April 1st Contest, why not? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: DenCraw
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2021, 08:17:26 am
content: Hi all.There must be a lot of people here, who have been on the internet for more than 20 yearsor who were on BBS! and that you still have white papers that you could share.The winner could receive an item from Dave's dumpster. just an idea.*| __O|_-\<,_(*)/ (*) ---> old school

author: Algoma
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2021, 04:15:12 pm
content: BBS .. Need to go further back, over 30 years to start hitting the real BBS user years. 20 years ago was already getting pretty modern in the chat messenger apps (ICQ, AOL, MSN Messenger) IRC and newsgroups.

author: DenzilPenberthy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2021, 04:29:01 pm
content: https://www.baldengineer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/25120-bw.pdfWOM chip has to be one of the classics.

author: DenzilPenberthy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2021, 04:30:39 pm
content: ...and IP over avian carrierhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 26, 2021, 04:38:01 pm
content: From the BBC

author: DenCraw
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2021, 11:59:53 am
content: For those of you who do not get the embedded muse.....A Story For April Fool's Day----------------------------The blue light of the TV flickered on the blank wall, but it wentunnoticed by me as I slumped in my old armchair.It had been a bad week. She left on Monday, screaming that shecouldn't take all of the equipment piled everywhere. Me, I thoughtthat old Tek 545 was a collector's item, an antique. Sure, the dustwas pretty bad, but you can bet we were the only couple in town witha living room populated by old scopes and CP/M machines.Women - I'll never understand them. Like, that time my homebrewfurnace controller burped and drove the house to 115 degrees when wewere gone for the weekend. Hey, I never liked those pets anyway, andthe smell did eventually come out of the carpets. Pretty much. Imean, it was just a little software bug; we all have those!And she never forgave me for the fire. Yeah, next time I'll put abigger heat sink on the power supply. I admit it - I learned alesson. The scorch marks on her dresses don't really look all thatbad. Jeez, you'd think she'd be a bit more understanding!I reached for another bag of chips as the chair groaned a bit more.One of these days I'm gonna have to work off some of the excesspounds. A decade spent in the lab drinking Jolt and munching frieshad taken its toll. Despite the flab I still know calculus and canprogram in C; surely a dream dude for any discerning woman. I bet Icould wow them at the local watering hole with my great stories about TCP/IP!Well, this is Silicon Valley after all, where relationships, jobs andcareers are measured in milliseconds and loyalty doled out by themicrogram. Electronics is a dog-eat-dog business and I'm an old handat crawling out from the wreckage. Like that last startup I workedfor. I told 'em we'd get that product out the door, eventuallyanyway. We woulda survived if that idiot president just got anothercouple of mil of venture capital. For a while at least.Ya know, maybe it was losing that job that ticked her off. I figure,what's the big deal? She should be used to this by now. Check out myresume - it shows lots of experience at lots of places. No one can beat this!I picked up the phone but heard only the accusing silence of anon-payment disconnection. No matter. Time to find another companylooking for my embedded expertise. There's a startup a minute here,pigeons ripe for picking.I clumped out of the trailer's front door and found Big Al, the usualwild look in his eyes, mouth working hard on this morning's sugarraised, the white powder spotting his beard. "Al, buddy, you're outawork too, huh? How's the wife and kids?""Kids? Kids? Yeah, come to think of it I did notice some littlepeople living with me. I wonder where they came from? Check thisout." With that he shoved a coffee-stained fragment of the San JoseMercury News into my hands. I quickly took in the circled want ad."ENGINEERs - microprocessor savvy designers and programmers needed.C, FPGAs, PLDs, assembly a plus. Exciting opportunity for a motivateddevelopers in a new high-growth company."A slow smile spread across my face. Here was our pigeon; I wasalready mentally spending the signing bonus.That afternoon, T-shirts cleaned and pressed, with most of the donutdetritus wiped from Al's beard, we met with the president of GalaxarEnterprises. Yep, just as usual, this man was the typical harriedexecutive desperate for people, so desperate he had neither the timenor resources to do much of a background check. Not that mybackground is so terrible; it's just that there's so much of it."You know C? Schematic capture? What's the last project you workedon?" he mumbled, looking at his