 free titles.
As we've seen before the MIT Courseware site
also offers great heaping bunches of free top
quality scholarly info.
I can see a major train wreck coming...
~ We are certain to soon have "some
other device" that completely blows
away all existing ebook readers AND
all conventional books for ease of use
and convenience. Pricing of such a
device will be "ad promotion giveaway"
within three years.
~ The overwhelming majority of services
a book publisher used to offer are either
no longer needed at all or else are wildly
counterproductive. Certainly a publisher
should not receive nearly as much in the
per-title return as the author. It is not
clear to me why we need book publishers
any more at all.
~ Draconian DRM digital rights management
is certain to self-destruct. And probably
spectacularly so. In many cases, the quality
and utility of free and open sources greatly
exceeds those being DRM'ed to death. If
a person buys something, they should be
able to use it forever in any form they choose.
April 22, 2006
Computing power has essentially become
free. As a result, throwing another hundred
thousand or a million calculations at a problem
is simply no big deal anymore. Which opens
up all sorts of new computational possibilities
undreampt of only a few decades ago.
Seti at home, of course, routinely racks up
millenia of computing power each use hour.
I've personally used "obsessively excess"
computing power on early exhaustive
searches for my Magic Sinewaves. Or
finding a heretical new way of analyzing
Electromagnetic Fields that eliminates all
of the coordinate transformation gore by
simply reentering initial conditions before
each and every "relaxation" averaging.
Some interesting things are newly happening
in active filters where we can now apparently
go well beyond the traditional Bessel,
Butterworth, and Chebycheff shapes. To do
this, you simply do a least squares optimization
towards the response you are after.
Ferinstance, others have shown that the "best"
Bessel time delay filters can easily be beat by
dinking around with the cascaded second order
section damping and frequency values.
I'm currently looking at finding the best
approximation to a brickwall filter using two
cascaded second order sections. It will be
interesting to see if anything better than
Chebycheff or Butterworth results, and also
how many optima there actually are.
Present thoughts are to throw ten million or
more random frequency and damping values
and then restrict them to least squares best
fits. This is a back burner project, so it may
take a while to get up toe GuruGram status.
April 21, 2006
There's a curious alternate lighting scheme
out there called an induction lamp. It would
seem to make a dandy student paper, but
otherwise would appear to be in a temporary
and pricey niche market.
Induction lamps are similar to newer
flourescents, except that there is a rf
transmitter in the base and no filaments
or electrodes. The rf is inductively
coupled into the internal mercury vapor.
Which lights up in the ultraviolet and
excites a normal phosphor.
Just like the old "hold a fluroescent up
to a Tesla Coil" gee whiz demos.
Induction lamps today offer exceptional
lifetimes of 20 years or 200,000 hours and
are thus in demand for tunnel lighting and
other places where the light absolutely must
not fail or its replacement labor is insanely
costly. Typical sizes are 150 watts or so.
Efficiency is rather impressive at 87 lumens
per watt, and the color rendering is fairly
good with several different white optoins.
Negatives include these being outrageously
expensive and having obvious RFI problems.
You can Google "induction lamp" for lots of
hits including this one and this one.
Additional topics for student papers appear here.
April 20, 2006
Found a second use for the solid state relay
tester: Digital panel meters only draw a few watts
and often involve temporary power clips on their
connectors. There's far fewer possibilities of
fireworks over a loose connection if you have a
60 watt bulb in series.
I may work up a GuruGram on this tester.
April 19, 2006
Our Southern Oregon Gold Hill spectacular view
property is now listed here.
We've purposely priced these 20 acres at well
under market because a solvable easement
issue needs resolved before homesite approval
can be granted.
Power is on the property and very attractive
financing is available. Mid-size city ameneties are
twelve minutes away. The Rogue River is nearby;
beaches and mountains are an hour away.
Here's some photos...
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
You can click expand these. Then click again.
This steep to sloping parcel is immediately adjacent to the Gold
Hill city limits and offers absolutely outstanding views. It is in one
of the most in-demand rural areas in the country, and has really great
access both to recreation and to midsize city resources. Plus superb
climate, low crime, and good schools.
Here is a map. Property is the green rectangle "pointed to" by
Thirteenth Street.
April 18, 2006
I seem to have been making a lot of really dumb
mistakes lately. I guess the trick is to play them
as they lie, to not repeat them, and to hopefully
learn from them...
~ An unhitched trailer can tip over if you get
the center of gravity wrong.
~ The flush mechanism on a toilet has a left
hand thread.
~ Driving six hours to an auction a week early
assures you of a good parking space.
~ Failing to inspect before bidding is really,
really dumb. And negates on-line bidding.
~ Putting identical "first" and "seconds" up
on eBay at the same time only pisses people
off. Besides totally trashing both offers.
~ Not looking deep enough into obvious trash
can miss spectacularly refurbable goodies.
April 17, 2006
Refurb Log:
One long forgotten and "lost" piece of test
equipment is a powered 60 watt light bulb
with a series pair of insultated alligator clips.
This was particularly useful for "fuse blows"
symptoms where you could estimate excess
input current without doing any damage. Or
finding out a motor has locked or high friction
bearings. Or simply ringing out questionable
line cords and such.
I just built up a variant on this ancient tester
that I'm using to test solid state relays. A
bunch of which we just salvaged from damaged
traffic light control modules.
I took a three gang wall box from Home Depot
and installed a switch (preferably double pole)
and two duplex outlets. After, of course, removing
the two nails. I then added most of a computer
line cord, zillions of which we keep in stock.
The middle duplex outlet powers a 12 VDC wall
wart, newly terminated in two small insulated
alligator clips. This provides the input control
signal for your relay under test.
The right duplex outlet has a pronged socket on
it that holds a 60 watt light bulb. Two large insulated
alligator clips are in series with it. And thus goes
across the relay load terminals.
A good relay will light the bulb only when +12vdc
is applied. An open relay will never light, while
a shorted one will light immediately.
Needless to say, there are all sorts of shock
hazard possibilities, so think before using!
I may work a GurrGram up on this depending
on how many of the relays test good.
April 16, 2006
There's some potentially interesting free
online file conversion utilities up on this site.
I had hopes their .BMP to .PDF converter
would directly convert bitmaps into PostScript.
But it apparently goes through a .JPG
intermediate step that trashes the quality.
It is also disturbing to let a third party site
reach down into YOUR computer (NOT your
ISP web pages) to access data. The abuse
and malware potential is extreme.
I'm not clear on exactly how they are doing
this.
JPG to PostScript is fairly trivial as there is
a DCTDecode filter built into PostScript.
We saw details on this in JPG2PDF.PDF.
April 15, 2006
Yesterday's comments on dimes versus
kilowatt hours being interchangable in many
energy stytems leads to the obvious question
of "What does it take to produce a viable
renewable and sustainable alternate energy
system?"
Here are some guidelines...
~ The system absolutely and emphatically
must be capable of producing NET new
energy. Gasoline is a net energy source
becuse one quart of old gasoline is needed
to produce one gallon of new. pv solar
remains a net energy sink and is likely
to stay so forever with older technology.
~ The fully burdened cost amortization of
the COMPLETE energy system must be
potentially cost competitive with existing
sources. But simply having cost parity
accomplishes nothing. For all you have is
a smoke-and-mirrors "paint it green"
transfer of existing conventional energy.
~ The system must offer costs that are
LOWER THAN conventional alternatives
to the point where they are capable of
DISPLACING conventional sources.
~ Only that fraction of the costs of alternate
energy BELOW market alternatives is truly
renewable and sustainable. Thus, if a home
panel produces nine cent per kilowatt hour
electricity in a ten cent per kilowatt hour
market, then only ONE CENT per kwh is
capable of being truly renewable and sustainable.
~ Zero subsidies or other incentives will be
needed if the system is truly and genuinely
capable of becoming renewable and
sustainable to the point of differentially
replacing conventional sources. In fact,
your main problem would be beating
customers away with a stick. Subsidies
are a sure sign of a worthless rathole.
And are ludicrously counterproductive.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
April 14, 2006
Many alternate energy enthuasiasts seem
to feel that the dimes and dollars used for
system amortization or excluded opportunity
costs somehow "don't count" in an energy
budget.
Which causes all of the utterly bogus voodoo
economics surrounding net energy sink pv
solar panels today. Not one net watthour of
silicon pv electricity has ever been produced.
And pv solar today is NOT in any manner
renewable nor sustainable.
In reality, all of economics is a minor subset
of thermodynamics. And net energy sources
and their demand availability ultimately dictate
the price of nearly everything else.
Sometimes the relationship between dollars
and kilowatt hours is very clearly defined.
Other times the linking is less tight and
may be temporarily affected by supply or
demand issues, by taxes, subsidies, and
such similar fuzzies.
But in the crucial case of home pv panels,
it is no cotest. In net metering states,
dimes and kilowatt hours are strictly
DEFINED as being directly interchangeable
with each other.
Thus every current dime in a pv cost
analsysis exactly equals one kilowatt hour
of current energy and vice versa. Dimes
and kilowatt hours are thus fungible and
interchangable commodities in this instance.
Cost analysis is easily done with this resource.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
April 13, 2006
Updated and expanded our GuruGram library.
April 12, 2006
Here's an alternate method of visualizing
a Magic Sinewave: For n pulses per
quadrant, you really seem to have a zero
phase synchronized and 100% depth modulated
(zero signal = zero width) bipolar PWM carrier
of frequency 4n. Whose pulse widths will
proportionally set any desirable amplitude.
The waveform has the following magic
properties: All odd and even harmonics
are theoretically zero up to 4n.Thus, a
seven-pulse-per-quadrant magic sinewave
will zero out the first TWENTY EIGHT
even and odd harmonics!
And, crucially, the absolutely minimum
number of switch transitions (one half-
bridge event for each harmonic zeroed)
guarantees the highest possible efficiency.
The first two uncontrolled harmonics
will be fairly large and require filtering.
These harmonics are never larger than
the fundamental.
Very exacting math is required to
precisely determine the pulse edge
positions. Example calculators appear
in our Magic Sinewave library.
Any desired number of harmonics may
be zeroed up into the hundreds and
possibly the thousands. But as the
number of harmonics increase, so
will the number of pulses and switching
events. Even extreme waveforms should
still retain advantages over conventional
PWM, though.
Real world quantization (especially when
retaining 8-bit word capabilities changes
true zero harmonics into those that remain
astonishingly low. Typically way below
-65 decibels below the fundamental.
It is highly unlikely that (A) any more
efficient sinewave generator can be
found for a given number of zeroed
harmonics; and (B) closed form solutions
for determining the pulse positions are
extremely unlikely to be found.
Here's an intro tutorial.
April 11, 2006
As Scooge McDuck would say about his
dime, it's "Good old number one".
Thanks to Michael Holly for scanning and
third party posting my very first national
technical construction project from the
April 1963 issue of Electronics World.
Links to other early projects and technical
articles can be found here.
The story paid $150 at a time when tv
dinners cost a quarter each. Sigh.
Curiously, the Music-Speech Discriminator
story in the same issue was also mine. At
the time Electronics World insisted on
pseudo author names if an author appeared
more than once in the same issue.
I'm just as glad my name did not appear on
this one because additional work should
have been done both on the "log" amplifier
and the Schmidt Trigger before it was ever
published. It did work, sort of. But its use as
commercial killers was strictly limited to ultra
snotty FM stations. All long gone, of course.
I eventually hope to provide on-site
reprints of each and every one of my
books and papers. This will take
considerable additional support from
our Banner Advertisers and Synergetics
Partners.
April 10, 2006
I'm amazed at the sharply dropping prices
and incredible variety of LED's and multi-
LED assemblies. Such as at this site or
this one or this one.
In particular, traditional pilot lights are now
replacable with identical size and based LED's
at prices ranging from three to six dollars.
The four-LED versions give superb virtual
brightness. Especially when matched to the
lens color.
I've just listed some really nice automation
pushbuttons and pilot lights on our eBay
store that are excellent candidates for LED
replacement.
Turning to the bigger picture, modules with
dozens of LED's in them are now cheaply
available. The largest single LED's are still
stuck at five watts. Some devices are now
approaching a stunning 100 lumens per watt.
And there's apparently no close-in physical
limits to what should come down next. It is
just of question of learning curves, Moore's
Law, and improved geometries that should
shortly give us a 60 watt 110 volt incandescent
lamp replacement for two dollars or so.
Very high performance caver lights are found here.
April 9, 2006
We pride ourselves in having the finest product
photos on eBay, bar none. Here's some of the secret
tools and techniques we use on, say, a piece of test
equipment to get the finest image possible...
~ Extensive image post prep. At least 90
percent of your time should be spent
improving your image, not taking it.
~ 5 Megapixels minimum resolution. Lots
of extra res is needed for rotations, for
distortion correction, lettering touchup,
and antialiasing. Even modest cropping
alarmingly gobbles pixels.
~ Use BOTH a Scanner and a Camera.
Or sometimes even both at the same
time. Per this tutorial.
~ Simple plus custom tools. We normally
only use plain old Paint plus ImagView 32
plus the custom routines linked here.
~ Background knockout sharpens edges
and defines product. Done with our
knockback utility or direct substitution.
~ Backrgound substitution eliminates any
too harsh white, allows vignetting when
appropriate, and dramatically minimizes
JPEG edge artifacts. Done either with
our manual pallette or auto-backgrounder.
~ Architects 2-1/2D Perspective makes all
vertical lines truly vertical. Using our
nutilt correction utility.
~ Pixel Locking in which each and every
vertical or horizontal line is made so to
one pixel accuracy. This greately eases
use of symmetry and replication. And
dramatically ups virtual sharpness.
~ Punchthru Elimination. If a background
is knocked out to white for later color
substitution, then absolutely no true white
pixels can exist in the image itself. One
combination utility appears here.
~ Edge Chasing. In which a believable edge
gets replicated by random length cutting
and pasting. Rotation handles other sides
and mirroring takes care of corners.
~ The "open lasso stunt" in Paint. Knocking
out a diagonal edge is trivial using an
open ended lasso of proper endpoint slope.
~ Image Leveling in which an entire panel
background is made identical. This also
greatly simplifies edge/corner replication.
~ "Shadowless" Techniques in which any
and all un-useful shadows are minimized
or (preferably) eliminated entirely.
~ Lettering Improvement, either by sharpening
the image leveling outline. Or, in extreme
cases, by doing a total ultra-res relettering
using our ultra high resolution, fully anti-
aliased Bitmap Typewriter. The latter is
normally cost effective only when more than
one identical instrument will be sold.
~ Available Light Photography. Flash sometimes
causes unacceptable harshness and shading.
Digital cameras are amazingly sensitive and
outdoors or skylights plus white reflectors can
often give you better balance and more than
enough light. Which can be further brightened
with ImagView 32 or a fancier package.
~ Dodging and burning. Or in some cases,
outright replacement of a flashed or
overwhite area. Tutorials here and here.
