mmm electronics

Saw this - very cool. (It kind of goes with a blog post, but I'm just sharing the yummy electronic circuit because I think it is really cool. And accurate.)

"Have your timer and eat it too"?

Like times 1000!

Bear, you're old as dirt! Who else would still know that a 555 is a timer?

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Saw this - very cool. (It kind of goes with a blog post, but I'm just sharing the yummy electronic circuit because I think it is really cool. And accurate.)

BB Roy of Great Britan Had a Very Good Wife....

i knew, but i got my electronics degree in 1980

Both my degrees are in EE. I should be designing antennas or something like that (but am so glad that I'm not).

Devesh H Rao wrote:

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Saw this - very cool. (It kind of goes with a blog post, but I'm just sharing the yummy electronic circuit because I think it is really cool. And accurate.)

BB Roy of Great Britan Had a Very Good Wife....

Can anyone identify the stripe colors on the resistors? If the ones near the top are both Oranage-Yellow-Green-Gold, then that should give the LED a frequency of about 1.4 Hz. (Although the current-limiting resistor seems too big to make the LED visible at all.)

Good to hear about Mr. Roy. I've heard a different, more socially unacceptable mnemonic. Let's just say Miss Violet is of questionable moral character.

1.4 Hz? That's off the bottom of the electromagnetic spectrum, its wavelength is so large. Did you miss out a few orders of magnitude there?

Paul Clapham wrote:1.4 Hz? That's off the bottom of the electromagnetic spectrum, its wavelength is so large. Did you miss out a few orders of magnitude there?

I may well have. I'm having a tough time identifying the color of the multiplier stripe (third from the right) on the two marshmallows/resistors near the top of the pic. Orange-Yellow-Black would make them 34 Ohm, which, if I'm applying the equation correctly, yields a frequency of 14 kHz. If they're Orange-Yellow-Violet, they'd be 340 MOhm, which would give a frequency of 0.0014 Hz, or one blink every 700 seconds or so.

Then again, if this is a demonstration circuit, you may want a frequency that's interesting yet discernible to the naked eye (sans oscope). Anything between .2 and 5 Hz fits the bill IMO.

and i thought i was the only programmer who migrated from the hardware world

Ryan McGuire wrote:

Paul Clapham wrote:1.4 Hz? That's off the bottom of the electromagnetic spectrum, its wavelength is so large. Did you miss out a few orders of magnitude there?

...If they're Orange-Yellow-Violet, they'd be 340 MOhm, which would give a frequency of 0.0014 Hz, or one blink every 700 seconds or so...

Okay, sorry, I misunderstood the "frequency" you were talking about. I was thinking in terms of "500 THz = blue", i.e. the frequency of the light that the LED gives off, not the frequency it blinks at. Obviously I'm not a hardware guy.

Randall Twede wrote:and i thought i was the only programmer who migrated from the hardware world

Don't worry you're not alone bro ;)

Ryan McGuire wrote:

Can anyone identify the stripe colors on the resistors?

I read it as Brown Black Yellow Orange which gives makes it a 100 K with 2% tolerance

Devesh H Rao wrote:
I read it as Brown Black Yellow Orange which gives makes it a 100 K with 2% tolerance

That works out nicely to... what... 5Hz.

Bear Bibeault wrote: I should be designing antennas or something like that (but am so glad that I'm not).

Which means you would be using your Fields course. All of the EE's I know hated Fields

I didn't mind it so much. What I hated, detested, abhorred and loathed, was matrix algebra.

I learned today it came from here. More pics along with how they made it.

i also hated matrix algebra. it was horrible.

Devesh H Rao wrote:
BB Roy of Great Britan Had a Very Good Wife....

http://xkcd.com/992 - lower left.

There was /is this arithmetic, algebra and I forgot the third (that uses sin, con etc) one I liked the most.

Sachin Patil wrote: I forgot the third (that uses sin, con etc) one I liked the most.

Trigonometry.

Randall Twede wrote:i also hated matrix algebra. it was horrible.

Hah, that's interesting, while I'm not exceptionally good at most math, linear algebra was my favorite and I got really great marks for it XD

Matrices, vectors, eigen-values, I loved it haha.

Stephan van Hulst wrote:Matrices, vectors, eigen-values, I loved it haha.

Well, someone has to like it. Otherwise, who'd work on Photoshop?

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:
Trigonometry.

Yes, that's the one.