That is one of the thing the Statists in the US are trying to do... create a National ID card. That's the push over "Real ID".
Most states refuse it.
We are after all a Federation of States, not a Nation State.
We rented a small Audi with an MT6 in our June trip. It had a hill holding feature that was awesome. A life saver really in the tight confines of our basement parking...
It wasn't "fast" but it was definitely much quicker than the multitude of little tin cans on the road -Seat, Skoda, Hyundai, etc... We could keep it on cruise control at 125 clicks all day long on the toll roads and we never got a ticket on the mail.
Over there, it felt big enough.... very nice for two people and luggage.
Over in the US, though, it's considered a compact.
Long term, yes, the Euro cars are great but they are not built for mileage. It's common for cars in the US to log 15K miles per year... easy, peachy. But in Western Europe that would be an outlier.
BTW, the Navi in the Audi was horrendous, pretty much useless and complicated. We ended up using our Android phones.
Oh, the longitudinal inline six are indeed easy to work... Pretty much any I6 or I4 with a crossover head is easy to work... turbos, however, are indeed a bitch. I have no issues with our Honda Civic with it's 1.5L turbo... but that's a Honda. I wouldn't touch a modern Audi/Bimmer turbo though.
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My Canon printer must be stupider. It doesn't even have WiFi. I stick a USB cable into the back and plug the other end into the PC.
Starting a few days ago my PC starts up with a gentle reminder that "More is possible" if I had an "elevated" Windows 11 experience, which could be obtained with a Windows 11 PC MADE for ME! More than what? Uh, I am posting this on a Windows 11 PC MADE for me BY ME, and it is running W11 without any hacks or mods. This PC runs a Ryzen 9 5900X with an older GTX1660 video card. It will do everything I ask of it including play a 4K video at 60 Hz on a 44 inch Walmart quality Hisense TV while solving LTspice simulations and displaying the results on a 2K at 60 Hz secondary display. This PC has a nearly identical twin with a better video card, an RTX4060Ti. That one is used for music generation and video processing, usually making time lapse videos from all of the timelapse (1 FPS for up to several hours) still pictures that are stored on its hard drives. Thay's why my FZ-1000 camera has taken over 400,000 pictures! It also controls my wall of music synthesizers, many of which are also DIY builds. Yeah, I'm sure that a better Windows 11 PC made for me by someone else, but not at the cost of my DIY builds.
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"Pretty much I'm just laisez faire and I don't pass judgement on other people or places."
Yet you say that my truck electronics belong in a museum? That's passing judgement. My truck disagreed with that when I drove it yesterday. And I've driven it for 16 hours straight in summer. It all began with you saying that somebody's truck could survive an EMP. Depends how close it is to the EMP. Just like my truck.
"Again, it comes down to each his own. If you don't like where I live, fine... just don't pick and insult me. That's not right."
I agree. To each his own. Don't pick on and insult me.
Your domestic appliances may be "phoning home" more often than you'd think if youre naive enough to connect to the Internet
What belongs in a museum is an issue depending on use case and often ownership details. I would rather listen to the excellent sounding 1.5 WPC that this pair of 95 year old vacuum tubes make, than stare at them from behind a piece of glass. The mouse is there to keep the "priceless artifacts from the past" from rolling off of the desk. They usually reside in my Lexan TSE amp, which is not in use at this time.
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No, that's not a personal opinion... that's my PROFESSIONAL OBSERVATION.
I have worked on State of the Art electronics since '78... the electronics in your truck... well, look, in '85 we started doing surface mount. With the exception of some VME chassis lab boards that might be kept around to ensure maintenance on some test rigs, that type of electronics is.... ancient.
Here's a window into where we're going with modern electronics..
https://www.embeddedrelated.com/thread/12720/communication-between-arm-and-dsp
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpga/stratix/10/sx.html
The trick is to not open your LAN to the Internet. Many people just plug into their provided modem/router/wireless access point... then add stuff like home cameras, etc...
