7 Jun
2010
7 Jun
'10
2:24 p.m.
On 05/06/10 11:12, Tony Duell wrote:
I stopped reading ELektor when many of the more
interesting 'projects'
depended on buying a pre-soldered module. Building the thing is part of
the fun...
They're going down the path a bit, and I'm debating whether to carry on
with my subscription (it's up for renewal in September). If they carry
on with the "here's a really cool project... and you have to buy it
ready built" bullcrap, they can stick their renewal "reminders" where
the sun doesn't shine.
The problem with older elektor projects is that often
the firmware is now
totally unobtainable. You can no longer buy the pre-programemd chip (in
some cases the 'blank; chip is hard to find anyway), they won't release a
dump of it, and even if you can find somebody who's built the project,
PALs and microcontrollers will be copy-protected :-(
Although in a few cases the article makes it fairly easy to figure out
what the project needs to do. The 1974 thru ~1986 era is
all-transistor-and-TTL (with few exceptions), whereas the 1990-1999 era
is mostly microcontroller systems with little TTL.
Very odd for them to publish the 1990-1999 PDFs in preference to (say)
1974-1984 -- nearly all the transistors used in those circuits were
"TUN" or "TUP"s; that is, Transistor, Universal, NPN or PNP
respectively. Diodes similarly were "DUG" or "DUS" -- Diode,
Universal,
Germanium or Silicon. TTL is similarly easily available, any electronics
hobbyist worth his salt will know that 74LS can usually be subbed in for
straight-74xx TTL.
With the demise of the 'Borders' book shop
chain over here, Circuit
Cellar is impossible to find across the counter.
It's still possible to get a subscription over-the-phone, it just costs
a HELL of a lot. Something like $100 for a paper CCi sub last time I
checked, most of that being the P&P.
I stopped reading AP when the editor changed some
years ago. Roger Hicks
no longer wrote an article every week, it almost totally dropped film
photography, and the answers to readers questions were misleading to say
the least (I seem to remember them perpetrating ythe myth that the focal
lenght of the lens affrcts perspective). Oh, and the 'classic camera'
articles became only 2 pages long., although even before that they were
somewhat lacking in accuracy.
It's both amusing and saddening to see them publish an answer to
someone's query one week, then publish a retraction-and-correction the
following week. Things like suggesting RAID arrays as an alternative to
offline backups (CD-R, DVD-R, tape, ...)
Little hint -- what happens if there's a power spike?
What I do read is :
Model Engineer, and Model Engineer's Workshop (the latter is more
interesting to me, being more on workshop techniques, the former being
mostly about making steam engines, but you do get useful information from
it, which is why I read it).
I'd really like to learn how to do some more advanced
plastic/metalworking (and get the tools to do it).
At high school we had a fair few wood/metalworking tools (most of which
were in pretty good nick), a teacher who knew his stuff (IIRC he used to
work for a metalworking company, retired, then started working as a
teacher). We also had a headteacher who was the sort of person who'd
make the kids run around in plastic bubbles for "health and safety"
reasons. Design-tech and science got cut almost entirely (the latter had
all the experiments and demonstrations cut and was turned into a lecture
/ question-and-answer / exam session)...
Radio Bygones and the Radiophile. 2 Magazines on
vintage valve radio. The
former has more on militry/amateur radio, the latter is almost all
domestic sets, but I prefer the style of the latter.
At some point I really need to read up on vacuum tube technology.. and
maybe re-read the stuff in AoE about BJT and FET operation. I've never
been much good with transistors when used as amplifiers (though I know
how to rig them up as switches)...
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/