Has anyone else been getting those Internet messages about bandwidth overload? If not, you mustn’t be visiting very popular sites. The powers that be warned us this would happen if the government didn’t allow metered service. It is like blackmail both ways but I see good Internet service as something you’ll have to pay extra for in the near future. That is, reliable access will require a government permit, a good credit rating, and ID. The censorship will be included free as a service. If you don’t want to learn anything today, skip today. A small breakthrough with my hobby was the big event. Flip-flip circuits are a prime example of how badly electronics is taught. Now, watch how much more sense my explanation makes. To emphasize the difference, you could go to the Internet or library and try to find out what a flip-flop is all about. That’s what I did, to no avail.
You’ll get the merry runaround about logic gates. Fifty sets of instructions how to build one and more than you want of those intimidating truth tables. But nary a description of what a flip-flop is or how it is used or why it exists. All you will get is geek-talk about how it works and never a word about what a flip-flop does for a living. And that is so wrong.
Now my method. Think kitchen light switch. When you turn it on, it stays on. You don’t have to stand there and hold it on. Now think elevator button. Unlike your kitchen, after you press, the elevator switch springs back out. You only pressed the button in momentarily and it remembered your press. Think, you can only turn it on. Some other switch somewhere else turns it off. Keep thinking, you can’t turn it on twice in a row. It has to be turned off before you can turn it on again. That’s the key. That’s flip-flop. When I explain it, even the name makes sense.
A flip-flop is fundamentally a circuit that needs separate buttons to turn it on and off, because it remembers your button press until some other action resets it. Simple as that. Think the elevator again. The button only reacts to your first press, then cancels itself when you arrive. What good is this? Well, the ironic part is that the dodo who keeps pressing the button thinking the elevator will move faster might be some geek on his way to write yet another article on flip-flops. Yet I got ten bucks says he knows less about them than you now do. Think about it.
(If you haven’t guessed by now, I don’t like geeks. Don’t give me lip about the world needs geeks. We’d be hundreds of years ahead by now without them. I believe my study of electronics has been impeded by the geek crowding-out effect. But I’m glad, because all geeks know that in the end, they will be forever alone and guys like me get the gal. If that sounds mean, good. They started it.)
I’ve prompted debate over last day’s comment that speculating and investing are different. They are not alike by implication as investing is longer term for a steadier return. Speculation is pure gambling on the here and now. Also, gain from gambling has to be carefully reined, for without a plan the money will go poof. You must know somebody who lost all their winnings in a wink. If you make any cash via speculating, the trick is to convert it quickly into some other asset before the prices catch up. And this is far easier said than done, and doing it badly attracts a lot of unwelcome attention, so I’m told.
Trivia. There is a tendency to view batteries as less efficient than fossil fuels for delivering energy, pound for pound. Yes, because the battery is not consumed in the process, but the battery delivers 53% of its weight in energy. By comparison, the human body only extracts 24% of the total energy available in the food we eat.
ADDENDUM
Another item that has come under close inspection is the progress of our little robotics club, and it is a less than positive ruling. It is nearly two years past and we have not a single robot or prototype to show for all this effort. To cheer up, I reviewed several hours of documentaries on inventions through history, such as Maxwell and his electromagnetic research and the development of the V2 rocket in Germany.
I admit to looking for anything that supports robotics and I found a lot of parallels in the newsreels of the V2. Despite the equivalent of billions, the successful tests didn’t happen until the 11th year after they went at it full time. They had to define a lot of parameters as they went along, and same here. We, too, found that we had to develop knacks in areas where previously we had no aptitude. If you count that as progress there was no wasted time. But why has there been no apparent movement toward the stated goal?
First, no money. Parts like mechanical switches that were two for a buck when we started are chiefly imported and now cost $3.80 apiece. (One of my more fantastical plans used 165 switches, so it remained a doodle.) Second, we did not have a master plan other than testing and thinking, it was only a verbalization of that optimism to suppose we might actually build a robot. Third, if we had focused on getting something to the table, we could have modified a toy chassis and made an obstacle-avoiding contraption by now.
I found encouragement in reviewing these videos and to date we have always been able to build components which were otherwise unaffordable. We’ve avoided the temptation to build a kit and I suggest that overall, we have done well considering the scarcity of nearly everything. Other than that, things stand where they did four months ago. Our requirements are around $400 for tools and $1,000 for materials to make a robot we’d be proud of.
And of course, I cannot omit references to the very bad advice and examples that plagued us at every stage. Blind alleys, false starts, it is pitiful the amount of garbage we had to sift through. In too many places, ten times the garbage for each millimeter of headway. The worst feature of textbooks remains these flippant references to matters that require enormous resources. Maybe these authors really can solder copper to aluminum or forge gear-teeth, but what about the rest of us who don’t own a machine shop?
Club meetings will be sparse until next year, but I’m proposing that the priority should be the tools, without which there can be no possibility of any momentum.