When "WiFi" became common, I used to take my laptop around and connect to the Internet from parking lots in condos and apartment complexes. The Apple people were the most careless. I could VPN into my home or work through their wide opened LANs.
My LAN's HP printer of many years recently stopped working. It said it "could not connect to the Internet".... Huh? Why would a printer do that? It turns out that HP has a program to verify that you are using OEM print cartridges. As my printer got older I refused the firmware upgrades and one day they -HP- bricked it..
Needless to say, I dumped it, no more HP for me, and now I got two Epson printers with a firewall to prevent them from connecting to the Internet ( I used static address for most everything that's Ethernet wired at home ).
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The simplicity of DYI and some older vintage AUDIO units is refreshing.
IMHO, we don't quite understand the cognition of sound and our electronic measurements are thus inadequate ( regardless of what ASR says )... but what we do know is that simplicity tends to sound better. And tubes -and SITs- sound best... Or, the little amps that we just brought from BAF24.
However, stuff like prosaic electronics do indeed go into museums. I mean, a controller board is not like an audio circuit.
Heat generation, slow clocks, obsolete parts, etc... I mean, take those old VME boards or SBC that we had back in the 80s, 90s, 00s. In my current job we're actually upgrading some test benches that were put together in the late 90s. We can't get parts. So, stuff like 1553, discrete IO, analog I/O, ethernet, etc... the newer electronics do all of that, better, faster, cheaper, more reliably, less power, etc, etc. The OS is vxWorks 5.4, there are no JTAG ports.. so why would you keep the old stuff around?
Hence, at best you save some boards and put them on display by the metrology dept... or shitcan them on the electronics recycling bins.
Well, I've got you beat- I was a military electronics tech beginning in 1972. Went to college on the GI Bill after that, worked as an engineer from college graduation until 2021. I am keenly aware of the modern electronics you're talking about, even though we still studied vacuum tube technology when I was in military electronics school. Plus, I worked for Intel Corp for a few years after graduation.
If you're still working, why? If you're still working, you're wasting your employers time and resources on the internet. Even if you work from home. 🙂
My 1953 truck is running great, even with the 1995 electronics that should be in a museum. If it works don't fix it.
By your logic, why spend time rebuilding/repairing vacuum tube stereo gear?
If you're still working, why? If you're still working, you're wasting your employers time and resources on the internet. Even if you work from home. 🙂
My 1953 truck is running great, even with the 1995 electronics that should be in a museum. If it works don't fix it.
By your logic, why spend time rebuilding/repairing vacuum tube stereo gear?
If you read what I wrote, you will see that I expressed, in clear logic, why old audio technology stuff is worthwhile using... although I wouldn't use an old 6550... my tubed amp is now running new Svetlanas. Simple circuits sound better.
I've been working fully remote for years now. My hours are mine, and so with the exception of a couple of weekly meetings, having dinner with the family and my evening constitution with cigar, my hours are completely mine.
A couple of us are working together... we joke we're vampires.
I work primarily to pay for our latest house remodel: new dual HVACs, multi zones, new roof, new bathrooms, new carpets, paint, new Romex lines to the front, termite work, two new water heaters, etc... that stuff get seriously expensive around here. Plus my audio toys, which are used and/or of the DIY variety. Heck, I might splurge and get a Keel and Ekos next year. That will be seriously expensive too.
Then I got to pay for Medicare... so it's 147 a month, plus 143 more because they think we're rich, and another 340 a month from my paycheck. Plus the dental and vision... it comes out to almost 800 bucks a month.
Oh, in our cars, I got used to the built in NAVI, the ability to plug our Android phones (Tidal HiFi downloads) plus better heaters, defrosters, air conditioners, good airflow, ventilated power seats, door locks, power windows, ABS, Traction Control, accurate cruise control, speed sensitive power steering, etc, etc.... I happen to like modern cars. They are safer and easier to drive ( well, at least Hondacars ).
When we're getting down the Interstate and facing the mountain passes we can figure out if we need chains, if there's a traffic jam, if it's raining, if we need to take a detour, etc... we can change our overnight reservations ( if we need chains, we'll hunker down and take the pass the next day )... etc... it just makes driving long trips that much more convenient.
