Holy smokes Hevans1944! I thought I typed a lot. Did you learn typing the old fashioned way on manual typewriter like I did? Sure seems like it.
Yep. Dad went to a
G.E.M (Government Employees Mart) department store in Houston, TX when I was about seven or eight years old, living in Lake Charles, LA where Dad was a bombardier/navigator on B-47 bombers. He bought a Royal Portable Typewriter with an integrated case. There were four levers in the bottom of the case that secured the typewriter while also allowing the typewriter to also be removed and placed on a desk. I was very happy when he gifted me with that typewriter, but not so happy when he covered all the keys with red plastic peel-off stickers so I couldn't see the characters embossed into each key. He then told me I had to learn something called "touch typing," and I was not allowed to remove the key stickers until I did.
So I spent the next few months (and years... my short stubby fingers had trouble reaching the number keys from the "home" row) learning how to touch type in lieu of two-finger hunt-and-peck. Good thing I did too: one high school I attended years later in Smyrna, TN in the eleventh grade offered a typing elective. So I signed up and was the only guy in a class full of girls
. Since I already knew how to touch type, I aced the course.
I eventually joined the Air Force and purchased a used electric typewriter at my first (and only) duty assignment at Kincheloe AFB, MI. That served me for many years after my AF hitch was up, until personal computers came along. I gave up using the electric typewriter and began using PCs with word-processing software instead. Not quite so good for printed copy using affordable printers, but I did purchase a 24-pin Epson dot-matrix ribbon printer that did a "pretty good" job with Word Perfect fonts. Later I upgraded to a monochrome HP Laserjet printer and wore out two of those before finally settling down with HP ink-jet color printers. IIRC, I am now on my third (or maybe fourth) HP ink-jet. If I need high-quality color prints, I take a thumb drive to Staples and let them print. I use Microsoft Office software exclusively now, instead of leaving the Windoze environment for a flavor of Linix and open-source software. Just lazy, I guess, but Word 2010 does everything I need to do. And WIndows 10 seems adequate as far as multi-tasking, non-premptive operating systems go.
Would you happen to know, I live in southern Dayton, Ohio. Miamisburg to be exact and work out at WPAFB. What a small world. It seems many Daytonians end up in Florida at some time or another.
I spent most of my career working for contractors who worked for various labs at WPAFB, Area B. Fresh out of the service in 1967, I talked my way into a technician job at the UDRI and stayed there for twelve years while I pursued (part time) a BEE degree on their dime. All I had to pay for was my books, and most of the labs were waived because of my technician job. My first task at UDRI sent me to Area B to resurrect a dynamic fatigue testing machine, whose California builder went bankrupt trying to get it to work. We got it running to original spec about a year later. From there on it just kept getting more and more interesting until I graduated.
By the time I graduated with a BEE degree in 1978 I thought I had seen everything, So I left UDRI a year after graduation and took a job as a principal engineer with Mead Technology Laboratories in Beavercreek, replacing an engineer there who was forced to leave because of a perceived "conflict of interest" in his owning a small company that "competed" with the giant Mead Corporation for government contracts. Yeah, right. They did give him a choice: give up his shares in the "competing" company or give up his job. That was a no-brainer for him and an opportunity for me. A couple weeks after I accepted their offer I got a call from Hughes Aircraft in Phoenix, AZ, where I had earlier interviewed to do engineering work on Maverick TV-guided air-launched missiles. I wasn't too eager to work for them after I found out their entire technician labor force would walk out if I so much as picked up a soldering iron. I am a hands-on engineer because of my previous technician training and experience. So I stayed at MTL another twelve years, until January 1991 when they laid me and a woman chemical engineer off.
Much later after I was hired I found out that almost all the work MTL did was either for Foreign Technology Division, now The National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) at WPAFB, or for the CIA, and required clearances above Top Secret. I got the TS clearance right away, but the extra "tickets" took considerably longer.
My last major project at MTL was around 1990 to re-design the control electronics for a huge indoor roll-pitch-and yaw (RPY) environmental test chamber at the Sensors Branch in Area B. This rig had been built in the 1950s when all the highly classified overhead imaging systems were based on photographic film. I got to see some of these (now obsolete) camera systems which were marvels of engineering ingenuity. The branch supervisor wanted his test rig updated (his swan song prior to retirement) to support more modern collection systems. Faster, smoother motion, better accuracy, more reliability. I think we were successful in meeting their goals, although just exactly how successful is based on a "need to know" and all my team "needed to know" was we did a good job and deserved an "atta boy."