~ Whole Cloth Accessories. Such things as feet
or handles or connectors are sometimes done
as new and original artwork, especially if
the originals are muddy or lack field depth.
~ Cut and Paste Reuse. "Borrowing" portions
of your existing images and reworking them
can often greatly reduce the total imaging time.
But always respect the VERO rights of others.
More tutorials and support on our Auction Help page.
Ultra image consulting services, training, and site
seminars available. email me with your needs.
April 8, 2006
If you do not have medical insurance, most
hospitals and practictioners have an in-place system
for substantial discounts for cash payments. These
often can be in the 30 percent range, sometimes
a lot higher. And further negotiation is often
possible.
The reason being that most insurance companies
only pay fifty cents on the dollar or less under
their negotiated contracts with practictioners.
But these discounts are never advertised and there
are severe gotchas if you do not know the rules
ahead of time. For instance, some may demand
immediate payment and giving them a day to
calculate the payment may disqualify you!
So, always ask beforehand, then ask again.
More thoughts on medical issues in our
Don't Get Sick tutorial.
April 7, 2006
The info you can dig out of Google never
ceases to amaze me. Most people now know
you can simply type in a phone number to
get the equivalent name and address.
Suprisingly often, you can enter an oddball
Manufacturers Part Number (!) and get
all sorts of hits and useful info. Especially
when you add a field-narrowing keyword
or two that are carefully chosen.
I've had this work even on obsolete parts
from companies that have folded or gone
through several mergers.
If a part number consists of 36 combined
letters and numerals, then six characters
would allow over 2 billion different part
numbers! Thus, it doesn't take much to
make a part number truly unique.
At long last, most manufacturers will tell
you how much their parts cost instantly
and without too much hassle. The usual
easiest way is to try and buy the item
through their online store.
But there are still a few epsilon minuses
who send you to their distributor who in a
week or two refer you to their rep who
eventually decides their comission is not
high enough to tell you what the item costs.
Curiously, there seems to be a backlash
among the electronic test equipment houses.
Most of whom stupidly refuse to post prices.
April 6, 2006
Revised and corrected our GuruGram #52 on
Full Transparency from Raw PostScript.
April 5, 2006
And ( see below for buyers ), here are some of the most
common eBay seller mistakes...
~ Not recognizing that eBay sales are a profession
demanding EXTREME time commitment, attention
to detail, and very high personal value added.
~ Trying to work on too low a profit margin. Always
seek out a 30:1 or higher sell/buy ratio.
~ Not having the faintest clue what your true costs
are. If you are not including your pro-rated water
bill and similar obscure items, your cost accounting
is probably woefully inadequate.
~ Not recognizing that the minimum profitable eBay
sale is somewhere around $19.63.
~ Not offering unique products not found elsewhere.
~ Failing to keep proper tax records.
~ Exceeding a 21 day cashout or 15 month hang time.
While avoiding the profit loss of "too fast" sales.
~ Not realizing that eBay seller profits happen during
BUYING and not selling.
~ Not buying except under EXTREME distress situations.
If more than 5% of your buy offers are accepted, you
are paying way too much.
~ Failing to promptly provide tracking info to buyer.
Naturally, you NEVER ship without tracking and
insurance.
~ Not keeping your item descriptions complete, accurate,
and somewhat understated.
~ Listing anything you cannot hold extended at arm's length.
~ Not having proper inventory controls in place.
~ Not having a VISA/MC commercial account,
UPS daily pickup, a trade name registration,
and a state tax stamp.
~ Using arcane terms and conditions that exceed
ten words absolute maximum.
~ Failing to promptly answer all emails and to
correct all problems as quickly as possible.
~ Not using a camera AND a scanner AND web data
links when and where appropriate. Images rule.
~ Failing to keep shipping charges strictly revenue
neutral.
~ Not spending nearly enough time in image post-
processing. At least 90 percent of your photo
effort should go here.
~ Selling foreign.
~ Listing any item at an opening price less than
you are willing to sell it for.
~ Withdrawing an on-the-block offer in violation
of the Uniform Commercial Code.
~ Selling any item violating VERO rights.
~ Selling in known problem categories.
~ Stealing images and copy from other sellers.
~ Accepting anything but VISA/MC or Paypal.
~ Not offering inspection priveleges. Not promptly
offering refunds. When appropriate, including
buyer costs and without return.
~ Falling for account-stealing phishing emails.
~ Posting feedback before customer evaluates item.
~ Being rude or confrontational in seller email contacts.
~ Using dropshippers, palletized "bargains", doing
consignment sales, or selling for friends.
April 4, 2006
There apparently is an interaction bug in Adobe Acrobat
7.x.x between transparency modes and the exact Reader
colors that are displayed.
Others web report this as a change in colors...
"We are aware of color mismatches when viewing
PDFs which have some kinds of transparency in
PDF 1.4. Yes, this has been duly reported as a bug
to Adobe too. "
"Details: As soon there is an extended graphics state
parameter dictionary present which contains any
transparency blend space operators, Adobe Reader
7.x switches into CMYK mode showing incorrect colours."
I believe the "harsh" first page in our PSTRANS2.PDF
file is related to ( and explained by ) this bug. And
probably has nothing to do with Cooltype or any
use of text smoothing.
The harshness appears to be only on the reader; your
pages should print normally. One crude workaround is
to put transparency on all pages of a document. The
bug would be somewhat less obvious this way.
April 3, 2006
Here are some of the most common eBay buyer mistakes...
~ Failing to proxy bid their max ONCE very late in the
auction, doing so in oddball penny amounts just above
a currency denomination threshold.
~ Failing to realize that an awarded bid is an enforcable
contract under the Uniform Commercial Code.
~ Not knowing the TOTAL transaction cost of the bid
price, the shipping costs, and any special charges.
~ Failing to acknowledge that it costs money to ship stuff,
and that the carrier charges are typically only a tiny
fraction of true total shipping costs.
~ Not fully reading the offer or seeing what is not there.
~ Failing to contact the seller if there is ANY question.
~ Failing to pay promptly and in the expected manner.
~ Bidding on all "n" items on a Dutch auction. ALWAYS
bid on n-1 Dutch or less!
~ Withdrawing a bid for frivolous or remorseful reasons.
~ Buying foreign.
~ Not realizing that "too good to be true" offers are.
~ Paying with anything except VISA/MC or Paypal
~ Failing to research value elsewhere. eBay is seldom
the only or the best buy.
~ Not realizing that shipping heavy stuff long distances
is practically NEVER cost effective.
~ Falling for account-stealing phishing emails.
~ Getting into pissing contests with other bidders.
~ Failing to preview the seller's feedback. Anything
less than 98 percent is suspect and below 95
percent should trip a red flag alert.
~ Nickel and diming the seller over trivial charges.
~ Being rude or confrontational in seller email contacts.
~ Negging before resolving any seller conflict.
April 2, 2006
Because anybody can now instantly find out
everything about anything, the value of
information is falling dramatically. And may
in fact approach ZERO in the near future!
The utter info glut also raises quality and
needle-in-haystack issues over and above
simple overload. For, like Greshams Law,
Bad information drives away good.
Which does not bode well for traditional
information gatekeepers. Especially since
we have to ask WHY we even need gates,
let alone gatekeepers. Or even a fence
to put the gate in.
Author payments have dropped something
like 30:1 in real dollars over the last decade
or two. At the very least, this means that
authors will have to seek out indirect payment
means and alternate revenue streams.
Trade journals are in dire straits because the
model of charging outrageous fees for something
that won't appear for many weeks or months
in the future. Combined with abysmal technical
content that is clearly plummeting.
Traditional Publishers once offered all sorts of
services that are now laughingly obsolete. Such
as typesetting, art departments, rack promotion,
and, above all, decent editing. The last known
competent book editor was locked in a closet at
Howard Sams in 1977 and has not been seen since.
Or the need to produce books in huge quantities
and then ending up throwing most of them away.
Books Themselves are clearly in jepoardy, and I'll
predict that their near total demise will happen a
lot faster and a lot sooner than most people expect.
Driven by a multi-purpose device that just happens
to completely blow eBook readers out of the water.
Combined with a student revolt against backpacks.
Libraries no longer have a clear purpose as they
demanded that the gatekeeper, the reader, and the
physical materials all be in the same place at the
same inconvenient time. With the added ludicrosity
that only one reader could access info at once.
But Scholarly Journal Publishers clearly have the
most serious problems. If they are to survive at
all. Sloppy researcher "A" throws some crap up
on the web and instantly delivers zillions of free
copies worldwide. Competent researcher "B"
pays an outrageous fee to have his peer review
paper published in the distant future in a journal
so expensive that their institution's own library
cannot afford a copy. Guess who wins?
At the very least, scholarly journal survival
demands unlimited free instant access of all
abstracts without so much as a registration
hassle. Combined with sanely limited quantities
of free access to any paper over five years old.
Oh, the times, the times, they are a changing.
April 1, 2006
Parallax has a free new eBook on Exploring the
SX Microcontroller, along with upcoming contests
and development systems.
The SX is basically a "PIC on Steroids" that runs
extremely fast (to 75 MHz) and offers an expanded
but quirky instruction set. Unlike the PIC, some of
the instructions are now two or more bytes,
The SX apparently excells at doing things really fast.
Such as directly generating video output, performing
software radio functions, or generating virtual
peripherals such as all-software UART's, stepper
drivers, LCD display interfaces, and such.
The SX might ease some of the "pinch points" in
my Magic Sinewave firmware. Especially for higher
pulses per quadrant and stronger harmonic rejection.
Per this intro tutorial.
Note that Intel also has a high end SX microcomputer
that is a totally different device.
March 31, 2006
March 30, 2006
Some energy grants available to individuals
and small scale startups can be found here.
March 29, 2006
New GuruGram #63 is a very brief note on our
Two Phase Magic Sinewaves.
It turns out that modifying the chip code for a
phase shift is rather trivial. And thus, a two chip
solution looks simple and effective.
If a single chip solution is attempted with a
best efficiency magic sinewave, it appears
there will be an unavoidable pattern versus
amplitude dependency, which makes for ugly
coding. The situation is eased somewhat with
lower performance normal magic sinewaves,
especially those with an even number of
pulses per quadrant.
Thus, a single chip two phase magic sinewave
appears both costly and complex, but can
be done.
March 28, 2006
There are times and places when you might want
to keep robots and search engines off of certain
pages on your website. Possibly because the info
is private or out-of-date or still being edited or so
huge the robot could get lost.
The usual and standard way to handle this is by
adding a robots.txt HTML entry to your home
page. Details on the robots.txt standard can be
found here, while this entire site is devoted to
robotic search control.
Back before our eBay store, I worked up a
Galley Slave system that gave you a website
product gallery with click-through enlarged
photos, more technical details, etc. I have
kept this demo active because I may return to
it sometime, and you just might like to use
something similar for your own online store.
Unfortunately, Google is jumping into the middle
of this demo of NO LONGER AVAILABLE items
and causing all sorts of disappointment. I'll be adding
markers to our demo like this one as a temporary
workaround.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
March 27, 2006
New GuruGram #62 is on a Enhancing your eBay Tactical
Skills III.
Sourcecode is found here. Additiona auction info here.
March 26, 2006
Refurb Log:
Repainting a case or a cover can very
dramatically improve your final product
appearance. Especially if it has been
through he military storage or loose
industrial inventory wringers.
I'm very much impressed with the new
Krylon "No Runs, No Drips, No Errors"
new "Smoothest Finish" spray cans that
you should be able to find at your local
hardware supplier or paint store.
Apparently they have a new solvent and
much finer particles or whatever, because
the results often seem ridiculously better
than traditional spray cans. Fast drying, too.
One curious gotcha, though: If you try to
use this stuff to repair a botched up paint
job with conventional Rust-Oleum enamel
or whatever, you may get a rather violent
finish interaction that gives you a "wrinkle"
or "crinnelated" finish. Which might be
real cute if it were more controllable.
Naturally, any larger bare metal areas should
be primed first. If you really want to do the
job right, then a shot blaster cabinet and full
stripping is the best way to go. While shot
blasters are now available from AutoZone
and such for as little as $79, note that you do
need a decent shop compressed air supply.
You also have the option of injecting shot
blasting material into a power washer using
a $25 accessory that is readily available.
But this can be kinda uncontrolled and
rather messy.
Durability of most paints can be dramatically
improved by heating to 175 degrees or so for
a reasonable time.
Naturally, plain old masking tape is essential
to protect any areas to remain unpainted. As
is cardboard or whatever barriers to prevent
any overspray problems.
What also should be obvious is that a dozen
light coats are often better than fewer heavy
ones. You should not even begin to think about
worrying about color coverage till after the third
coat or so.
March 25, 2006
I've made some additions and updates to
our Auction Help page. In particular the
long missing ENHEBAY2.PDF is now up.
Enhance III is in the works. You can
preview some of its probable content by
checking the eBay related entries in
WHTNU06.ASP and WHTNU05.ASP.
March 24, 2006
Zero Defects certainly is a laudable goal,
but getting there with real world customers
can be tricky at best. Chances are that you
will be blindsided where you least expect it.
Some strategies towards "no unhappy
customers" include...
~ Throroughly researching your products.
~ Carefully understating descriptions
~ Giving 15 day inspection priveleges.
~ Promptly offering (often full) refunds.
~ Protecting yourself with 30:1 sell/buy ratios.
~ Giving immediate tracking info.
~ Shipping as quickly as possible
~ Avoiding problem categories.
~ Keeping most product weights fairly low
~ Linking listings to additional info
~ Never skimping on proper packaging
~ Carfeully clean and/or refurb before shipping
~ Prompt refund as the ONLY adjustment.
~ Spell out all known defects or problems
~ Never selling anything customer unsuitable
~ Recognizing that adjustments are expected
~ Keeping terms less than 10 words maximum
~ Avoid humor for it WILL be misunderstood
~ Never worrying about the feedback sideshow
~ Verify good product is in stock before listing..
~ Keeping all shipping charges revenue neutral
~ Try to be available 24/7
~ Never saying anything nasty in emails.
~ Flushing anyone who nickel and dimes you
~ No good deed goes unpunished
~ Testing electrical items for main functionality
~ Never try to be a penpal
~ Block ALL refunded buyers regardless of fault
~ Respond facutally & unemotionally to feedback
~ Absolutely no foreign bidders or shipment.
Let's look at some "case studies", some of
which were clearly our fault...
~ I replaced a knob on a Tek plug-in without
properly phasing its position. Customer
rightly complained that settings were off.
~ We mixed up two orders shipping together.
Customers have NO obligation whatsoever
to return anything to you. All you can do is
politely ask. In the case of lower value items
stocked in quantity, comping is fastest and
cheapest in the long run. But you NEVER
ask customers to ship to each other.
