Something wicked this way comes
Sorry, but that is my gut reaction to this. If anyone can demonstrate how this is a good idea, I'd like to hear it.
5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
In the early 80s I wrote a pinball game for the BBC B. Unlike those on the market at the time, the ball in mine followed something like a parabolic curve, and you could get real control of the speed. This worked fine for me and a bunch of friends, until a new guy joined us. After familiarising himself with the game, he complained that sometimes the ball would go 'through' the flippers. We didn't believe him at first, until he was able to do it repeatedly. It turned out he had dramatically better reaction time than any of the rest of us, and (like in a real pinball machine) timed the flick so just the tip of the flipper hit the ball to get maximum velocity. The code was slow enough, and the look-aheads far enough apart that this came between two of them. The solution was one of the very first bits of 6502 assembler I did.
P.S. I was quite proud of making rebound speed dependent on where on the flipper it hit.
Without access to precision tools I had to mount a Raspberry Pi on a panel. Lining up for screw holes in the panel, and then threading them would have been a nightmare so I eventually came up with the idea of using plastic standoffs (the type with a peg to push the board onto). This presented two problems. Being able to line up the holes (again). A peg small enough to fit in the raspberry Pi mounting holes. The latter are 2.7 mm.
The solution I came up with was to use a rat-tail file to careful increase the size of the holes, then thoroughly clean and scratch up the panel, and dollop quick-set epoxy on the other end of the standoffs, then prop the whole assembly against the panel till it set - seems to still be OK after a couple of years.
Our people fitted a new central process control unit in a plastic film factory. This had just about every test imaginable before being fitted including being hit by brownouts and static discharges. However, once installed at the location demanded by their engineers all sorts of random errors were occurring. This was in the middle of the factory on a partition attached to the back wall and at the top of a flight of steps. It was months before we identified the problem, and only then because one of our engineers took a laptop there to make notes of readings and it kept crashing. One of their production workers commiserated and said that their mobile phones would sometimes freeze if they went there. In a moment of inspiration our guy asked what the partition was there for, and was told the 3 phase supply for the entire factory complex was behind it.
A communications problem
Customer: {mumble} {mumble} {complain} getting worse {mumble} You fixed the last one so why can't you do this one?
Us: We would if we could get the parts. Most of the chips on the board have been obsolete for years. We just can't get them anymore.
C: {woe} {woe} But the machines have years of life left in them.
U: Well, as we suggested before, we could always fit modern controllers to them as they fail. This could actually work out cheaper than trying to fix the old ones.
C: No, you'd have to do all of them at once and I can't afford that.
U: Why would we have to do them all together?
C: Because they all have to talk to each other.
U: Well, modern controllers can be configured to talk to the old system.
C: No they can't. There's this special system installed by Radiospares.
U: Pardon?
C: The machines can only talk to each other with this. There's some board or something fitted in all of them.
U: {collectively scratches head and asks around} Can you be more specific? None of us know of any system that Radiospares have designed, and we have never heard of them doing installations.
C: {smugly} Well it *is* an old system so I expect you young engineers haven't have come across it.
U: Does it have a name or anything?
C: Yes of course, and a model number. It's the RS-232
A place I once worked for had a system of route numbers, not cable numbers. This was for highly distributed Audio/Video systems, so you'd see a number on a balanced audio patch panel and the same number would appear on all cables and interconnects right up to the mixing desk. With almost all bundles, there were also a few unconnected lines with a totally different series of numbers.
Sitting on my desk is a home-made amp with FM radio. I built the lot from a mixture of available drawings and my own ideas. That was in the early 1970s. It's been pretty much in daily use ever since. The only change being a replacement volume control a couple of years ago. I could probably still get the parts for, and fix anything else that might go wrong.
I wonder if anyone could home-build a DAB radio? Any takers?