watch while the beeper pinged an urgent tune."We did that Internet Cappuccino maker for Kitchen Services; you musthave read about it in the press. Yep, that puppy had a MIPs basedcoffee engine with 64 megs of RAM.""Didn't they go Chapter 7?", he interrupted, interested now."Trust me on this. The boss was an idiot. He just didn't understandhow much compute power we needed to blend the perfect cuppa joe. Thatsucker could crank some coffee, believe me. If they hadn't been sostuck on the cost of goods we coulda cleaned up the Cappuccinomarket. We were practically done with development when the SEC raided us.""OK, OK, look, when can you start? Now? Don't you guys ever shave?Heck, just sit here and Bob will tell you what to do."Bob, engineering VP, was one of those snotty-nosed brats with adegree and an attitude. "We're building a new marine VHF radio forthe recreational boating market. That means there are three maindesign parameters. First, the unit must be totally sealed to insureit's waterproof. Second, the sell price can't exceed $250. Andobviously the unit must be simple enough that even the most casualboater can use it."He went on to tell us how we were going to design the product. Us!Can you imagine? As if I don't understand project planning,structured design, discipline design, and all of that utter crap. Me,I prefer to skip all of that non-productive nonsense and just bang it out.I zoned out, the drone of Bob's voice barely noticeable, nodding atthe right time while planning my next move. Clearly it was time forthe old end-run. Saturday night Al and I marched into the president'soffice. "Herb," I started, "we know you're running out of venturemoney and an IPO is at least a year away. Bob's planning to spendanother three months just doing preliminary design. Whatdoya want, adesign or a product? Trust me on this - we can pound out a design ina week, max, and then get the radio done in no time."Herb's eyes gleamed. It seems that he, too, was frustrated by Bob'smethodical approach to engineering. This valley is the land of SteveJobs, where unbridled passion and hope fuels the dream of tomorrow'sbig score. Discipline? Bah. Just lemme at a problem and I'll get itdone. With a bit more prodding Herb agreed that this project was soimportant he'd give it skunk-works treatment, get Bob off of ourbacks, and let us report directly to his president's office.The week sped by like a read from cache memory. Al slouched into mycubicle, let out a long, satisfying-sounding belch, and asked "didn'twe promise Herb a spec or something?" Right! Never let the boss,down, that's my motto. Unless there's a good reason, of course."Sure, look, just grab those header files we've been working on andedit a bit of descriptive stuff at the beginning. They'll never readit all anyway. If he complains we'll tell 'em not only is the specdone, we've incorporated it into the firmware. How can he get upsetif he sees we're already coding?"Herb swallowed our header files hook, line and sinker. He's thrilledthat we're already cranking out software, and giddily reported ourprogress to the venture capitalists. I think they're already mentallyspending their IPO profits. Bob is muttering vague threats, but he'sbeen squeezed into the user-interface group. He wants Al and me totake on that new college grad, Marty. We're supposed to show him howto get projects done. It's not all bad; the kid has a car so can getus beers and carry-out.The secret to success in this business is to look busy, keep aprototype in a state that looks like it has some level offunctionality, and always agree with the boss. And you can't actlike you have a personal life when battling a schedule! Heck, afterjust three days on the job Marty asked if he could leave at 5 tocelebrate his first anniversary. I straightened him out. "Kid, trustme on this. We all go through one or two starter marriages, you know,no kids, no property, no regrets. Don't take it too seriously. Nowlet's order a pizza and get back to work." It was probably a goodthing that I turned off the switchboard that night, so he wouldn'tget distracted by all of those frantic calls from home.And that kid did need some attention. I caught him late one nightdoing a spell check on his comments! Somehow he missed the fact thata ship date loomed; comments are always the first thing to go. "Kid,trust me on this. Never include a comment that will help someone elseunderstand your code. If they understand it, they don't need you." Ithink he gets the picture now.As time moved on we started having trouble fitting the binary imageinto the CPU's 64k address space. "This always happens", I reassuredHerb, "them 8 bitters just can't handle the sort of code we'recranking out for you. Look, we'll just stuff a bigger part in therethis afternoon. No problemo; I've done this a million times."Big Al's eyes lit up when I suggested we look into a 32 bitprocessor. "I've got just the ticket. There's one I've been itchingto try; it's totally