~ I called an Option 1 TCXO oscillator an
"oven" not noting that a fancier option 4
oven existed and was customer expected.
~ An apparently mint PIC emulator from a
bankruptcy auction would not communicate
for the buyer. I felt this was baud rate or
interconnect related, but refunded anyway.
And these problems which clearly were not...
~ We were falsely accused of selling product
safety recalls. All of our offered products
post-dated any recalls and were fully
corrected at time of manufacturer. All
code dates always carefully checked.
~ An individual bought a precision seismic
testing simulator thinking it was a plain
old car audio thumper.
~ We throoughly reconditioned a precision
scientific instrument including expensive
factory replacement parts. It tested
perfectly. The customer claimed a failure
within twenty minutes of operation but
absolutely refused to make the simple
measurements (a VOM resistance check)
that could have allowed an email/phone
repair. This with full docs provided.
~ Customer negged us without contact after
dozens of our emails, phone calls, and
eBay communications went unanswered.
~ Customer negged us over nondelivery
after an extremely late payment and
unreasonably short delivery expectations.
~ Customer negged after an improved variation
of offered product was shipped. New product
still had the same Tektronix "-A" part number
version as the old one.
Much more on our Auction Help page.
March 23, 2006
Many hundreds of you are accessing our
RSS feed info daily , but I still have a hollow
feeling that all is not well. We pass this
validator but not all of them.
What is supposed to happen is that every
few days, you should get an update of this
news blog and a list of several popular
tutorials. That include Energy Fundamentals,
eBay buying, eBay selling, Magic Sinewave
intro, Auction Help library, our Magnetic
Fields Heresy and Marcia Swampfelder
humor.
Is this happening? If not, can you please
tell me what I am doing wrong? email me
with any help you can provide.
March 22, 2006
Some assorted comments and such...
There are apparently now 185 extrasolar
planets at last count, and we seem to be
gaining one every fifteen days or so. I'd
expect the rate to climb sharply real
soon now. You can Google "extrasolar
planets" to pick up lots of sites that
include this one, this one, and this one.
There's a new LED Trade Journal. Too
early to tell how useful it may become.
Some new chips that may be of interest:
The STPM01 single phase power metering
IC from STM. New MEMS accellerometer
devices from Freescale, (MMA7260Q),
OKI (ML8950), Kionix, (KXP74-1010), and
again STM (LIS3LO2DQ). New gas sensors
that eliminate the usual preheating hassles
from Applied Nanotech. A $20 development
system eZ430-F2013 from TI. (Its only tiny
fatal flaw is that it is not for a PIC!). And a
new 360 degree Hall Device MLX90316
rotary position sensor from Melexis.
March 21, 2006
It seems to me that any new product
breakthrough development has a unique
viability threshold that it has to get through
one way or another.
Obvious older examples: video recording
demanded both a cartridge approach and a
helical scan to combine high tape speed with
low tape usage. The little noted breakthrough
that enabled most all of modern electronics
happened when MOS shift register memory
smashed through the nickle-a-bit magnetic
core cost barrier.
The microprocessor revolution took off the day
that an unheard of third tier MOS Technology
started selling 6502 chips at Wescon for $20
each literally out of bushel baskets. This at the
time the Intel and Motorola big boys would
not even let you near a prequalification list
for their thousand dollar prototypes.
The desktop publishing viability threshold was
crossed when that combination of PostScript
and the Apple Laserwriter I came out. And two
obvious examples of viability thresholds that
just have been crossed are cost effective flat
panel displays of acceptable size and viewability.
Plus megapixel digital camera image sensors and
algorithms.
And here are some viability thresholds I feel
are very shortly about to be crossed...
~ An ebook reader so good that we will
have an utter and total demise of books.
Only it probably will be a totally different
device that just happens to let you read
stuff more confortably and with much
more convenience that a "real" book.
One that relegates DRM to a sideshow
and probably will be greatly aided by
a student revolt against backpacks.
~ extrasolar Earth-like planets becoming
as common as dirt, thanks to viability
thresholds being crossed on a dozen new
and updated technologies. But I'll also
predict that the earth-moon combinations
required for climatic stability will remain
extremely rare indeed.
~ truly renewable and sustainable pv solar
electricity. It flat out ain't gonna happen
with conventional silicon panels. And new
CIGS technology will likely only get us a
third of the way there. But solutions will
eventually abound, brought about by
multiple and split workfunctions, nano
and MEMS construction techniques,
metalloradicals, direct antenna conversions,
photonic lattices, and such. More in our
ENERGY FUNDAMENTALS tutorial.
~ A revolution in lighting efficiency. Today's
incandescent lighting is only five percent
efficient at best and represents a staggering
waste of energy. There's no known near upper
physical limit to LED technology today, and
100 lumens per watt or higher seems totally
approachable. I'd expect a ten watt and two
dollar 50 lumens per watt white LED shortly.
~ Sanity emerging in scholarly papers. Any
serious researcher has a choice: They can
spend thousands of dollars to publish a peer
reviewed conventional paper that not even
their school library can afford to own. Or they
can directly publish on the web at zero cost.
Guess which is gonna win? If the publish-or-
perish crowd is able to survive at all, it will
be through absolutely free abstracts and
free access to any paper three or more years
old. The latter possibly with a sane quantity
download limit, say ten papers per month.
~ Dramatic improvements in ICE technology.
The efficiency of today's internal combustion
engines are less than one half of their Carnot
Limit. And Carnot itself can be pushed. We
can expect a split Otto cycle, an improved
Miller Cycle, and lots of new six cycle options.
One likely consequence would be automotive
fuel cells becoming of less interest. Clearly
more dollars and smarter dollars are being
spent directly on the ICE than on fuel cell
alternatives.
~ Direct solar-to-liquid hydrocarbons. As we
have seen before, the "hydrogen economy"
emperor has no clothes and is totally bogus.
But carbon neutral ( rather than carbon free )
solutions that end up with isooctane or heptane
similar room temperature liquids make
infinitely more sense on all levels. The key
secret will likely be a more detailed understanding
of photosynthesis-like metalloradicals.
March 20, 2006
Several clients have asked us about two
phase magic sinewaves. These could be
useful for capacitor-run motors or for various
I-Q modulation schemes. With fixed filtering,
perhaps four octaves of frequency range could
be provided.
At present, we have single phase and three
phase magic sinewave chips and sourcecode
available. It is also possible to derive a
single phase output from the three phase
chips, but you cannot simply use one of the
three outputs because of the differential
common mode delta drive.
Creating a 90 degree phase shifted single
phase chip would involve only a trivial
change in the sourcecode.
Producing both phases within one chip
might get a tad ugly, as it appears that
the pulse overlap (and hence the port
patterns) will be highly amplitude
dependent. Certain timings may also
be unacceptably tight.
Considerable development effort would
appear needed. Code would almost
certainly be much more complex than
the single phase and three phase cases.
At first glance, a two phase chip whose
first nonzero harmonic was the 29th would
possibly fit in a 4K PIC. Higher zero harmonic
rejection would probably require going
to an 8K or larger PIC device.
Using a pair of chips in parallel, one for in-phase
and one for quadrature would appear to be a lot
cleaner and simpler.
Either route can be done for you on a custom
consulting basis. Click here for our
Magic Sinewave History.
March 19, 2006
Some other ICE internal combustion
engine efficiency breakthroughs may
center on various experiments that
involve six cycle operation.
While these may seem limited to lower
speeds, that is precisely where the
efficiency and pollution problems lie.
Proposed solutions allow switching
between four and six cycle operation,
provided electrically variable valves
become common and cost effective.
In one six cycle scheme, normal suck-
squeeze-pop-phooey takes place on
your first four cycles. Fuel-free air
is injected on cycle five and exhausted
on cycle six. This provides additional
cooling and spent gas removal for
lower temperatures and higher
efficiencies.
In a second six cycle scheme, water
is injected on cycle five, creating a steam
engine that converts normal heat losses into
useful power while again reducing pollutants
and increasing efficiency.
March 18, 2006
Refurb Log:
Stepper Motors and their drives have
gotten quite fancy even while prices
have been dramatically dropping. It is
super important to understand exactly
what type of stepper and driver you are
involved with before attempting any
repair or modification.
There are two basic types of steppers.
A bipolar stepper often has one winding
per phase that has to be driven from a
full bridge to provide current in both
directions.
A unipolar stepper will have a center
tapped bifilar winding for each phase
and thus can be driven by a simpler and
cheaper current sinking drive. For the
maximum performance, though, you can
sometimes simply ignore the center tap
and use a full bridge bipolar drive on a
unipolar stepper motor.
There's all sorts of fancy games these
days that involve half stepping and micro
stepping and similar options. One very
interesting variant is called current drive,
where the stepper motor is driven from a
much higher voltage. This can greatly
improve your response speed.
Direct current drive is outrageously hot
and inefficient, so it is often combined with
switchmode techniques. Besides improving
the efficiency, the pulse duty cycling can
give you a current multiplication effect.
You might only draw 100 mils average from
your 38 volt supply, while providing two
amps of phase drive to your 3 volt stepper.
A properly sized filter capacitor must be
included to fill in during the pulse on
times.
Two classic chips for this sort of thing are
the ST L297 switchmode current controller
and the ST L298 full bridge driver. These
both remain readily available as $5 parts.
Several ap notes are available directly from
SGS-Thompson.
March 17, 2006
A curious fact that very few people seem
aware of: The word "gullible" does NOT
appear in any major dictionary or spell
checking program!
March 16, 2006
Sure seems to be a quiet time on the
Arizona Auction Scene. Hasn't been
any industrial auctions for several months
now. Except for some classic machine
shop stuff.
Meanwhile, there are bunches of musical
chairs going on. Cunningham just may be
getting out of (or at lest de-ephasizing) the
classic auction business while favoring real
estate projects. Sierra is apparently greatly
expanding their presence in the Tucson area.
Auction Advantage seems to be ceasing sales
at their superb "old church school" home. And
the future of the Pima College auctions are
presently not at all clear.
More on our Auction Help page. Especially
our Live Auction Scene tutorial.
Your own custom regional auction resource
finder can be created for you per these
details.
March 15, 2006
Corrected some links on our home page.
Put some new temperature recorders and
some classic Tektronix plug-ins and some
other interesting new stuff on eBay .
Work continues on our Schleuniger wire
cutter refurb project. It sure is challenging
to try and restore a total basket case. The
latest surprises involve the stepper driver
circuitry. Fortunately and surprisingly,
key chips remain available.
email me if you have any interest in a
superb UC3750 programmable wire
cutter that is heavy industrial grade.
March 14, 2006
I am rarely impressed with "new" ICE
internal combustion engine designs, and
have been even less impressed with the
ongoing government funding boondoggles
at Southwest Research. But maybe, just
maybe, they have really outdone themselves
this time.
The claim is that a new technology based
on splitting the Otto Cycle into two seperate
cylinders, one for compression and one for
power can nearly double real-world ICE
efficiency. Cost effectively and with far less
pollution and loads of other major benefits
More info here, here, and here.
Key search words to get and stay up to date
on this are Scuderi and Air-Hybrid Engine.
Yes, they are still within the Carnot limit.
The underlying enabling technology would
seem to be electrically controllable valves.
This also appears to be a variation on the
Miller Cycle , various six cycle operation
schemes, and the ancient Reid Engine
that others are exploring.
I suspect that these eventually would lead
to a tank that is filled at a carefully controlled
compression ratio, mixture, and vapor-to-
liquid ratio by one system, and combusted
by a second. Both of which can be separately
optimized to do their best possible job. It
is not yet clear whether rotary or piston
compression might end up best.
This one definitely bears watching. If true,
any motivation for automotive fuel cells
would be dramatically diminished to say the
least.
March 13, 2006
Refurb Log:
Never underestimate the power of a
Sherwin-Williams overhaul! Giving
a customer a fresh looking and squeaky
clean item often guarantees that your
item will stay sold.
This is especially important on surplus
instruments that may be grimy, have
storage cosmetics, and lots of useless
labels on them. In general, you want to
remove any and all non-original labels.
Except possibly for reasonably current
calibration date info.
Citrus based cleaners such as Resolv
or Citra-Solv are handy to soften labels.
Leaving a sponge on a label overnight
can help bunches, as can removing as much
of the label as possible to expose the
underlying adhesive.
Ordinary glass cleaner can then be used
to remove the bad smelling orange odor.
This is espeically important if you are going
to repaint later. Be sure that no odor
remains at shipping time.
Special MicroTex polyester polyamide rags
work a lot better than regular ones. Helped
along for light tasks by the Mr Clean Magic
Eraser, and for serious stuff by Scotch-Brite.
Soft plastic scrapers can be faked from
drawer dividers or vehicle ice removers.
Tire shine can sometimes dramatically
improve black bakellite cases.
Retouching paint usually causes more
harm than good. Although careful use
of a permanent marker Sharpie can often
reduce the odd scrape or scratch.
Repainting an entire cover or case can
often give amazing results. The latest of
Krylon "Smoothest Finish" interior/exterior
spray paints seem to give excellent color
matches, improved durability, and far less
splatter than before.
Simply replacing worn feet can make
a difference as well. If a decorative
part is cracked or worn, sometimes
scraping with an X-Acto knife or a
little superglue can help. Other times,
replacement parts might be available
from the manufacturer at prices that
may end up justifiable.
Sometimes you can cheat and do a
virtual overhaul first. In which you
clean up the image of the item being
sold. This is far simpler and cheaper
on any item that you are not sure will
sell or how much you will get for it.
Just be sure that you can in fact make
the final instrument look like what you
appear to have offered.
March 12, 2006
There's a new speed reading course that
lets you read War and Peace in twelve
minutes.
It's about Russia.
March 11, 2006
The perpetual motion nuts and the otherwise
thermodynamically clueless seem to be invading
the newsgroups again. You can instantly spot
them by their vitrolic personal attacks any time
unemotional factional and easily verifiable info
is presented to them.
Knowing how much and when to respond can
be frustrating. There is no way that you can
convince someone who "has" to be right, so
your only hope is to make lurkers and other
group denizens aware of the poster's inherent
ludicrosity.
The goal, of course, is to get them so mad that
they box themselves into a corner by posting
outrageously "not even wrong" claims that
display their utter and total cluelessness.
By mixing up power and energy, confusing real
and reactive power, ignoring average vs rms,
routing DC through transformers, failing to
recognize that pulse trains have a Fourier Series
frequency equivalence, or claiming to clearly
violate Faraday's Law, all of those Laws of
Thermodynamics, or other stuff that flat out
ain't broke.
Sadly, things of value you post to a newsgroup
will disappear with a half life of twelve hours or
so. While posts you may regret stay around
forever in the archives.
For long term effectiveness, I feel that posts to
your own website, blogs, rss, and your own news
pages can be much more controlled and end up
ridiculously more effective in the long term.