This test chamber used hydraulic actuators to lift up and toss around overhead image collection systems while simulating the outside pressure, temperature, and radiation environment, as well as targets on the ground. The government customer wanted to replace the original analog model-controlled system with digital servo valves and an IBM PC-AT clone running an Intel 80386 with 80387 floating-point math co-processor. He also wanted to run the current version of Microsoft Windows, which would not do at all because of its lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking and lots of "bugs" at the time. So, we opted for a real-time Linux OS kernel and X-Windows for the HMI and didn't bother to tell him it wasn't going to be Microsoft Windows until we had something to show him. IIRC, this then state-of-the-art PC was clocked at a whopping 12 MHz.
We kept the analog model, which was located in the control room above the test floor, but didn't use it for control. Instead it displayed (in miniature) the motions of the real-deal out on the test floor. I managed to get the services of a whiz-bang, recent graduate, new hire, genius software weenie/physicist/engineer to roll the code that made it all work. I, with the help of a senior electronics technician, performed the grunt work of replacing control and signal wiring and designing the control algorithms that were implemented in software.
This was the software guy's first experience with an embedded computer running real-time programs that tossed around tons of expensive hardware. He did a superb job. He eventually left MTL (which eventually went out of business when they failed to make the transition from film to digital overhead collection systems) and he now has a cushy supervisor job in one the the labs at WPAFB Area B.
Several years after all that, I landed a job in 1996 operating and maintaining a small 1.7 MV tandem particle accelerator for UES, Inc. As word got around that I was a "hands on" engineer, I got to design laboratory experiments and teach others how to service and maintain vacuum deposition systems. I finally was forced to retire in December 2014 because I couldn't find any customers for our accelerator heavy-ion, high-energy, implant services. We could only implant 4-inch diameter wafers, and the semiconductor industry had moved on to much larger wafers by then. THAT'S WHEN my wife decided we were gonna retire to someplace warm, like Venice, Florida. So in October 2016 we bought a house here, and in December 2016 we rented a Penske truck and moved ourselves here. Best move I ever made, and as a former Air Force Brat, I've made a lot of moves.
I heard the computers and the modeling software for weather forecasting are out of date here in the USA. Europe uses more up to date hardware and forecasting models. Explains why you'll see various hurricane track forecast cones for one storm.
I watched both the European and American track predictions for Irma last year. Neither one appeared to be particularly accurate IMHO, but I don't yet have an historical record to compare them with. We'll see what happens in the upcoming hurricane season. No matter what the track or its predictions, we plan to ride them out.
Have a nice Radio Shack multi-meter bought 25 or more years ago that looks like a Fluke. Always pulling that thing out and using it. Have an amp reading accessory that goes with it for commercial work. Don't think this multi-meter has a capacitance reading capability, though. Really needed that to check my capacitor that I believe went out on my washer machine. Fairly sure it cooked the windings on the motor, could smell it. Could really use an oscilloscope, too.
@(*steve*) gifted me with a digital inductance/capacitance meter a few years ago after I escorted him to various sights in the Dayton area. I think he especially enjoyed the visit to Mendelsons. I have wanted one of those LC meters for years, but hadn't realized how affordable they are. I later looked it up online and discovered there is a lot of inexpensive test equipment now available via mail-order from Asia and Pacific Rim countries.
A decent dual-channel, 200 MHz, digital storage oscilloscope only costs about 300 bux and they are available in the USA from an American retailer with free shipping.
Is there any particular power and voltage ratings I need to pay special attention to for potentiometers for these types of projects? Don't see any of those specifications mentioned for the ones used on breadboards.
Always use potentiometers to attenuate or select low voltage, low power signals. Avoid wiring potentiometers as variable resistors (rheostats), but if you need to do that, always include a series resistor to limit the minimum value of resistance you can "dial in."
You can purchase pots with power rating from a few hundred milliwatts to several watts, but for most hobby uses you will be working with less than a half watt of power dissipation and voltages of around twenty-four volts or less. Always calculate the maximum power a potentiometer will have to dissipate. If the calculations yield power levels that exceed the rated power dissipation of the potentiometer, either replace the potentiometer with a higher rated power, or change your circuit to decrease the amount of power dissipated.
Remember to have fun and "let the smoke out" less frequently as you progress in experience and knowledge.
73 de AC8NS
Hop