I must admit though, that sometimes I've wondered about our Android phones broadcasting to the World our location. Will they use it to issue me a speeding ticket?
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Automotive and other electronics subjected to vibration and rough handling that tended to use a rather large components on a large PC board were the last things that migrated from through hole parts to SMD. This was also about the same time period when big brother came after our lead.......solder. The early no lead solder was quite brittle. It and SMD automotive ECU's were not a good match. I had a friend whose son was a mechanic at a Mitsubishi car dealership. Their ECU's were failing often. They sent them to a private shop that fixed them for $200 each. The kid noticed that all the round silver things had been replaced with round blue things, and the ECU's that had the blue ones did not fail. Daddy gave me a call and brought me one with blue parts, and a box full of dead ones with silver parts. I learned rather quickly that the silver colored SMD electrolytics were shaking themselves loose from the board, usually leaving part of one lead pad behind. The blue ones were probably about the same size and weight, and the real fix was the use of lead solder to hand solder the replacement in place. I ordered some of the right value and size caps from Digikey, and they were light blue in color. I fixed a few dozen of those ECU boxes for $75 each. Eventually Mitsu solved their quality issue.
I was on the design team for the Motorola STX public safety walkie talkie in 1985. SMD was used for most of the small stuff (0603 and 0805 caps, resistors and small IC chips) while everything else was leaded through hole parts. The ECU in post #82 is done the same way, probably for the same reason. The Jedi series radios came a bit later, all SMD. There were a lot of board quality issues in the first year of production.
I was on the design team for the Motorola STX public safety walkie talkie in 1985. SMD was used for most of the small stuff (0603 and 0805 caps, resistors and small IC chips) while everything else was leaded through hole parts. The ECU in post #82 is done the same way, probably for the same reason. The Jedi series radios came a bit later, all SMD. There were a lot of board quality issues in the first year of production.
In 86 I was working on the RF section for the D5 missile's first gen GPS receiver. (1)
The boards all used surface mount technology. With a big wave soldering machine. We were building to MIL-Spec so the State of California left us alone.
The idea was that those boards would likely sit around forever and never be exposed to the crazy vibrations and accelerations of a launch. But if it did, they would survive for an hour.
(1) You should have seen the prototype GPS "receiver".... it was a long wheelbase Dodge van armed to the gills with racks of instruments and three AC systems on the roof. Today, my cell phone has a better GPS receiver.... 40 years... wow...
The boards all used surface mount technology. With a big wave soldering machine. We were building to MIL-Spec so the State of California left us alone.
The idea was that those boards would likely sit around forever and never be exposed to the crazy vibrations and accelerations of a launch. But if it did, they would survive for an hour.
(1) You should have seen the prototype GPS "receiver".... it was a long wheelbase Dodge van armed to the gills with racks of instruments and three AC systems on the roof. Today, my cell phone has a better GPS receiver.... 40 years... wow...
Sometime in late 1999 or early 2000 I was sitting in a professor's office in the engineering building of a local college discussing whether I should take an MSEE degree and run or continue on towards a PHD. This was a feet up on the desk kind of BS session, not a formal discussion. Suddenly three "suits" appeared who were obviously out of place in a second tier academic institution since their clothes cost more than either of our cars. These guys had an "idea" for something that really didn't want to discuss, and they were looking for someone to build them a few prototypes. After a nice expensive lunch on the three suits, I agreed to write up a proposal of what could be done with the tech of the time, and what was looming just over the horizon that would render their idea obsolete and useless. They agreed to pay me for this report and promptly put 5 $100 bills in my hand and said that I had a week. I was working in cell phone development at Motorola at the time.
These guys described a reasonably small tracking device that could be hidden in a fairly large object which remained inert until remotely activated, then provided real time location of the object until remotely deactivated. The unit must operate wirelessly over a cellular network and operate for a day in tracking mode or remain in standby mode for a week or more. Prototype cost was no object, but information on possible production cost was needed. I had asked several times for a good description on the object to be tracked, but kept getting vague answers. One of the guys told me to assume that it was the size and weight of a baby grand piano.