reconfigurable, you can even define your owninstruction set. Man, this is gonna look great on my resume!"Ah, resume fodder, the grease of the industry. Herb didn't seem toconcerned about the increased cost of goods - at least he wasn'tasking any questions - so I set out trying to find some way to coolthe sucker. With luck a big old heat sink and decent-sized fan mightbe adequate. Jeez, maybe I'll use the next size up; those burntdresses still haunt me at times.We optimized the instruction set on the CPU to play DoomStar III atawesome speeds. The best part of using a custom architecture was thatI got to port the entire GNU toolchain to our chip. That compilersure is tricky! First time I'd ever fiddled with a code generator, soit naturally took a bit longer than planned to get working - mostly - tools.As the weeks passed Herb got noticeably more antsy, checking on ourprogress on a daily, and then hourly, basis. This always happens, andis a sign that the old cash reserve is evaporating. I started runningto the bank the minute paychecks came out. No one's gonna stick mewith bouncing paper! Been there, done that.Bob - remember Bob? - strolled into the lab one afternoon to check onour progress. It seems the fool had actually invested his own moneyinto the company! He's correspondingly annoying about what we do,even though my end-run had gotten him off the project months before.Oddly, he seemed upset about the cooling fan. "This thing has got tobe totally sealed, so no water gets in!" he whined."Yeah, yeah, just mount it in a dry place or something", I replied."I can't be bothered with that sort of stuff. You know how much powerthis sucker uses?" These company men are all stress puppies. Not me;I'll be going strong when he suffers his first mid-30s myocardial infarction.Christmas rolled around - or was it Easter? I dunno, we were plentybusy chasing down bugs and making feature changes. Bob's paycheckbounced. I knew that Herb had been doing some fancy footwork to keepthings afloat, but when everyone in accounting quit, complainingabout insolvency or something, the standard exodus began. As usual,engineering remained untouched by the various rounds of layoffs. Theyneeded the products we make to survive. I love this field!This seemed like a great time for a two week vacation, though Martyseemed almost hysterical that I'd take off now. "Kid, trust me onthis. Never complete a project on time. If you do, they will think itwas easy and anyone can do it and they don't need you. Now I'm outahere for a while. Look busy and we'll sort it all out when I get back."I got back, more or less sober but feeling great, to find the frontdoor padlocked and a sheriff standing guard. Marty, skulking in adark corner, grabbed my arm and moaned that he couldn't build thecode at all while I was away. It seems he had trouble locating all ofthe source."Kid, trust me on this. Never archive all the sources necessary tobuild a binary. Always hide a few on your own disk. If they can buildyour binary, they don't need you. What do they teach you in college, anyway?"He said the creditors got fed up and were demanding their money. Halfthe employees were suing because their paychecks bounced. A satisfiedgrin spread across my face as I recalled beating the rest of thoseidiots to the bank.Marty shrieked that Herb was suing all of us in engineering for notmeeting promised dates, specs, or features. "Kid, trust me on this.They always sue. That's why I own nothing. What do they think they'llget, my trailer? The bank owns that!"Well, it seems my two week holiday might extend itself a bit. Noworries there! After such a tough project I needed a break. It's timeto sleep in for a while, build up those reserves.Days later an awful booming interrupted my sleep. "My god, it's noteven noon!" I shouted, "Go away". The door banged open and Big Alloomed over me. "Check this out." He unwrapped the newspaper fromaround his BLT and handed me a section from the want ads. Yep, old Alwas right on top of things again. Another startup, as usual desperatefor a pair of gurus like us, no doubt willing to hire at any price.A harried president briefly interviewed the two of us, asking lots ofquestions about our most recent experience. We gave them the scoop onthe VHF radio, but had to parry his request for references. "Sorry -they went out of business. Shame, that. There's no one there you cancall. But we built a heck of a radio for those guys. It's too badmanagement was so screwed up they folded. Hey, it happens all thetime in this industry.""But trust me on this - you need a graybeard like me to mentor youryoung engineers, and to get this project out now! I'm ready to startcoding today. What is it we're building?"

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 01, 2021, 02:31:21 am
content: My favorite April 1st circuit. Gravity Wave Detector - it really works:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/gravity-wave-detector-radio-electronics-april-1986/