8 Jun
2010
8 Jun
'10
11:31 a.m.
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
There were microprocessor (and even microcontroller) projects hack then.
At least computers based round the SCMP, 6502 (Junior Computer), 2650 (TV
Games Computer).
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.
Indeed. And somehow I find projects using a handful of simple components
to be more appealing than just a single 40 pin microcontroller.
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?
Second little hint : None of my cameras has a hard disk, or a CD-ROM
drive, or...
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)...
Do the world a favour, and put that headmaster between centres :-). A
light skimming cut should do the job...
Fortunately I managed to get away with all sorts of lethal things at
school. As I mentioned once before, when the rest of the kids were
booting spheres around areas of grass, I was making a CRT in a bell jar.
Or fooling around with valves. Or...
I learnt nothing at school that I was _supposed_ to be learning, though.
Certianly not from the so-called teachers.
-tony