So, I wrote a pretty looking report that was several pages long. In that paper I made it known several different ways that every cell phone sold in the USA, and probably the entire world would have location tracking built in within a time frame that could be as short as two years. There were issues with the cell system in the US in that time for 911 emergency calls, as the patchwork of multiple cellular networks could not accurately locate a phone, just the tower that it was using, and even that was not always accurate. The new E911 system had deadlines for super accurate location, and GPS was the only way to achieve it, so all phones would also be very accurate trackers in the early 2000's.
Regardless, these guys wanted two or three prototypes and FAST! I agreed, which led to the usual NDA signing, that gave me enough information to find out who these guys were. One was a prominent plastic surgeon for the rich and famous, and another was a personal lawyer for a very powerful family in politics. The third was a local Florida businessman.
Some Google work led me to u-blox modules. The three green boards on the left side of the picture are Y2K vintage u-blox GPS receivers, and the grey square in the upper right is the amplified antenna. Today u-blox puts the whole system in a single small IC chip. The board in the middle is the first prototype, primarily made for writing and debugging the code for the PIC chip. The bottom board was one of the working prototypes. I made several, and still have all of the excess material. The unit fit on the back of a low buck Nokia cell phone and the phone's battery fit on the back of this unit. The user would use a modem like that used for dial up internet to call this unit, then a code was entered to turn on the GPS and transmit GPS coordinates on time intervals sent in the dial up command. The suits took the two units an gave us a check. About a month later we were notified that the units did their job perfectly, but they had decided not to pursue any further development, and we were to destroy any working units and not divulge any info.
Boca Raton Florida is a high society microcosm filled with Hollywood style gossip. Word got back to my college prof friend that one of the three suits needed to track the movements of his possibly unfaithful wife. The fairly large trackable object was her car. For this my college prof friend and I split about $10K!
These guys described a reasonably small tracking device that could be hidden in a fairly large object which remained inert until remotely activated, then provided real time location of the object until remotely deactivated. The unit must operate wirelessly over a cellular network and operate for a day in tracking mode or remain in standby mode for a week or more. Prototype cost was no object, but information on possible production cost was needed. I had asked several times for a good description on the object to be tracked, but kept getting vague answers. One of the guys told me to assume that it was the size and weight of a baby grand piano.
So, I wrote a pretty looking report that was several pages long. In that paper I made it known several different ways that every cell phone sold in the USA, and probably the entire world would have location tracking built in within a time frame that could be as short as two years. There were issues with the cell system in the US in that time for 911 emergency calls, as the patchwork of multiple cellular networks could not accurately locate a phone, just the tower that it was using, and even that was not always accurate. The new E911 system had deadlines for super accurate location, and GPS was the only way to achieve it, so all phones would also be very accurate trackers in the early 2000's.
Regardless, these guys wanted two or three prototypes and FAST! I agreed, which led to the usual NDA signing, that gave me enough information to find out who these guys were. One was a prominent plastic surgeon for the rich and famous, and another was a personal lawyer for a very powerful family in politics. The third was a local Florida businessman.
Some Google work led me to u-blox modules. The three green boards on the left side of the picture are Y2K vintage u-blox GPS receivers, and the grey square in the upper right is the amplified antenna. Today u-blox puts the whole system in a single small IC chip. The board in the middle is the first prototype, primarily made for writing and debugging the code for the PIC chip. The bottom board was one of the working prototypes. I made several, and still have all of the excess material. The unit fit on the back of a low buck Nokia cell phone and the phone's battery fit on the back of this unit. The user would use a modem like that used for dial up internet to call this unit, then a code was entered to turn on the GPS and transmit GPS coordinates on time intervals sent in the dial up command. The suits took the two units an gave us a check. About a month later we were notified that the units did their job perfectly, but they had decided not to pursue any further development, and we were to destroy any working units and not divulge any info.