Two key papers of mine that demolish the usual
posts are How to Bash PseudoScience and our
Energy Fundamentals. While a thermodynamics
intro appears in HACK64.PDF
The inescapable facts of why electrolysis for
hydrogen from high value electrical sources
such as grid or pv flat out ain't gonna happen
appear in MUSE153.PDF.
And the latest "resonance is free energy"
flap gets dealt with in HACK59.PDF
While the usual "overunity through pulses"
crowd needs to carefully study their rms-vs-
average blunders in our MUSE112.PDF and
MUSE113.PDF tutorials.
And, once again, our Energy Fundamentals
tutorial tries to deal with those who feel that
outrageous subsidies for bolting pv net energy
sinks on roofs will in some manner cause net
energy renewability and sustainability.
At present, the fully burdened and properly
accounted for price of a synchronous inverter
alone guarantees home solar electricity stays
a net energy sink.
Even when the magic fifty cents per peak
watt holy grail is reached, you still only
have an elaborate "paint it green" transfer
scheme that still uses 100% conventional
and traditional energy sources. The old
energy, of course, going into the amortization.
Sustainability and renewability can only
emerge on any differential that is below
conventional old energy breakeven.
But, as noted here a week or two ago, the
new developments in CIGS photovoltaics
might get us as much as one third of the
distance to the goal of solar pv ultimately
becoming a truly renewable and sustainable
net energy source.
March 10, 2006
Here's a partial collection of links to some of
our more intriguing PostScript-as-Language apps...
Acrobat .PDF Content Extractor
Auto-tracking .PDF Web Links
Beginner Projects
Bezier Curve thru Fuzzy Data
Bionomial Goes Binary
Book Cover Layout Utility
Digital Camera Swings and Tilts
eBay Image Theft Detector
Elaborate Cubic Spline Manipulations
Fibonacci Sunflowers
Flutterwumper Utilities
Fractal Fern and Image
Free Font Collection
Galley Slave Thumbnail Touring
Gambler's Ruin Simulation
Gonzo PostScript Utiities
4x4 Linear Equation Solver
Logfile History Analyzer
Nonlinear Graphic Transforms
PIC PostScript Flutterwumpers
Pulse Monitor Software
Real Time Acrobat Animation
Ridiculously Better PowerPoint Emulator
Simplified Electromagnetic Field Plotter
Smith Chart Generator
Ultra-Legible Tiny Typography
Universal Bitmap Manipulator
Vignetting Image auto-backgrounder
Writing Complex JavaScript Programs
Word Frequency Analyzer
March 9, 2006
The price of Santa Claus Machines continues to
drop dramatically. But we are still far away from
low cost hobby, small shop, or toy devices that can
desktop produce useful three dimensional objects.
Two machines in the $20,000 class are newly
available. A ZPrinter 320 Plus inkjet from
http://www.zcorp.com and a fused deposition
"sticky string" modeling BST unit from
http://www.dimensionprinting.com/.
Meanwhile, in a vaguely related development,
Adobe has extended their Acrobat to include
3D capabilities and standard CAD imports.
And one school that seems to be doing some
interesting Santa Claus stuff is found here.
March 8, 2006
Refurb Log:
Holding nuts or spacers during reassembly can
be a real hassle. Sometimes placing the unit on
its side or upside down can help. Other times,
removing items the make access difficult can
end up saving you bunches of time and hassle
in the long run.
That ancient Heathkit Nut Starter is essential
if you can still find one. But my favorite trick
remains using a small amount of beeswax on
screwheads and anything else you want to
temporarily hold onto. But avoid doing so on
anything that has to end up superclean.
Various forms of hemostats and screwholding
devices can also be handy. Someimtes, though,
a plain old alligator clip can work wonders. In
extreme cases, you can sometimes superglue
a nut to a folded piece of card stock, giving you
an exceptionally tiny "wrench" that needs
minimal clearance.
Small mirrors and strong lights can also help
you bunches. As can magnets. And magnifiers.
Sometimes a child or someone with smaller
hands can end up immensely valuable.
March 7, 2006
A current ROADMAP:
While much of our web site is new and up to date,
there are some nooks and crannies sorely in need
of revision and overhaul. In absence of additional
advertisers and partners, I pretty much have to go
with where my current interests and the majority
of viewer demand lies.
As revealed by our daily Log File monitoring.
Our latest and best info will appear on our What's
New page, while the newest tutorials should show
up in the GuruGram library.
Other pages of current interest being actively
improved upon include Auction Help, Cubic Splines,
Hydrogen Energy, Magic Sinewaves, Acrobat,
PostScript, InfoPack, and Patent Avoidance.
Plus, of course, our eBay Auctions and our
Amazon Books. Also reached via our Book
Access page.
I've also recently added access to bunches of my
classic reprints to our Guru's Lair archive. There
are many thousands of files remining to go here.
I eventually hope to have all of my articles and
all of my books in eBook form up here. Again,
advertisers and partners, and research associates
permitting.
The Hardware Hacker, Tech Musings, Resource
Bin, and Blatant Opportunist libraries are essentially
complete and offered in their historical context. A
few of the oldest columns still need updating to
modern layout standards.
Our Refurb Logs remin very much ongoing and
active, but I've been a little slow moving each item
from its initial What's New entry to over to its
compiled Refurb Log tutorial. To keep up to date,
simply search What's New for Log: every now
and then.
Several software demo pages that involve this
tutorial do NOT offer current products! It seems
you can still Google these. I'm working on a robot
blocker to try and stop this.
If you are overwhelmed by our website offerings,
start with the latest What's New info (now also
a RSS Feed) and then go to the Top Files Sampler
and Recent Uploads boxes on our Home Page.
March 6, 2006
New GuruGram #61 is on a Book Cover Layout
Utility.
Companion utility is found here. Sourcecode is
found here.
March 5, 2006
If you are at all serious about selling
a self-published book on Amazon or in
any bookstore or any other retail outlet,
then you absolutely MUST have an ISBN
along with a rear cover barcode.
ISBN's cost between three cents and
three dollars each and are gotten here.
Minimum order is ten.
An ISBN barcode tutorial appears here,
a free barcode generation utility here,
and an online barcode generator here.
March 4, 2006
I thought that my Smith Chart Drawing
Utilities were still buried in the 1000+ pile
of GEnie PSRT era and earlier files still
awaiting a sponsor or translator.
Smith Charts greatly simplify high frequency
VHF, UHF, and Microwave analysis.
Turns out the code is cleverly hidden in our
PostScript Secrets as column 43-A.
Lots of similar older and obscure stuff does
remain deeply hidden in our Ask The Guru
historical library archives.
March 3, 2006
Picked up five super premium HP Agilent
system power supplies that include a pair of
6653A's, a 6627A, a 6675A J07, and a 6651A.
The 6675A J07 is the most impressive, being
rated 0-200 volts and 0-11 amps for a total
of 2200 watts. Fully GPIB programmable and
controllable of course.
I've just placed this beast up on eBay.
March 2, 2006
Several major manufacturers are at long last
bailing out of conventional silicon pv solar panels.
Having finally concluded that (A) there is no
way in hell than conventional silicon pv can EVER
even remotely hope to become renewable or
sustainable, and that (B) silicon is simply not
available, having totally sold out through 2006.
The heir apparent is a group of new processes that
involve CIG (copper-indium-gallium) or CIGS
(copper-indium-gallium-selenium) semiconductors.
Here is a news story and a company announcement.
While clearly not an instant panacea solution, these
compound semiconductors do appear to make really
major advances on several fronts.
The material is ridiculously more absorbent of solar
energy than silicon, allowing active areas that are
much, much thinner. By around 70:1 or nearly two
orders of magnitude!
The material has a direct bandgap, meaning that
(A) at least some "loose change" energy above the
workfunction energy is not lost, and (B) recombination
and crystalline defect problems are much lower.
Further, the material can apparently be bulk processed
industrially on large sheets in a vacuum free environment.
Compared to earlier thin film approaches, the material is
insanely more stable and apparently does not degrade
significantly with time.
Efficiencies in the 12.5 percent range are reported.
My own view is that this development should take
us "one third of the way" towards pv renewability
and sustainability. But that significantly higher
efficiencies will be needed for ultimate net power
production.
Likely brought about by multiple or distributed
workfunctions, direct nanotechnology antenna
techniques, metalloradicals, and possibly photonic
lattices.
More in our ENERGY FUNDAMENTALS tutorial.
March 1, 2006
Refurb Log:
Oilite buishings remain one of the greatest
mechanical engineering developments of all
time. I probably should have included them
way back in our Elegant Simplicity tutorial.
These were invented by Chrysler engineers
in the 1930's and consist of a sintered sleeve
bearing made from bronze and similar powders
into which oil has been vacuum impregnated.
Despite inroads from Nyliner and others, these
remain the mainstay of many lower speed and
lighter load industrial bearings. You can buy
a typical smaller oilite bearing from McMaster
Carr or Small Parts and others for around forty
four cents.
The correct way to change out a worn oilite
bearing is with an arbor press and a special
matched insert. But you can sometimes get
by using nothing but a hex head cap screw.
Ferinstance, on a 3/8 od by 1/4 id oilite bushing,
A 1/4 x 1-1/2 inch capscrew should have a head
diameter that is a comfortable slip clearance to
the 3/8 inch hole. Any spacer larger than 3/8
inch id can be placed on the other side of the
bearing surface and terminated with two
washers and a quarter inch nut.
Suprisingly little force will be required on the
box end wrench or 7/16 inch socket that tightens
the nut. The process seems simple and safe.
There is a 20:1 mechanical advantage from the
1/4-20 threads and around an 18:1 or so further
advantage from the wrench arm. Which means
that a little over three pounds of force creates
half a ton of extraction at the bearing surfaces!
February 28, 2006
Do brack-and-mortar libraries have any
future whatsoever? If so, why?
A traditional library was a gatekeeper to
hard-to-find information. Usually a highly
authortatian one of, for, and by control
freaks.
Since Google has now totally demolished the
information access fence, it is not clear exactly
why we need any gates, let alone gatekeepers.
Libraries demanded that the information, the
information providers, and the information
recipients all be in the same physical place at
the same time. They further restricted info
access to one-patron-at-a-time. Both of these
concepts are now utterly ludicrous for web age
information dissemenation.
It is reasonable to assume that a "nearly perfect"
eBook will arrive within a very few weeks. When
this happens, a logical consequence will be that
most schools will be totally textbook free within
a very few years.
Driven in part by utterly ovewhelming economics,
and possibly in part by a student revolt against
backpacks.
May you live in interesting times. email comments
welcome.
February 27, 2006
I've been refurbing a Schleuniger UC3750
programmable wire cutter that's turning into
quite an adventure. This high end US made
factory floor machine cuts any number of wires
for you to any preset length at rate as fast as
several per second.
Also cuts ribbon cable, coax, fairly heavy cable,
tubing, and such. Rerurb is now around 80%
complete, but the outcome remains in doubt. So
far, key issues have been badly worn bushings, an
incorrectly installed rectifier, roller refurb, some
transformer rework, and a new power entry module.
Please email me if you have any interest in this item
February 26, 2006
A new search engine specific to the nondestructive
testing community is now up at www.ndtsearch.com.
February 25, 2006
Managed to negotiate some lower UPS charges
for the hose reels we have up on eBay.
While we still strongly recommend free local
inspection and pickup, the UPS packing charge
is now a reduced $59.
We have approximately 14 of these remaining.
being all stainless steel, these suckers are heavy.
But they sure refurb beautifully.
By placing the reels in two boxes (easy six bolt
reassambly) of 61 and 44 pounds, the UPS size,
weight, and oddball shape penalties can be
eliminated. A typical price for UPS delivery, say,
to Nebraska, is $51.00 .
By the way, because we have daily UPS pickup
service, our rates are sometimes considerably
lower than what the eBay UPS calculator will
predict. Be sure to verify your shipping charges
on any and all of our items via email, as they
may be quite a bit lower. Payment via VISA
or MC instead of Paypal simplifies this for
all concerned.
Call us at (928) 429-4073 or email us for further
details.
February 24, 2006
History tells us that Alexander Graham Kernatski
was the first Telephone Pole.
February 23, 2006
Cunningham has long been one of my favorite
Arizona auctioneers. Apparently there are big
changes afoot.
They definitely have long term leased their 3138
West Durango auction house yard to a second tier
(and largely charity) auction house clled Arizona
Auction Center. Who do not seem to have a website.
Meanwhile, they continue to list yard auctions at their
Auction and Appraise competitor's site!
Rumor has it they may be going real estate only. I'm
not yet sure exactly what is coming down here.
More on the Arizona Auction Scene here, here, and
here.
Separately, there may be a glitch in the Pima College
auctions as well. It is not totally clear when these will
resume or who will be doing them.
Your own custom regional auction finder can be created
for you per these details.
February 22, 2006
The name of the game in electronics these days
is called RoHS, short for Reduction of Hazardous
Substances. Basically, you might not be able to
sell your electronic products if they have too much
lead (aka solder), cadmium, mercury, or a few other
hazardous substances present.
Electronic distributors are scrambling to become RoHS
Compliant. Newark Electronics, among others has
an extremely agressive RoHS program.
One of the unintended side effects is that most
electronic distributers have now completely dropped
stocking of classic CMOS and TTL integrated
circuits! Or may shortly do so.
Presumably such obsolete semi firms as Rochester
Electronics and Luke Systems will continue with
pricey and limited availability.
Meanwhile, I have several thousand tubes of classic
CMOS and TTL parts I hope to get up on eBay
shortly. Note that these may shortly become
impossibly difficult to locate at any price.
February 21, 2006
A reminder about our Gonzo Utilities. These are a set
of device independent but non-WYSIWYG PostScript
utilities that I personally have used for many years.
Among their other features, they can greatly simplify
Using PostScript as a General Purpose Computing
Language, offer superbly fancy typesetting, greatly
simplify gridding and graphing, and provide unmatched
quality electronic schematics.
They also let you read or write most any disk file in most
any language, thus leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
You can start with our PostScript Beginner Projects or
else go to most any .PSL file in our GuruGram library
or elsewhere for detailed use examples.
To use the Gonzo Utilities yourself, download them into
a known place in your computer or place them on a
floppy or other media.
Then, after making obvious site changes, include one
of the following in the beginning of your standard
ASCII textfile that will hold the PostScript instructions
that you are going to send to Acrobat Distiller...
(C:\\Documents and Settings\\don\\Desktop\\
gonzo\\gonzo.ps) run % use internal gonzo
(A:\\gonzo.ps) run % use external gonzo
Note that you MUST use a DOUBLE reverse slash
inside a PostScript string every time that you really
want a single reverse slash!
To activate the Gonzo Utilities later in your program,
use a gonzo begin ps.util.1 begin nuisance begin
sequence.
February 20, 2006
All of the emergency services have their own form
of gallows humor. Needed to maintain sanity in an
insane world.
In the case of EMT Ambulance Crews, it is usually
their frequent flyer program.
