Take a gander at these PCBs designed by E24, our honorary member from West Palm. He had them manufactured in China. Read below to discover I am barely able to produce a basic schematic drawing. I say, that’s quite a gap in skill levels. The most encouraging thing I can say is that I thoroughly understand the details of the design and production. That much I’ve learned.
In any order, the Walkabout gig got rained out, bingo was the smallest crowd yet, and the new Kevlar belt won’t fit on the scooter. How was your day? That new belt was a problem, it didn’t have enough give, so a regular belt went on to give service. You ask, how bad could the original Chinese belt have been? Well, when you were a kid did you ever play with those wind-up balsa wood airplanes? Remember the rubber bands?
I was concerned about the low rate of expenses for my band. Not any more. When I closed the annual books and added “Loss on Sale of Assets”, there was my missing 5%. I’d forgotten the wagon trailer belonged to the band, not to me personally. Here’s an expense I don’t have a category for: driving away from the house on the electric bike with the battery charger still attached. Duh. (I fixed it.)
It is early Sunday, so I’m going to investigate a schematic program called ExpressSCH. Then, I’m doing breakfast. Even a nothing bingo pays more than Peach Pie [a band I used to play in]. Lately any e-mail I send with an attachment gets a late delivery notice. Is this hotmail’s protest against net neutrality laws? Give us money or we slow things down? Or how about that “dazed” actress who was escorted off stage? If it was an actor, he’d have been escorted alright—by the police. Funny the feminists don’t complain about that. Where a man is labeled a druggie, all they get is passing mention of a “history of substance abuse”.
Well, okay. I skipped breakfast and made a gourmet meal at home. I get just as much pleasure from a good book as a good meal, so I opted for both. I admit that cooking for myself is a disincentive, but there are no women to cook for in this town. None of them want or appreciate a man who can, it seems. Unless you are a high-paid chef and hand her your paycheck; that they like. I also miss women who don’t try to own you, but you can forget that in Florida. They’ll say that money is not important, but tell them you live in a trailer and see what happens.
Ah, but what was the gourmet meal in the trailer today? Boiled potatoes with onions & gravy, baked skinless chicken breasts in Russian sauce, corn on the cob with lemon-pepper butter, peas with mint, and peach cordial. And for dessert, coffee and chocolate ice cream. Reminded me of the Reb, that’s what it did. How odd it is so difficult to find one single, decent woman to share it with, particularly when all you hear on the media is married people raving about how wonderful married life is. At least until the divorce when the truth comes out.
By mid-afternoon, I give up on ExpressSCH. It uses two-sided boards, kind of out of my league as a novice. Time is passing, so it is high time I took a serious look at the artwork involved in making a PCB. E24 reports he used Fritzing, which I found confusing so that’s where I took dead aim. At least it uses one-sided plates. Using my 4.2V supply as a model, I am reverse engineering it onto the software. The manufacturer recommends this approach for learning. Unless the gal of my dreams knocks on the door, I’ll give a progress report later.
ExpressSCH is a piece of crap. So is Fritzing, but I spent a couple hours trying to learn Fritzing. What a troop of gopher-brains. It took an hour of trial and error to change the value of a resistor, and even then, the icon colors did not change. Their help pages stink, the instructions they give don’t work, period. They’ll tell you to save your changes, but there is no save command in the modular window. Real zeeks, those people.
I’ll get it, but what a hassle. Here’s a graphic of my design work to prove I know what I am doing. This is top-notch breadboarding, something to be proud of. Yes, the wiring is tricky, but it is also very efficient. Yet Fritzing, which claims to use a breadboard metaphor, could not correctly interpret this simple circuit. Two capacitors through a voltage regulator with a red light to show when it is working. I intentionally left a small redundancy in the design to see who notices it.
In any order, the Walkabout gig got rained out, bingo was the smallest crowd yet, and the new Kevlar belt won’t fit on the scooter. How was your day? That new belt was a problem, it didn’t have enough give, so a regular belt went on to give service. You ask, how bad could the original Chinese belt have been? Well, when you were a kid did you ever play with those wind-up balsa wood airplanes? Remember the rubber bands?
I was concerned about the low rate of expenses for my band. Not any more. When I closed the annual books and added “Loss on Sale of Assets”, there was my missing 5%. I’d forgotten the wagon trailer belonged to the band, not to me personally. Here’s an expense I don’t have a category for: driving away from the house on the electric bike with the battery charger still attached. Duh. (I fixed it.)
It is early Sunday, so I’m going to investigate a schematic program called ExpressSCH. Then, I’m doing breakfast. Even a nothing bingo pays more than Peach Pie [a band I used to play in]. Lately any e-mail I send with an attachment gets a late delivery notice. Is this hotmail’s protest against net neutrality laws? Give us money or we slow things down? Or how about that “dazed” actress who was escorted off stage? If it was an actor, he’d have been escorted alright—by the police. Funny the feminists don’t complain about that. Where a man is labeled a druggie, all they get is passing mention of a “history of substance abuse”.
Well, okay. I skipped breakfast and made a gourmet meal at home. I get just as much pleasure from a good book as a good meal, so I opted for both. I admit that cooking for myself is a disincentive, but there are no women to cook for in this town. None of them want or appreciate a man who can, it seems. Unless you are a high-paid chef and hand her your paycheck; that they like. I also miss women who don’t try to own you, but you can forget that in Florida. They’ll say that money is not important, but tell them you live in a trailer and see what happens.
Ah, but what was the gourmet meal in the trailer today? Boiled potatoes with onions & gravy, baked skinless chicken breasts in Russian sauce, corn on the cob with lemon-pepper butter, peas with mint, and peach cordial. And for dessert, coffee and chocolate ice cream. Reminded me of the Reb, that’s what it did. How odd it is so difficult to find one single, decent woman to share it with, particularly when all you hear on the media is married people raving about how wonderful married life is. At least until the divorce when the truth comes out.
By mid-afternoon, I give up on ExpressSCH. It uses two-sided boards, kind of out of my league as a novice. Time is passing, so it is high time I took a serious look at the artwork involved in making a PCB. E24 reports he used Fritzing, which I found confusing so that’s where I took dead aim. At least it uses one-sided plates. Using my 4.2V supply as a model, I am reverse engineering it onto the software. The manufacturer recommends this approach for learning. Unless the gal of my dreams knocks on the door, I’ll give a progress report later.
ExpressSCH is a piece of crap. So is Fritzing, but I spent a couple hours trying to learn Fritzing. What a troop of gopher-brains. It took an hour of trial and error to change the value of a resistor, and even then, the icon colors did not change. Their help pages stink, the instructions they give don’t work, period. They’ll tell you to save your changes, but there is no save command in the modular window. Real zeeks, those people.
I’ll get it, but what a hassle. Here’s a graphic of my design work to prove I know what I am doing. This is top-notch breadboarding, something to be proud of. Yes, the wiring is tricky, but it is also very efficient. Yet Fritzing, which claims to use a breadboard metaphor, could not correctly interpret this simple circuit. Two capacitors through a voltage regulator with a red light to show when it is working. I intentionally left a small redundancy in the design to see who notices it.
