Thanks for your congratulatory comment heavens1944.
Yes, marginal design...in anything, not just electronic stuff frustrates me to the point of scalping myself. That "built down to a price not up to a standard" drives me nuts because I can see that a tiny bit of effort at the design stage can save so many so much hassle down the track and in the end the poor old planet/ecosphere is the one who pays for the greed and selfishness of some of us. Money seems to turn to shut everything it touches.
I have seen some really potty things in electronic sutff...like an LM7812 with its two bypass caps in a battery charger simply to drive a single relay coil...why not just drive the relay coil with unreg DC...but maybe the transformer was being driven into saturation to get "regulation" and then would not provide enough to pull the relay in. I saw the same in a consumer audio amp where it just drove a single L.E.D. on the front panel to let you know it was on.....AND, it had its own secondary winding and bridge rectifier!
Another "potty" one was this cassette deck...if any of the tiny incandescent lamps that illuminated the buttons when they were pressed went open circuit...the bias oscillator would not run! Now I suppose there is this "bent" logic there that says if the red "record" light does not come on, then it is not recording!
I have thousands of these types of stories, a whole lifetime's worth...and I'm sure I'm not the only one, but where I live there are only about half a dozen "like thinkers" in a "banal and brainless" population of 150,000.....thank heavens for the Internet and these BLOGS where those of us of like mind and some modicum of remaining sanity and share such stories without the need to go back to Ohm's Law every damn time!
But I'm sure this is probably not the most appropriate place to tell them as I have strayed somewhat far from gensets!
Yes, marginal design...in anything, not just electronic stuff frustrates me to the point of scalping myself. That "built down to a price not up to a standard" drives me nuts because I can see that a tiny bit of effort at the design stage can save so many so much hassle down the track and in the end the poor old planet/ecosphere is the one who pays for the greed and selfishness of some of us. Money seems to turn to shut everything it touches.
I have seen some really potty things in electronic sutff...like an LM7812 with its two bypass caps in a battery charger simply to drive a single relay coil...why not just drive the relay coil with unreg DC...but maybe the transformer was being driven into saturation to get "regulation" and then would not provide enough to pull the relay in. I saw the same in a consumer audio amp where it just drove a single L.E.D. on the front panel to let you know it was on.....AND, it had its own secondary winding and bridge rectifier!
Another "potty" one was this cassette deck...if any of the tiny incandescent lamps that illuminated the buttons when they were pressed went open circuit...the bias oscillator would not run! Now I suppose there is this "bent" logic there that says if the red "record" light does not come on, then it is not recording!
I have thousands of these types of stories, a whole lifetime's worth...and I'm sure I'm not the only one, but where I live there are only about half a dozen "like thinkers" in a "banal and brainless" population of 150,000.....thank heavens for the Internet and these BLOGS where those of us of like mind and some modicum of remaining sanity and share such stories without the need to go back to Ohm's Law every damn time!
But I'm sure this is probably not the most appropriate place to tell them as I have strayed somewhat far from gensets!