February 19, 2006
By how many DECADES will the California 8 billion
dollar rathole fiasco SET BACK the development of
renewable and sustainable pv solar electricity?
Let's assume the 8 bil only costs 8 bil, rather than its
true triple cost after transfers and admin. And that
there are ten million of our pioneer panels from two
days ago in fact installed and working.
Our projected panel returns two cents of genuinely
renewable and sustatinable pv solar electricity per
kilowatt hour for eight cents of "old energy" gasoline-
in-disguise invested. A 400 watt panel would generate
about 2.5 kilowatt hours per day, or around five cents
worth of renewable and sustainable pv solar electricity.
At 300 effective days per year, each panel year would
generate $15 worth of renewable and sustainable
electricity per year. Ten million panels would thus
generate 150 million worth of renewable and sustainable
electricity per year.
8 billion divided by 150 million leaves 53.3 and change.
Thus, the California pv fiasco will likely set back the
development of renewable and sustainable pv electricity
by a grand total of 5.3 DECADES!
Assuming a zero interest rate, of course."
More in our ENERGY FUNDAMENTALS tutorial.
February 18, 2006
Refurb Log:
It sure can be rewarding to take an ugly duckling
pallet of junk from an auction and do a high risk refurb
that sells for thousands of dollars or more. On the
other hand, trash is trash, and the beast may have
died for a really good reason.
Here's some high risk refurb guidelines...
~ Make sure you know the demand and the used
market value before you begin.
~ Try to have full technical data and service info
on hand.
~ Stay within 30:1 cost return and $75 per hour
effort. Otherwise flush the project before it
turns into a rathole.
~ Keep a meticulous engineering notebook on
your progress. Most especially wiring, pinouts,
and tricky disassembly details.
~ Use a two level approach where you first do only
the bare refurb needed to prove you probably
will have a viable and marketable product.
~ Separate wants from needs. Tightly focus on
needs only untill you are sure of success.
~ Pay particular attention to factory and dealer
websites. The Wayback Machine can be of help
if the company has folded or merged.
~ Outrageously expensive factory parts may in
fact end up cheapest if they are otherwise
unobtainium. But watch your 30:1 return.
~ Sometimes replacing a part backwards or upside
down may expose new wear areas and greatly
extend product life.
~ Exceptionally valuable resources include Small Parts
and Grainger and most especially McMaster Carr.
Plus, of course, that crochety old blacksmith down
the street.
~ Watch the nickel and dime effect where you make
three dozen trips to the hardware store at $6 each.
~ Iffen it ain't broke, don't fix it. At least not right away
and not till you are absolutely certain of success.
~ Sherwin-Williams counts! Efforts spent cleaning
and painting known functional items can pay back
spectacularly. But only on a known winner.
~ Work on ONE project at a time. Otherwise you will
bury yourself in "ain't gonna happen" futilities.
~ Aim for a two week completion time. Otherwise
flush the project or strip it for sellable parts.
And finally, of course...
~ NEVER sell an item that you are not completely
proud of and satisfied with. EXACTLY spell out
all defects and UNDERSTATE all features.
February 17, 2006
I am mystified why the State of California would blow eight
billion dollars (plus admin and transfer costs that likely
triple this figure) paying people to put gasoline destroying
net energy sinks on inappropriate rooftops.
Clearly, conventional silicon PV panels will never reach
sustainability and renewability. And every cent poured into
this particular rathole can only set back the time when
true renewability/sustainability can emerge.
Let's instead postulate a "pioneer panel", the very first
real world sustainable and renewable pv solar energy
system. What would its characteristics have to be to
allow pv solar energy to be anything but a monumental
"feel good" energy sink and net destroyer of gasoline?
A nominal pioneer panel size would be one square meter
delivering internally synchronously inverted "plug and go"
110 volt 60 Hertz consumer ac power with utility buyback
and storage option.
The at-the-terminals efficiency would have to be in the
forty percent range, brought about by an absolute minimal
material use and ultra low cost processing that involves
spread or multiple workfunctions probably combined with
MEMS nanotechnology techniques using nanoantennas.
Plus possible photonic lattice techniques.
Let's see. Such a panel would generate something like 400
peak watts at appropriate sites, or about 2.5 kilowatt hours
per day. Naturally, only a tiny fraction of the delivered energy
could be renewable and sustainable, owing to materials cost
and amortization. Let's assume the fully burdened panel can
deliver ten cent per kilowatt hour energy at an infrastructure
cost of eight cents per kilowatt hour for two cents per KWH
of genuine net honest renewable and sustainable energy.
The "old energy" breakeven pay for itself would then be
about twenty cents per day. Assuming a ten year lifetime and
a ten percent interest rate, the retail cost of the zero-installation
hassle panel at Home Depot would have to be under $454.00
total. Or more like $378 in an area with 300 days of available
sunshine. Per this amortization calculator.
I very strongly feel that such a pioneer panel is definitely
acheivable within a one decade time frame. Provided that all
of the ludicrous sideshows are immediately flushed.
Naturally, if you build these pioneer panels, they WILL sell.
"Beating your customers away with a stick" comes to mind.
And absolutely ZERO in ludicrously counterproductive and
pointlessly "not even wrong" subsidies would be needed.
The key point is that NOTHING ELSE MATTERS long term
but acheiving pv renewability and sustainability. Clearly, dollars
blown on anything but this specific goal simply set back the
time when solar electricity ever becomes viable.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
February 16, 2006
There's an amazing group of Tempsonic linear position
sensors available from MTS Systems.
These are basically a nickel magnetostrictive rod that
gets whapped with suitable control electronics. Any
magnet near the rod interferes with the pulse travel
and creates an output. Thus, sliding a magnet along the
rod allows for extremely accurate position measurement.
Advantages over conventional linear potentiometers are
much more accuracy and freedom of noise and wear.
Outputs can be linear voltage, pulse width modulated,
or start-stop width controlled.
The contactless system also simplifies such tasks as
floating liquid level sensing or measuring the position
of a hydraulic cylinder from outside of the oil circuit.
I picked up a bunch of these at the Rubbermaid auction
in various conditions from new to heavily worn and
in sizes from four inches to a whopping seventy two inch
length. I've now placed most of these on our eBay store.
Typical pricing new of these sensors is $400 to $800.
Ours are available for a tiny fraction of the going
price. But you may need some interface expertise to
be able to get these working properly. And companion
connectors and cables may be outrageously expensive
unless you work up your own alternatives.
Do note that you may be able to avoid a long linear
sensor by going to a rotary wind up "volume control
on a spring" solution instead. But anytime you truly
need a contactless linear sensor, these MTS devices
can offer some superb possibilities.
February 15, 2006
Refurb Log:
Any time you find an exceptionally bizarre test result, make
sure you are absolutely certain of your diagnoisis before
continuing! The medical folks call iatragenesis a "physician
induced disease". Which can cause you no end of repair
and refurb problems.
Here is the probable story: I was refurbing an automation
system where the power supply was left a basket case.
Amazingly, the +35 volt power output seemed to have
suddenly reversed polarity!
What likely happened was this: A plant electrician type
apparently decided to replace a chassis mount bridge
rectifier and managed to get it physically 180 degrees out
of place from its companions. Thus reversing the internal
diodes. The bridge markings were incredibly subtle and
the ac symbols still lined up.
There were bunches of indirect evidence that this mistake
was in fact made. The output filter cap plainly was marked
(+). System design normally would demand a positive output
voltage. The polarity would have been wrong for a Zener
subsystem. And no sane manufacturer would place two
identical items beside each other with one reversed.
Is this enough evidence to justify reversing the bridge back
the way it apparently was supposed to be? I felt not. Instead,
I'm going back to the manufacturer to try and score a schematic
or otherwise make absolutely certain that the system power is
supposed to be positive rather than negative.
"Preponderance of evidence" just barely won't quite hack it.
February 14, 2006
The prices on much of the test equipment at many
Government Liquidation auctions now seems to be
well above that of eBay pricing!
The most reasonable expectation is agressive
participation by the "real" test equipment houses.
Or that GL auctions have simply become too popular.
There's still a few opportunities now and then. Especially
when an oddball piece of test equipment shows up in a
NON test equipment auction. Or when the lots are huge.
Or when other items poison the lot. Or when they are
buried in a triwall with hundreds of other nondescript
items. Or when they are truly bizarre. Or when you are
stripping huge obsolete systems for currently in-demand
sellable components. Or when there are listing errors.
Or when they are a special interest item, such as older
GR gear.
But the higher prices combined with site manager hassles
and their maddingly infuriating bid extensions makes GL
a lot less of a useful resource than they once were At
least for me.
More on useful supply sources on our Auction Help page.
Your own custom regional resource finder can be created
per these details.
February 13, 2006
Here is another apporach to the "true" length of a
Cubic Spline. Along with this older one from our Cubic
Spline library.
Our method in GuruGram #60 makes a simple approximation
up front. The "true" methods apparently go through a
lot of ugly math involving elliptical integrals and such only
to end up making some simple approximations as well.
February 12, 2006
New GuruGram #60 is on Finding the Length of a Cubic
Spline and its Subdivisions.
Companion utility is found here. Sourcecode is found here.
February 11, 2006
Added some of our newest and best tutorials and
utilities to our Cubic Spline Library.
February 10, 2006
Just listed some superb Hannay hose reels to eBay.
These are ALL STAINLESS STEEL, have oversized
1-1/2 inch piping reduced to 3/4 redline ready, and are
in clean used condition as copper mine surplus. Normal
list price is over $1200 each. 24x26 inches. Manual
rewind.
April 2000 build date. About 18 remain available. 3500
series SS3520-24-26 apparently custom upgraded with
fancier rotary pressure seals.
February 9, 2006
On any of our older archive files, please double check the
date before acting on suggestions or recommendations!
Or email me for a current review.
In particular, one alternate to patents and patenting in
the good old preweb days was to place your concept in
the public domain by publishing in a national magazine.
These days, magazines are struggling to exist and have
ceased to be a viable anything. Not to mention their
utterly abysmal author payment rates. Or the fact that
few people build things out of magazines anymore.
If you have an "idea" you want to sell, your first and
foremost task should be to bring that concept up to
where it is ALREADY actually selling. For anything
less has even less value today than it did then.
At one time, undeveloped ideas were worth as much as
a dime a dozen. These days, unproven ideas are worth
less than a dime a bale in ten bale lots.
Any product has an idea mortality curve. The further
you go along that curve towards actual marketed
products, the higher the value of that idea. You are
often infinitely better off by positioning yourself as
a purveyor of risk reduction, rather than an "inventor".
For product success, your item MUST be presently
working its way through beta test! Anything less is
ludicrous and guarantees unmarketbility.
And, of course, patents are even more of a problem
rather than a solution for the individual and small scale
startup. As I've mentioned a time or two before, any
involvement whatsoever with patents and patenting is
virtually certain to result in a net loss of time, energy,
money, and sanity.
One key to successful idea promotion is to have your
own website where (besides direct sales) you strive to
be a definitive gateway resource to your concepts.
A second key to successful idea promotion is to get
yourself a track record. Yeah, this is very much
a chicken and egg problem. But if you already have
proven winners, others are more likely to pay attention.
A third key is to agressively seek out every scrap of
info you can in your target market. There is no point
whatsoever in writing forest fire simulator software if
you have never sharpened a Pulaski.
And a fourth promotion key, of course, is agressive
networking through friends, associates, trade shows,
and business associations. And, above all, the web.
Further recommendations available per our infopack
services.
February 8, 2006
I'm utterly amazed that the "free"print trade journals still
exist. I fully expect their imminent demise.
At one time, trade journals were absolutely superb
for pinning down impossible-to-find info and supply
sources. I subscribed to many hundreds of them as
core research materials for my various print columns.
The whole trade journal idea was based on ripping off the
post office by stealing extreme subsidies while outrageously
overcharging advertisers for utterly unaccountable results
having ludicrous lag times. The rules demanded excessive ads
combined with limited marginal to negligible editorial quality.
At any rate, there are a very few electronic trade journals
left and you might want to subscribe to them before their
final anorexic demise. Those I still find of interest include
E.E. Times, Electronic Design, EDN, Machine Design,
Sensors, and Battery Power Products and Technology.
February 7, 2006
A reminder that my Magic Sinewaves are a newly
discovered class of mathematical functions that
promises to dramatically reduce the distortion and
significantly improve the efficiency of simple all digitially
derived high power line frequency sinewaves for ac motor
controls, electrical vehicles, solar inverters, aerospace,
mobile power, telecomm, and power quality conditioning.
Key features of a magic sinewave are that they use
the fewest possible switching events to completely
reject the highest possible number of low harmonics.
Any number of low harmonics can theoretically be
forced to ZERO. And held well below -65 decibels
in real world quantizations.
You can start with our MSINTRO1.PDF intro tutorial and
its three-phase-specific DELTAMS1.PDF companion.
A development proposal appears here.
Seminars, consulting services, demo eval chips, and system
development services are available. As are complete
and exclusive IP rights packages. I have unique and sole
source expertise in this area that can significantly shorten
your development times.
The timeline of Magic Sinewave development appears here.
February 6, 2006
Started revising our Length of a Bezier Cubic Spline
routines, and you'll find some temporary code here.
I hope this eventually becomes GuruGram #60.
Also addressed is the tricky issue of subdividing a cubic
spline into equal LINEAR parts. And of finding any point
on a spline a given distance in from its initial end.
It turns out there is no sane way to find the exact length
of a cubic spline because of the horrendous elliptical
integrals piled on top of everything else. But that a 100
chord approximation is more than good enough for most
uses, especially involving print or graphic displays.
Sadly, that wonderful cubic spline "t" parameter is NOT
normally linear with distance along the curve. Typically
changing "faster" along the "more bent" portions of the
route.
The workaround is to build up a pair of arrays, one in "t"
space and second in "s" space. You can then accurately
interpolate to find s as a function of t and vice versa. Very
conveniently, your last entry in the "s" array is a very
good approximation to the total spline length.
February 5, 2006
Two of the more obscure electronic surplus houses
certainly deserve repeated mention: Marlin P Jones
has all sorts of motors and unusual surplus items that
are particularly suited to amateur robotics, They are also
one of the very few sources besides us for autographed
copies of my Active Filter Cookbook. These are the
blue and white Synergetics Press versions that have much
better bindings than the Newnes ones.
And Surplus Traders remains an outstanding source for
oddball wall warts and the solderable NiCad cells needed
to rebuild older system batteries. Along with lots of other
flat panel display, video interface, cables, and great
heaping bunches more. But note that they typically have
mininum quantity orders often in the 25 to 100 range.
February 4, 2006
I may be doing something wrong on our rss feeds and
could use your help in debugging.
The intent here is to have a new top WHATNU06.ASP
file show up nearly daily. With a few "reference files"
that long term stay in place below. Such as ENERGFUN.PDF,
MARCIA.PDF and such.