Boca Raton Florida is a high society microcosm filled with Hollywood style gossip. Word got back to my college prof friend that one of the three suits needed to track the movements of his possibly unfaithful wife. The fairly large trackable object was her car. For this my college prof friend and I split about $10K!
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Funny... well, was she cheating on him?
The electronics... amazing... how that stuff keeps shrinking. And that was good money on the side too.
At one point I saw that UCI had opened a PhD program for embedded software.... I checked it out, sent an email exploring the program and enclosed my resume. At the time I was an employee at Boing! Boing! and they would let me do it part time and pay for it. I figured I could get it done in no time at all... because I could likely just challenge most of the courses and then do a thesis. A couple of years, I figured. Get to play with their labs, which are less than a mile from my house.
Their reply was that I knew more about the subject than the professors... Not to mention they knew little of Computer Engineering... After all, it's a field that I entered before the field existed as a recognized independent branch of software development. So I decided not to waste my time. Instead, I wrote some neat stuff and spent more than a year flying around the West Coast testing my firmware in an aircraft. Funny thing, a lot of it was GPS...
So it turns out that those advanced college diplomas are as Frank Zappa and the Wizard mentioned.. not worth so much. You get your basic BS, get a job and if you're lucky in your choice of work assignments ( or like me, go consulting early on your career ) you LEARN a lot. Sure you blow and smoke things, but they sort of expect us R&D folks to do that. Just don't burn the building.
I did learn that at a world famous lab I worked a few times, they equated the PhD to four years of work, and the MS to just two years. Which is pretty much true. That was the pay scale.
I happened to like Physics because, to me, it was the broadest course of study for those of us who never stop asking "why"? It teaches philosophy and makes the least assumptions of any course of study ( even Math... which naturally came by default with the Physics degree ). It gave me the basis to teach myself.
'Coz Fisiks Iz Phun.
I meet a few physicists here and there at work ( not many of us )... I always pay attention to what they say, since they tend to have, IMHO, the best insights into the work. And that Physics background has found me working in many projects where it was exactly what they needed to design the firmware.
BTW, originally I wanted to do instrumental atmospheric geophysics... turns out, I have done that more than a few times in my career. Surprise!
The electronics... amazing... how that stuff keeps shrinking. And that was good money on the side too.
At one point I saw that UCI had opened a PhD program for embedded software.... I checked it out, sent an email exploring the program and enclosed my resume. At the time I was an employee at Boing! Boing! and they would let me do it part time and pay for it. I figured I could get it done in no time at all... because I could likely just challenge most of the courses and then do a thesis. A couple of years, I figured. Get to play with their labs, which are less than a mile from my house.
Their reply was that I knew more about the subject than the professors... Not to mention they knew little of Computer Engineering... After all, it's a field that I entered before the field existed as a recognized independent branch of software development. So I decided not to waste my time. Instead, I wrote some neat stuff and spent more than a year flying around the West Coast testing my firmware in an aircraft. Funny thing, a lot of it was GPS...
So it turns out that those advanced college diplomas are as Frank Zappa and the Wizard mentioned.. not worth so much. You get your basic BS, get a job and if you're lucky in your choice of work assignments ( or like me, go consulting early on your career ) you LEARN a lot. Sure you blow and smoke things, but they sort of expect us R&D folks to do that. Just don't burn the building.
I did learn that at a world famous lab I worked a few times, they equated the PhD to four years of work, and the MS to just two years. Which is pretty much true. That was the pay scale.
I happened to like Physics because, to me, it was the broadest course of study for those of us who never stop asking "why"? It teaches philosophy and makes the least assumptions of any course of study ( even Math... which naturally came by default with the Physics degree ). It gave me the basis to teach myself.
'Coz Fisiks Iz Phun.
I meet a few physicists here and there at work ( not many of us )... I always pay attention to what they say, since they tend to have, IMHO, the best insights into the work. And that Physics background has found me working in many projects where it was exactly what they needed to design the firmware.
BTW, originally I wanted to do instrumental atmospheric geophysics... turns out, I have done that more than a few times in my career. Surprise!
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