Tom Anderson

@tomacorp
57 Followers
128 Following
77 Posts

Engineer. Working on test equipment and electric guitars. Writing Python, designing mostly analog circuits and making them work. Fan of pens, pencils, and paint.

That long-hair in the alley at Supercon who would rather solder than go to talks, and would rather talk 1:1 than solder.

Show threadTom AndersonMar 17
@MLE_online sugar is retail $8.00 for 20 lb, which ferments to 3.5 gallons of vodka. If the energy source is retail propane, the cost to triple distill 3.5 gallons is about $10. So, grocery store vodka is inherently worth about $1/fifth, federal tax on it is $2.70, California state tax is another $0.66. So even for the cheap stuff, price is dominated by packaging and distribution.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 9
@tubetime even a big dish antenna has enough sidelobes such that detection of high power pulse transmitters is easy.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 9
@tubetime This type of pulse is easy to detect in the time domain with a diode detector and an oscilloscope. Throw in a log amp after the detector to be fancy about it.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 9
@MLE_online grease trap in the largest kitchen should do it. Bonus points for following the truck that picks it up! Sadly we have no smellovision to give the full impact.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 8
@kbob Some plastics decay if they are stored in a sealed container. I lost a lot of gear that way until I learned what was going on. Something to do with the outgassing getting back into the plastic.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 6
@MLE_online not spelled right, but phonetically it is French and means “my dear's little game” or “sweetheart’s charade”.
Show threadTom AndersonMar 2

@FusedEngineering I assume this is a quartz crystal datasheet (motional inductance). The temperature specification affects the crystal yield, because they measure each crystal over temperature to see which ones fail the spec for frequency stability. So they end up with a big reject pile, and selling them requires a spec change.

Crystals are the most complex electronic commodity part to specify. Trusting them involves not treating them as a commodity part and procuring them to your own drawing.

Show threadTom AndersonFeb 15
@brouhaha It will be interesting to see what you come up with! I took a look at a similar idea a few times but I decided on a computer algebra system instead. I use Maxima (maxima.sourceforge.io) to keep the irrational numbers separated out.
Show threadTom AndersonFeb 15
@brouhaha A conventional computer takes advantage of having an identity value for addition and another identity for multiplication. In Boolean algebra this is a*1=a and a+0=a. As far as I can tell, without these there is no algebra, or even group theory or ring theory. It would be interesting to see an implementation with a way around this.
Show threadTom AndersonDec 3
@timonsku the hands also form a BH loop!