You can view our present RSS feed here.
To do this, I change the lastBuilddate and the latest news
pubDate and resave the file as whtnu.xml.
Is this working, or what am I doing wrong? Please email me
with details.
February 3, 2006
Refurb Log:
I've found it pays to keep a few fiberglass rods in stock,
especially in the 1/8 and 5/16th inch sizes. These typically
cost 40 cents a foot from McMaster Carr, Small Parts, or
any of a number of similar sources.
I originally got these to service those long mini-shafts
common to Tektronix plugins. But since have found them
to be most useful to deal with broken pins on card guides.
and to make an excellent "splint" for epoxy repairs.
Speaking of which, I've found that a two-tube epoxy called
JB Weld is head and shoulders above the others because
of its high solids content that pretty much stays where you
put it rather than running or puddling. Found in most any
hardware store.
But note that JB Weld has a powdered iron filler in it.
While great for grinding or filing, you can assume its
electrical properties are an atrocity. Particularly at rf.
February 2, 2006
Many thanks to local Allen Pump for picking up our
remaining bypass feeder inventory. In some classic
thinking outside the box, they are remanufacturing
these into superb high performance irrigation pump
lubricators.
February 1, 2006
Refurb Log:
There's some really good and some really awful features
of those new power entry modules. These are single snap-in
blocks that give you a removable line cord, one or more
switch poles, one or more fuses, and possibly some line
voltage switching. All in one very attractive snap-in (or
optionally screw-in) packages.
Our Banner Advertiser Sponsor Jameco Electronics has
these for $5 up, as do the other major distributors that
include Mouser, Digikey, Newark and Allied.
The really ugly thing here is that there is usually a tiny and
totally insecure and totally unforgettable little piece of
plastic that holds the fuse in. This, of course, promptly will
disappear forever, especially in a school or factory floor
use area.
Easily letting a penny part trash a valuable instrument.
Naturally, each manufacturer uses their own variations on
these. The rule: TAKE EXCEPTIONAL CARE ON ANY
POWER ENTRY MODULE LOOSE PARTS!
Another problem is that these modules are kinda huge and
may need too much behind panel depth for a refurb or mod.
While the normal single size opening of roughly 30x70 mm
is nicely standard, this is a very large rectangular hole to
have to cut or punch.
January 31, 2006
It saddens me greatly to see cancerous wildly uncontrolled
growth descending on the Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez
Metropolitan area. One of the very few remaining superb areas
in the American West.
I had hoped that the 1800's clan wars still being bitterly
fought, the ultra conservative religious base that dominates
the valley, the (until two weeks ago) utter lack of decent
paying jobs, and, above all, the lack of a unified school
district would hold the developers at bay.
"But with a unified school district, there would not be enough
football teams." Naturally, pointing out that there could
now be middle school courses in oceanography, cinematography,
and C++ Robotic Programming gets met about as well as an
illegal receiver downfield during a halfback pass option.
Sigh.
January 30, 2006
A reminder that I have a pair of highly collectible and eminently
restorable 1907 era commercial silent movie projectors available.
These are presently disassembled, allowing for UPS shipability.
Please email me if you are interested in the unique opportunity.
January 29, 2006
A concept called "Total Cost of Ownership" is likely to turn any
home electric vehicle charging units (or much worse - electrolysizers)
into big time sucker bets.
Any electrical device has two costs associated with it: The electricity
consumed and the fully burdened original cost and its amortization.
In the case of a home vehicle charger, running it only a few hours a
night can make the amortization costs totally outrageous per unit
of output.
There is no way that a low duty cycle device consuming retail
electricity can compete with a high duty cycle commercial one
at wholesale or avoided costs.
Let's look at a much more obvious example first: Those new
high efficiency miniature fluorescent lamps can easily cost a
lot more than conventional incandescents, and in fact do so in
most home uses! Clearly, these new lights are quite beneficial
in any socket that is run four hours a day, 300 days a year. Also
clearly, they will never pay for themselves in a closet light. Any
home light that is used less than a few hours per week will almost
certainly never justify the higher cost of the fluorescents.
Especially since their current rinky-dink quality means they do
not remotely approach their promised lifetimes.
In the case of a home recharging unit, 20 kilowatts is a nominal
value for an average vehicle doing average stuff, based on a
gallon being roughly two liters and twenty miles per gallon for
twenty miles per hour. Based on these energy efficiency figures.
For rapid charging, at least a 200 kilowatt capability would be
needed, which is far beyond the total service capacity of most
homes. Which means that home rewiring (and possibly even
heavier service transformers) may be needed for a home auto
recharging unit.
Costs for the rewiring, the charger, and its amortization could
easily approach $10,000, especially for early adopters. Which
could add more than the electricity costs to the output product.
At a dime per kilowatt hour, amortization could be viewed as
a ten cent surcharge on the first 100,000 kilowatt hours run
through the device. Neglecting efficiency losses.
Thus easily doubling the costs of the first few years of ownership.
More on related items in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
January 28, 2006
We are rapidly selling out of many of our longer term eBay items.
Newly gone are our Adept Robotic Sliders, the 16 mm aerial gun
cameras, our duct smoke detectors, hydraulic filters, bypass feeders,
Staplex air pollution devices, autoclave sterilizers, surge protectors,
water soluble swimsuits, older PIC emulators, and great heaping
bunches of smaller stuff. And our home energy efficiency devices
should all clear in a week or two at their present rate.
For which we are greateful and most thankful to you.
Several very interesting items remain that do not seem to be getting
the attention and interest they deserve, considering that they
are outstanding bargains: One of these are our half horsepower
genuine Allen-Bradley AC motor drives that easily double as a
lighter duty single phase to three phase converter. Our authentic
"fruit style" refurbed slot machine mechanisms seem to have
garnered little interest, despite them being an outstanding first
PIC programming project and being fully legal in all jurisdictions.
Also, we have great heaping bunches of small animal lab cages,
super premium quality all-stainless steel large hose reels, and
stationary monitor gas detectors that are easily reprogrammed
to many current needs. Plus one zillion brand new American Made
and superb quality SUV cargo nets at two cents on the dollar.
Additional details on our eBay store.
January 27, 2006
Modified our http://www.tinaja.com/psutils/imbz4p01.psl
Bezier Cubic Spline through four data points utility to
give you a choice of a "good" result that is quite fast or
a "better" result that takes several iterations.
Any number of Cubic Splines can be drawn through four
data points, but the "best" one will usually end up being
the shortest. Our chords are now optionally broken up into
thirds so they more nearly approximate the true spline
lengths. Several repeat trips are made. And convergence
is usually quite rapid. Four trips should do it.
A partial tutorial appears as NUBZ4PTS.PDF in our
GuruGram library.
January 26, 2006
Thermoelectric modules have stayed pretty much where
we left them way on back in the Hardware Hacker 68 you'll
find in the HACKAR2.PDF collected archive.
The problem remains that these devices are horribly
inefficient. Typical COP's vary from 0.15 down to
ZERO at higher delta-T drops. This means that many
many more watts have to go through the heatsink than
the cooling watts. And it is enormously difficult to get
even a fan cooled heatsink below one degree per watt.
Thus, it is trivially easy to have your TE heatsink rise
EXCEED the cooling drop of the TE module, thus
heating rather than cooling!
The TE modules are well suited for low power apps such
as dewpoint detectors, microscope slide chillers, or noise
figure control.
There performance at the one to ten watt level is usually
highly disappointing. Thus their use in picnic coolers or as
CPU temperature control devices is marginal at best. The
odds are very high you will be unhappy with either device.
These modules remain a classic Engineering Rathole and
simply do not work at all at higher power levels. And will
not until fundamental new TE materials are discovered.
January 25, 2006
New GuruGram #59 is on Fitting a Bezier Cubic Spline to
Four Data Points.
Sourcecode can be found here, and the underlying point-
fitting utility here. Additional Cubic Splines are here, and
more GuruGrams here.
It turns out that an infinite number of splines can be drawn
through four points, depending upon your choices for t1 and
t2. Apparently the shortest spline is in fact the "best", but
the length differences are often at the fourth or higher
decimal place.
While our chord apportionment method of drawing straight
lines between the points and proportioning these to t1 and
t2 gives a useful approximation, you can improve results
by subdividing the splines or going to true length calculations.
Both of these add complexity and computation time as they
seem to require multiple passes.
Consulting Services available.
January 24, 2006
Another interesting new component is the Melexis Absolute
Rotary Position Sensor IC. That senses a magnet's position
to better than a degree accuracy and 12-bit resolution. The
output options include analog, PWM, or serial.
Part number is MLX0316.
January 23, 2006
We looked at pyroelectric "people detectors" motion sensors
way on back in HACK39.PDF, which you'll find as part of
HACKAR2.PDF. Two of the problems with these had been
that very special lenses were needed for custom aps, and the
lens + detector package usually ended up rather large.
The problem being that pyroelectrics have to work on ac or
changing signals. Lenses have "hot" and "cold" areas that
a person has to walk through to create the ac signal that is
needed for detection.
Aromat, who is now a division of Panasonic has just introduced
some brand new miniature passive infrared motion sensors that
include(!) an internal lens. These are less than fingertip size and
come in several flavors of standard, sight, spot, and 10 meter.
January 22, 2006
Posted a preliminary new Bezier Cubic Spline through four
data points utility to http://www.tinaja.com/psutils/imbz4p01.psl
I'll try to work up a GuruGram on this shortly.
As with nearly all of our utilities, this uses PostScript as
A General Purpose Computing language. You alter the
standard ASCII textfile in an editor of your choice and
then send it to Acrobat Distiller.
It turns out that you can draw an infinite number of cubic
splines through four data points, depending on your choice
of t1 and t2 for the intermediate locations. If t1 and t2 are
too close together, the mid space will be "too straight" and
the outer space will be "too loopey".
Similarly, if t1 and t2 are too far apart, the mid space will
be "too loopey" and the outer space will be "too straight".
I'm not sure what the optimum criteria for the "best" curve
would be. I'd guess it involves the second derivatives through
the t points. But it turns out a simple and useful approximation
is to set your t values by the chorded linear distances between
the inner and outer data points.
January 21, 2006
Got some preliminary revised Bezier Cubic Spline through
four points code working. Use of Basis Functions apparently
dramatically simplifies things.
For any point...
xx = x0B0(t) + x1B1(t) + x2B2(t) + x3B3(t)
If the inside points are somewhere near uniformly spaced,
arbitrarily putting them at t=1/3 and t=2/3 would yield...
firstx - x0(8/27) - x3(1/27) = x1(12/27) + x2(6/27)
secondx - x0(1/27) - x3(8/27) = x1(6/27) + x2(12/27)
Since x0 and x3 are already known, this is an easily solved
plain old two variable linear equation pair. A similar y
equation pair is equally easy to solve.
Its not yet quite clear to me what the behavior will be for
other t values or whether higher order Bernstein
Polynomonials can be used to fit more points, so stay tuned.
January 20, 2006
I've been accused of ridiculing the hydrogen economy,
but the simple fact is that the hydrogen economy is
inherently self-ridiculing.
Here is why the emperor has no clothes...
~ No large net energy source of hydrogen is known
that is conveniently reachable. There are no large
terrestrial hydrogen mines, wells, or farms.
~ Hydrogen on earth is only an energy carrier or
transfer system. You first have to fill it with energy
before you can empty it. This process is inherently
inefficient and highly wasteful of exergy.
~ Hydrogen is inherently a pollution AMPLIFIER that
INCREASES the pollution of its underlying net energy
sources. It is utterly ludicrous to claim that hydrogen
is in any manner "non polluting".
~ The energy density by volume of STP hydrogen is absurdly
low, typically being 1/3000th that of gasoline. Known
methods of increasing the density such as liquification
or pressurization raise major and unresolved safety,
efficiency, and cost amortization problems while still
falling far short of gasoline energy density.
~ The energy density by weight of hydrogen is a useless
measure of no terrestral consequence whatsoever.
The CONTAINED energy density by weight is much
worse than gasoline. While improving gasoline to the
theoretical hydrogen density would only have negligible
benefits of slightly reducing vehicle weight.
~ Virtually ALL commercial hydrogen is produced by the
reformation of methane. Hydrogen is thus presently a
product and service of "big oil". One that is certain to
increase foreign oil dependency.
~ The explosive range of hydrogen is among the widest
known and its spark trigger energy is exceptionally low.
Hydrogen burns with a nearly invisible flame. No
colorant or odorant solutions are presently known.
~ Electrolysis is wildly and totally unsuitable for the
production of bulk energy hydrogen because any
one kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously more
valuable than a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.
Thermodynamic fundamentals involving exergy will
absolutely and positively guarantee that electrolysis will
forever remain the equivalent of your 1:1 exchanging
US dollars for Mexican pesos. There ALWAYS will
be more intelligent things to do with electricity than
instantly and irrecoverably destroying most of its
energy quality and value. Especially from high value
grid or pv sources.
~ Water is an ash. And thus by chemical energetics is
the worst possible place to seek a hydrogen source.
~ Hydrogen improperly burned in air produces highly
polluting oxides of nitrogen.
~ There is only one known method of creating a hydrogen
product of acceptable convenience and safety. And that
is by carbon hydride bonding to form such liquids as
iso-octane or heptane. At present, "carbon neutral"
fuels appear to have overwhelming advantages over
"carbon free" ones.
~ There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there
is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. The gasoline also offers
four times the energy density by volume. And has no
frostbite or blindness safety issues.
~ Many metals will self-destruct if placed in contact with
hydrogen through a process called embrittlement.
~ Any fuel solution of lower energy density will have a
compounding infrastructure effect where more product
has to be shipped and stored, thus intrinsically making
its costs noncompetitive. For instance, pipelines are
ridiculously more efficient at dealing with conventional
hydrocarbon products than hydrogen.
More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
January 19, 2006
Oops. Apparently the four point Bezier cubic spline
curve fit in MUSE145.PDF is only valid for x values
that are monotonic and non-repeating.
I'm not yet sure whether there is also a problem in
the underlying BEZ4PTS.PDF. Hopefully I just got
sloppy at column deadline time. This contributed file
did use an intriguing u = 2t - 1 parameter space that
is further explored in BEZIERU.PDF
Your comments and input welcome.
January 18, 2006
New GuruGram #58 is on The Math Behind Bezier Cubic
Splines.
Sourcecode can be found here, and additional Cubic Spline
info here.
January 17, 2006
I guess I spent several decades "perfecting" color organs,
or music-to-light converters. Among many dozens of designs,
my first appeared in the April 1963 Electronics World, while
latest and best was the Psychedelia I, in the Sept 69 PE.
Basically, these took an audio input, filtered it into channels,
and then modulated light bulbs to follow the music. While a
major component of rock concerts and DJ club scenes, home
or dorm units seem to have clearly fallen by the wayside.
Why? First because static light displays are not all that exciting
any more. It is enormously difficult to get deep and vibrant
colors. Especially with controlled heat.
Second, because the dynamic range was usually very
limited, nonlinear, and highly mismatched. Third, because
rf noise on these would take out AM radios, unless you used
exceptional shielding and filtering. Bulb "singing" was a
related problem. And finally, because low end imitators offered
even more rotten performance.
I guess if I were doing a classic color organ redesign, I would
set it up to use low level audio inputs that were routed to
an automatic level control and an extreme compressor. I'd
further improve the dynamic range by linearizing the brightness
versus voltage using ROM table lookup correction that took into
account the actual bulbs in use. Plus continuous drive to eliminate
low brightness interactions. With a PIC, of course. And I'd
treat the RFI problem a lot more seriously.
But these days, the obvious display is a home theater screen.
What might be really interesting is some ultra high end DSP
that takes the music and, instead of simple filtering, extracts
all of the individual instruments back into separate channels
of amplitude and color dependency. Each channel would then
become an avatar or agent on the screen. Or otherwise
represent itself. Mood sensing could lead to countless ongoing
display variations.
Sort of a super screen saver.
January 16, 2006
I've made several minor adjustments on our web pages that
should improve contrast and legibility. Please let me know
what you think of them.
I'm definitely going to stick with our "retro" look. It seems
to me to be the best way to deal with linking the enormous
quantities of data in a useful way.
January 15, 2006
The local job market here in the Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez
Metropolitan Area has kinda been turned topsy turvy. Three
major corporations are hiring sight unseen. Successful applicants
must be able to show a core body temperature measurably above
January ambient.
Our own needs are for part time order fulfillment, packaging, and
product cleaning and refurb. We try to seek out individuals who
specifically have part time interest and already have a dozen or
more jobs. Such as dog grooming, personal caregiving, catering,
non-profit work, or whatever.
We combine only moderate wages with perks the others cannot
even dream of touching. Such as extreme flextime, high autonomy,
a dress code that does not draw all that fine a line between the
casual dress days and the clothing optional ones, lack of most
hassles (although I do get tedious over quality control and proper
item prep.), and absolutely zero workplace harrasment.
Plus an aggressive profit sharing program we call bonus hours.
One bonus hour is awarded for every $500 in daily cleared gross
sales. Other bonus hours are added for any tasks that get excessively
dirty or otherwise unreasonable.
January 14, 2006
Refurb Log:
Had our HP 830C start making terrible noises. On inspection,
there was a black lagoon gloppy mess on the righthand side
as well. It was easy to strongly suspect the two were related.
One problem with modern peripheral service is that most of the
parts snap together. If you do not carefully study and understand
the disassembly process, you are likely to break a tab or at
least go to far too much trouble for what should be an instant
disassembly.
A second problem is that the service info may be readily
available but inaccessible to you if you do not get your Google
keywords just right. Once I found that this area was properly
called an inkjet service station or an inkjet parking station,
useful service info popped right out.
Meanwhile, I discovered that the ink was more or less water
soluble. While the proper procedure is to remove all cables and
cartridges, followed by the right cover, removal of the electric
connections to the right cover, removal of the parking station,
and removal the station stepper and gears, you can probably get
away with putting the whole printer in the shower right end down
and using a hot water shower head on the station till the water
runs clear.
It may take a while. Possibly three separate ten minute
sessions. Be sure to thoroughly dry, reshaking often.
More on related topics in our Refurb Log.
January 12, 2006
And a reminder that there are three different ways
you can measure pressure. And that it is important that
everyone doing or interpreting the measurement exactly
understands which is which.
Internally, nearly all pressure sensors respond to the
difference between their two inputs. These are called
differential pressure sensors and they measure psid,
short for pounds per square inch differential.
A "normal" pressure gauge will have one of its inputs
connected to ambient. And thus will measure psig,
short for pounds per square inch gauge.
A pressure sensor that has one of its inputs referenced
to a perfect vacuum will measure psia, short for pounds
per square inch absolute.
A perfect vacuum is thus 0 psia and -14.7 psig. Normal
room conditions are 14.7 psia and 0 psig.
January 11, 2006
There were all the usual mixups and confusion with
yesterday's TFD pumper tests, so I thought I'd go over
the fundamentals here. Approximately...
30 MILES of Air = 14.7 psia
30 FEET of Water = 14.7 psia
30 INCHES of Mercury = 14.7 psia
Perfect vacuum = MINUS 14.7 psig
Thus, if you built a magic box that was 30 miles high
and weighed the air in it, the weight of the air would
be 14.7 pounds if the box was exactly one square inch
and 14.7 psi or POUNDS PER SQUARE INCH if it was a
different size.
This pressure varies a little with weather (the worst of
hurricanes are 10 percent low) and quite a bit with
altitude. At 3000 feet, you'd have something like 13.1
psi. Dropping to around 10.1 psi at 10,000 feet . One
half of the total air is under you at 16,500 feet..
A perfect vacuum can NOT lift water more than thirty feet!
The best of fire pumps can only draft to 26 feet or so at sea
level, dropping to 22 feet or so in Thatcher's 2800 feet.
Deep wells work by putting something at the bottom and
pushing the water UP. You can PUSH water upward as far
as your energy and materials will let you; BUT you can only
SUCK water up TWENTY feet or so. The least little air leak
will dramatically cut your lifting ability.
And may eliminate it entirely
Other things useful to remember are that a cubic foot of water
weighs around 62.4 pounds and holds just under 7.5 gallons.
Since there are 144 square inches in a square foot, a one foot
cube box full of water will exhibit a pressure of 0.4133 psi.
A pints a pound the world around.
Giving us the approximate rule that ONE foot of water
head equals ONE-HALF of a psi. Or two feet per psi.
A sixty foot water tower will deliver roughly 30 psi and
exactly 24.79 psi static pressure. If the fire scene is
twenty feet above the pumper, an additional ten psi of
pump pressure will be needed.
January 10, 2006
Yet another mesmerizingly awful "worst" hobby
project of all time had to be the Gravity Wave Detector
in Nuts and Volts magazine. This was just a cheap opamp
with an electrolytic cap hung across its inputs.
Which almost certainly was measuring the diurnal input
offset temperature drift as their shop cooled off at night.
Clearly, the technology was twelve orders of magnitude
shy on sensitivity and fifteen on selectivity to actually
find or interpret a gravity wave.
Electrolytics, of course, are a witches brew of bizarre
nonlinear electrochemistry, and never should see use
as a precision sensor of any sort. Especially at zero bias!
Chances are overwhelming that whatever it was they thought
they might have been measuring would have gone away
with a decent low drift op amp inside a picnic cooler. One
combined with a stack of decent mylar caps.
Just like those "antigravity" experiments where it turned
out they had invented a propeller. In which downward moving
air apparently lightened an object.
Anytime you find a "too good to be true" result, you should
always immediately stop and aggressively try to prove
yourself wrong.
Only once in a lifetime was I unable to prove myself
wrong. Details on this fascinating story in STALAC.PDF
January 9, 2006
My own worst projects? If the truth be known, very few
of my high school electronics projects worked very well at
all. It took a rather long time to find out what engineering
and product development were really all about. Or that
the first cut on any project will be wrong and will have to
be redone. Probably from scratch.
My worst published project was likely an ultra cheap
color organ. Audio had to be loud and distorted to drive
the easily blown pilot lights that shone on some huge
Delco light dependent resistors. Worse, while rated to
200 volts, the LDR's would spark with nonlinear illumation
and end up with very short lifetimes. But it was amazingly
cheap and simple and cute. Definitely minimilist.
My worst "failed before publishing" project was an ice
cube maker using a thermoelectric module. Turned out the
delta T across the heatsink was larger than the delta-T
cooling provided by the TE module, thus heating instead
of cooling. And trashing the concept completely.
My worst "corrected after publishing" was a simple PE
square wave generator that I was offering dialplates for.
I forgot about the inverse relationship between time and
frequency, so the linear dial should have been really
cramped at one end. I did replace each and every sold
dialplate and promptly published a correction.
I did purposely create bunches of "not even wrong"
projects, publishing them in April issues under the Marcia
Swampfelder byline, both in Popular Electronics and the
rather short lived Modern Electronics. A summary can be
found in MARCIA.PDF.
Typical was the mass teleportion project where the user got
his settings wrong. His girlfriend arrived at Petauluma all right,
but she was rather upset at being newly lefthanded and three
inches shorter. "But she complains a lot anyway".
Most of the mass teleportation production went to importers
of specialty herbs and spices. Where the 4X cloning feature
and ordinary phone line comm would eliminate all of those
annoying long lines at customs and allow you to set your own
international currency exchange rates.
The most diabolical was the "in-situ" solar cell process in
which you built ultra efficient 110 volt dc solar panels using
nothing but beach sand, hardware cloth, and a cookie sheet.
and, a chemical known as 3,7 Dimenthylpentadecon-2-ol
Proprionate. AKA the sex pherome of the pine sawfly.
Naturally, if you were an entomologist, you would use this
stuff in picoliter quantities. But locked in wax for, say, a
one year gradual release. Instead, we had these dudes
spraying two liters of this onto their sand covered cookie
sheets.
Don't let it bug you.
Many of the products in the Swampfelder columns were
really the combined names of several Arizona fire lookout
towers. Where some of the stories were actually written.
January 8, 2006
Someone just asked me what the worst hobby construction
projects of all time were. In general, Ziff Davis quality
control was ridiculously better than Gernsback, so much of
the really bad stuff appeared in Radio-Electronics and its
renamed and repositioned offspring.
I'd guess that a RE cable tv descrambler project caused the
most grief. Fatal errors in the story were combined with the
very limited places where it would work at all, added to the
questionable skills of the theft-of-cable epsilon minuses.
But my vote for the most mesmerizingly awful hobby project
of all time would have to be the magic lamp in the April 96 RE.
This was a "free energy" project that was so "not even wrong"
on so many levels it clearly was one of a kind.
The premise was that if you took a half wave dimmer circuit and
used a 32 volt incandescent bulb lit to normal brightness, your
cheap average responding meter would record only one-third
the voltage and one-third the current. For an obvious power
savings of 90 percent. In reality, of course, we had standard
Beginning EE student blunder #0001-A of confusing average
and RMS current and voltage readings.
Naturally, the author never bothered to touch the 32 volt bulb
to see if it was any cooler. Compounding ludicrosities included
a patent being granted on a mainstay circuit found in most any
1938 industrial electronics textbook, the circuit being illegal
because of power quality considerations, and extreme stability
and bulb lifetime issues over late angle phase. Compounded
by the author's belief that a conspiracy was doing him in.
Amazingly, at a 126 degree half wave dimmer phase delay angle,
the ratio of average to RMS current is in fact a whopping 3:1! I
did a detailed analysis of related topics in MUSE112.PDF and
MUSE113.PDF
January 7, 2006
The future just ain't what it used to be. And "they" just
don't seem to be getting it. Not at all.
Dramatic and profound and fundamental changes have taken
place in IP intellectual property recently...
The value of IP has dropped dramatically and
is fast approaching ZERO! Back in the correcting
Selectric and 3x5 card days, it might have taken
a painful year to author a book. These days, nearly
anybody can knock out a much better ebook in a week
or two. And there are now far more anybodies.
The gatekeepers are no longer in charge, and boy
are they ever pissed! It used to be you had to go
to a book publisher for typesetting or a record
company for studio work, or a scholarly journal
to expose your paper to a receptive audience. Today
these all are simply obstructionists who clearly no
longer serve any useful purpose whatsoever.
Anybody can easily and cheaply and conveniently
make any number of superb quality copies of just
about any IP. Any attempts to "protect" IP went out
with introduction of the Apple II. In the first place,
the stuff being protected is no longer worth nearly as
much as it once was. And the options for capture are
now so overwhelming that any atempt at protection is
clearly doomed to failure.
Research has gone from difficult and costly to utterly
trivial. Anbody can now find out just anything about
everything with a click or two on Google. And thus
totally trashing the value of information in the process.
Information is now utterly overwhelming, so any attempt
at controlling a portion of it ain't gonna happen. Sadly,
this also dooms most libraries.
Traditional media has become totally irrevelant. The
watchword is now fragmentation from countless sources.
At one time, if you watched a video screen, your choices were
over-the-air broadcast network television. If you wanted
to make others aware of your products, you had to place
an outrageously expensive and glacially slow inefficient
ad in a trade journal. There is no longer any point whatsoever
in network television, over-the-air broadcasts, or printed
trade journals. And certainly no point whatsoever in public
broadcasting. Or in worrying about "analog conversion".
IP Law overwhelmingly favors the megacorporation over
the invidual. Patents have long become a ludicrous joke to
the point where it is insane to try and patent a million dollar
idea. And the "sue your best customers" mania of the record
industry is not in any manner improving or increasing the
return to the indiviudal song writer or artist. Copyright, in
particular, should be strictly limited to a nonrenewable 18
months for a corporation or 36 months for an individual.
IP respects no international borders. Knockoff copies
are certain to result on any IP that is generally perceived
as "overpriced" or "overvalued". All from either unknown
or uncontrollable sources beyond the limits of US law.
I'm not sure just where I'm going with this. Your comments welcome.
January 6, 2006
Refurb Log:
How much new money should you throw at a project
during refurb? Certainly pocket change spent at a
hardware store or Radio Shack can dramatically
improve appearance. And McMaster Carr or even
Small Parts can end up fairly reasonable. But beyond
that, "cut all your losses and move on" can set in fast.
Our normal eBay goal is to seek out a 30:1 sell/buy
ratio. So, adding $25 in parts should add at least $750
to the marketability of the project. There seldom is
that much differential payback to refurb, except in
very special cases.
I did go ahead and spend another $250 on a pricey
autoclave as an experiment. But we have sold these
before and the odds seemed real high that replacing
the costly single-source heater was all that was
needed to get from junk to a high demand item.
Sometimes you can simply stash an item till another
one like it shows up. Waiting might be better than
a direct repair.
Rule ot thumb: Think twice beyond $25 and real hard
beyond $50.
January 5, 2006
We are continuing our bailout of stuff that has been
around for a year or more without processing. Much
of this has or should soon appear on our eBay store.
My foremost rule here is to ask "Would I buy this
item now and for how much? Attempts are made to
fully clear one small area at a time, such as a shelf
or a tote or a box. With the rule "If you touch it, you
dispose of it".
Favoring expensive over cheap, new over used,
working over needing refurb, "our" sort of stuff
over "ain't us", multiples over singles, general
interest over highly specialized, docs available
over mystery, current suppliers over orphans,
and previous winners over unknowns.
And, crucially, stuff we feel good about over any
that we do not.
A lot of the dregs might end up on the Alvin Pile,
and you might find some outstanding buys here.
January 4, 2006
Closed out our two-part 2005 What's New archive
and started this one. These files have gotten a lot
longer now that they have daily coverage, are much
more "bloggier", are rss linked, and include a lot
more images than before.
Future files will continue to be split whenever their
size gets out of hand.
January 3, 2006
They just discovered that Viagra makes lawyers taller.
January 2, 2006
Refurb Log:
Items are typically very easy or impossibly difficult to
refurb, and there often is a very fine line between the
two. Sometimes a little patience and rethinking that is
combined with a very unusual tool or two can salvage
any marginals. Plus bunches of blind luck.
Ferinstance, I got this otoscope medical device that had
its threaded locking ring epoxy seal break away from
its battery case. And some epsilon minus apparently
cross threaded the ring while attempting a fix.
Stripped threads are often bad news, especially if
brass and large diameter fine threads. But by reversing
the ring and using the good "exit" threads and some light oil,
the ring was first gotten to work properly backwards, and then
even frontwards. Much of this was a combination of patience
and blind luck. And using just the right amount of force.
To reassemble the device, a special spanner wrench is
usually used that lets you twist two holes in a ring that
are spaced an inch apart at the bottom of a six inch
deep case. Such a tool normally costs a lot more than the
otoscope itself. But an ordinary stainless steel dinner fork
can be destructively bent into a tool that is just barely enough
to get the job done.
More on related topics in our Refurb Log.
January 1, 2006
Got one of the usual late night phone calls from an
individual who just invented a new way of marketing and
wanted to run out and get a patent on it to "protect" their
invention. The individual, of course, had never really
marketed anything themselves.
For openers, a patent in no manner prevents anyone from
stealing your ideas. All a patent does is give you a right to
sue someone should your idea in fact get stolen. As the
typical enforcement cost of patent litigation is in the
$300,000 range (yearly litigation insurance alone normally
costs more than $90,000), the cost of a getting a patent is
pocket change that simply does not enter into the economics.
There is, of course, not one patent in one thousand that cannot
be busted outright by a diligent enough search for prior art in
obscure enough places. Nor does more than one patent in
five hundred ever return a net positive cash flow.
I may have mentioned this a time or two before, but any
involvement whatsoever by an individual or small scale
startup with the patent system is VIRTUALLY CERTAIN
to result is a HUGE net loss of time, energy, money, and
sanity.
Much more on these topics in our Patent Help library.
especially our Collected Patent Tutorial Reprints, and
specific files on When to Patent, The Idea Mortality
Curve, How to Bust a $650 Patent, and, of, course, our
classic Case Against Patents that started it all.
December 31, 2005
Here's some of the major Data Sheet Sites, courtesy of
the Sci.Electronics.Design newsgroup...
http://www.partminer.com (12 Million)
http://www.datasheets.org.uk (5.20 Million)
http://datasheetarchive.com (2-3 Million)
http://www.alldatasheets.com (1.07 Million)
http://www.chipdocs.com (701,010)
http://datasheets4u.com (523,031)
http://www.datasheetcatalog.com (280,758)
http://chipcatalog.com (253,733)
And, of course...
December 30, 2005
Some eBay sellers seem obsessed with having as high a
sellthru rate as they can, attempting to sell everything
every time on its first listing.
In reality, there probably is no correlation whatsoever
with fast sellthru and optimal eBay profits. In fact, if
things are selling too fast, you are probably charging far
too little.
My own feeling is that if it takes a few weeks or even a
few months to sell something, the chances are you can
get a much higher price for it. And that your total return
even after the extra fees should be significantly higher.
Especially since your first relisting is free.
At least to me, a twenty one day cashout and a fifteen
month hang time appears about right for industrial items
acquired in quantity. Especially if a 30:1 sell/buy ratio
goal is in fact acheived.
More on our Auction Help page.
December 29, 2005
I've been doing more study into image pixel interpolation.
This is an utterly fascinating subject with some amazing
potential. Several very interesting links appear here, here,
here, and here.
It still turns out that your "best" image interpolation scheme
for minor size changes often remains the High Resolution
Cubic Spline Basis Function. Such as we are using in our
Universal Bitmap Manipulator and as we looked at back
here.
But if you are reducing an image, another problem rears its
ugly head. You might get Moire sampling artifacts or dropouts
of fine detail. The workaround is to combine a low pass filtering
(such as a Gaussian correllation) with your downsizing to
prevent missed lines or added artifacts.
When highly magnifying, there are newer and fancier techniques
that go beyond what you can do with high resolution cubic
splines. Many of these are based on Lanczos techniques, while
the present top dog just may involve a process called LAD
Deconvolulation.
Beyond these techniques are whole other worlds of content specific
and nonlinear transformations. A content specific image processor
might deal with a picket fence area differently from a blue sky area.
And nonlinear techniques can solve particular problems. For instance
an algorithm of "Replace each pixel with an average of its nine nearest
neighbors" dramatically reduces artifacts in a noisy image. But also
introduces very bad problems of its own.
Another consideration is that the fancier techniques often involve
great heaping bunches of computer horsepower and may not be suitable
for real time or even near real time uses.
December 28, 2005
Refurb Log:
Sometimes you can guess at a schematic simply by
noting which integrated circuits are apparently used
how. I was refurbing a Heath 4804 byte analyzer that
seemed to be behaving erratically. Docs appeared to
be unavailable anywhere. On closer checking, though
operation ended up pretty much as they intended.
We'll first note that you can read the date code on any
IC to get an age estimate. Chances are the unit was
sold about a year later. A typical date code might be
1389 which would be the thirteenth week of 1989. The
IC package style, its SMT vs thruhole mounting, and
its complexity can also give you major clues as to what
you are dealing with.
In the case of the 4804, the inputs obviously went to
a pair of 4-bit transparent latches whose true outputs
indicated their current or held logic state. This was
followed by a plain old 8-input NAND gate that allowed
"1" "0",, or "don't care" adress trapping for fancier
uses. The choice of chips and their position made it
obvious how the unit was supposed to work.
Their hassle (and a really dumb mistake) was that any
ungrounded inputs could easily pick up the power line
or a radio station via body coupling. If you did not know
that All unused inputs MUST be grounded, you would
easily get erratic and confusing results.
If I were keeping the unit, I'd add eight 100K resistors
from each input to ground to discourage noise source
inputs. But I kept the unit as is on eBay, just in case
anyone wanted an authentic collectible.
Naturally, if any item has a use quirk, you should very
conspicuously point it out ahead of time.
More on related topics in our Refurb Log.
December 27, 2005
Someone had asked when the eBay spring slowdown starts.
This is nothing to worry about, because it is simply that little
dip between the winter slack period and the summer slump.
December 26, 2005
The fancier features of a Universal Bitmap Manipulator
demand a high quality true X-Y pixel interpolator. For
such utilities as a precision rotator, a true keystone
corrector, a general distortion remapper, or a scanner
"reperspector".
The "best" interpolation often involves High Resolution
Cubic Spline Basis Functions. As they involve a 4x4=16
correllation at every pixel in a megapixel image space,
these can easily get excessively time intensive. Most
especially when using raw PostScript to create corrected
.BMP images. The big question is what corners, if any
can be cut for faster performance.
The full 4x4 interpolation looks like this...
p03(b0y)(b3x) + p13(b1y)(b3x) + p23(b2y)(b3x) + p33(b3y)(b3x) +
p02(b0y)(b2x) + p12(b1y)(b2x) + p22(b2y)(b2x) + p32(b3y)(b2x) +
evaluated pixel -----> X <----- is positioned here
p01(b0y)(b1x) + p11(b1y)(b1x) + p21(b2y)(b1x) + p31(b3y)(b1x) +
p00(b0y)(b0x) + p10(b1y)(b0x) + p20(b2y)(b0x) + p30(b3y)(b0x)
You can get this result by starting with four X interpolations that
are followed by one Y interpolation, or vice versa. Either way ends
up with the same result shown above. Twenty lookup-multiply-adds
would seem to be needed at first glance.
But terms like (b0y)(b3x) can be combined into a single table
lookup. Ferinstance 10X the x residue plus 100X the y residue
could give you a 100 entry lookup for each of sixteen tables.
Thus reducing you to Sixteen lookup-multiply-adds per pixel.
Further, as this plot shows, those four "corner" tables do not
do all that much. They only add two percent worst case and add
very little noticeable in most other positions. (red on the plot is
a one percent or higher weight; green is two percent or higher.)
So it would seem tempting to bundle the corner table weights
with those of their diagonal neighbors. And getting us down to
Twelve lookup-multiply-adds per pixel.
A second corner cutting opportunity involves dealing with the
rare underflows. As this analysis shows, underflows can occur
just under two percent of the time at an average of a five percent
darkening of the blackest blacks.
Naturally, the underflows have to be trapped out somehow. The
obvious dup 0 lt {pop 0} if might be approximated by a simple abs.
This would incorrectly lighten a few of the lowest energy blackest
of blacks. While eliminating a time intensitive test on a centermost
processing loop.
I'll try to work up these concepts further.
Consulting services available.
December 25, 2005
Optimum bid strategy very much depends upon the
auction venue. As we've seein in EBAYBUY.PDF,
your best eBay bid strategy is to always proxy bid
your max once very late in the auction, doing so in
oddball penny amounts just above a currency
resistance threshold.
This may also seem best at a live auction on a big
ticket item that you really want, but I have found
compelling advantages to consistently offering
the auctioneer loball floor opening bids, especially
if you are subtle about it. The auctioneer is more
likely to notice you and accept your bids and may
even give you a fast hammer every now and then.
More in AUCTSCNE.PDF.
The situation with Government Liquidation auctions
is much more complex. I've cut back on my bidding
here because end-user bidders have gotten way too
competitive, because of an unacceptably high $50
minimum bid opening, their maddeningly infuriating
auto bid extensions, and problems with site access
and site manager customer treatment.
Trap #1 is any GL auction is that your optimal
bidding time is precisely 42 minutes into the last
hour of the bid offer. Anything less telegraphs
your intent, and anything later trips the ludicrous
bid extensions and really invites competition.
Trap #2 is that oddball penny amounts will immediately
tell the competition that you have just proxy bid your
max should you become high bidder. Thus one or two
even bid increments above a currency threshold may
in fact be your best bet.
December 24, 2005
O.K. Heres some more details on our "Use both
a camera and a scanner" ploy from two days back.
The basic idea is covered in EBAYFOTO.PDF. I'll
first take an ordinary picture using a Nikon Coolpix
5000 at full native resolution. The next step would
usually be going through our Swings and Tilts utility
to force Architect's Perspective. But this particular
item is squat enough that the persepective can
be forced by background knockout alone.
While I've got a new Fast Background Knockout
utility available, this time, I used our plain old
KNOCKOUT.BMP with a simple cut and paste.
As we've recently seen, fitting background to a
diagonal line can be greatly sped up by using the
lasso tool with a matching diagonal closure. The
rest of the image is post processed using my
usual tricks.
At this point, the space for the label gets carefully
measured. Label width is 561 pixels, its left height
is 120 pixels, its right height is 118 pixels, and its
right offset climb is 233 pixels.
The side label is than scanned. Any retouch or
lettering improvements are best done before
perspective distortion using our newly revised
Bitmap Typewriter tools.
Now for the tricky part. The image is resized to
120 x 561 pixels and rotated vertically. It is then
copied into the center of the top half of a new Paint
page of exactly double height or 1122 pixels. The
reason being that we want to keep the original left
side of the label the size it was, while progressively
applying climb and shrink correction to the rest of
the label.
Some playing around with NUTILT01.PSL is needed
to find the magic values that give you exactly the right
amount of climb and shrink. In these examples, setting
the tiltaxis to -1.15 and the howmuchtilt to 0.1 gave a
quire good fit.
The newly "perspected" label is then rotated back to
its normal position and cropped to size. The "white"
background may no longer be a pure white, so the
lasso tool is used to crop out all but the active label.
Merge time. The scanned and corrected label is then
pasted on top of the camera image of the rest of the
module. Some minor edge cleanup and treatment may
be needed to make the patch completely invisible.
One minor gotcha: The lettering across the label will
be uniformly spaced rather than perspectively spaced
where the distant letters are compressed. You are very
unlikely to notice this discepency at all. The problem
can be fixed at the cost of computation time.
December 23, 2005
We have pretty much decided to strongly discourage
premium shipping services. The day we use one is the
day the UPS relief driver forgets to stop or the day our
shipping help uses their flextime for dog dentistry.
More often than not, someone will piss around negotiating
for a month or two and then demand instant shipping. It
makes little sense to double or even triple their costs for
little apparent benefit.
Plain old UPS brown is surprisingly fast for most people
most of the time. And most of our eBay feedback praises
our fast shipping using this service. And the disruptions do
not in any way seem to justify the benefits.
December 22, 2005
The obvious answer to whether you should use
a digital camera or a scanner for your eBay
photography is to use both at once...
Note the infinite depth of field along the lettering
plane! Plus the total absence of any flash flare on
the label. Combined with our usual pixel locked 2-1/2 D
"Architects Perspective" and our normal shadowless
photography with JPG edge artifact reduction.
What you do is scan the label, resize and retouch as
needed, and then use my Swings and Tilts backwards
to distort it into the correct trapezodal shape. Then
cut and paste and retouch the borders a tad.
You can click expand the above image to get it up to
the normal eBay JPG size. The full size, full res
bitmap image can be made available on request.
The latest Swings and Tilts version is found here.
I hope to expand our Universal Bitmap Manipulator
routines to simplify converting flat text into a
perspective paste. More on PostScript here.
We have the finest photos on eBay, bar none. Yes,
Consulting and Seminar services are available.
December 21, 2005
Refurb Log:
I can't emphasize strongly enough how important
careful inspection of auction items and continuous
inventory control is. Here's some recent examples
that have caused me grief...
~ A pricey community college instrument needed
an outrageously expensive replacement part.
~ What I thought was a complete scanner turned
out to be only the slidemaking attachment.
~ Most of a stack of large electronic breadboards
was missing crucial inserts.
~ A pallet full of slot machine mechanisms turned
out to be pulls needing extensive refurb.
~ Apparently new-in-original-packaging drafting
table covers turned out to be the old covers
stashed in new boxes.
~ Repairs to an oscilloscope plug-in were so
awkward they could not justify resale price.
~ What appeared to be a real bargain was really
a mix of useless halves of two wildly different
Items.
~ An attempt at humor in an instrument description
caused wildly wrong assumptions by naive buyers.
~ A lab oven turned out to be a much lower value
lower temperature incubator. Also flood damaged.
Much more in our ongoing Refurb Log and on our
Auction Help library pages.
( earlier material appears here. )
|
 |
 |
Please click here to...
View our eBay Auctions. Send Don Lancaster email. Go to the site directory Learn patent alternatives. Pick up surplus bargains. Explore magic sinewaves Sponsor a display banner. Find out what a tinaja is. Find research solutions View recommended books. Place an order. Return to the home page.
 |
 |
