Rowe's and Columns

October 10, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

With all that's going on in the financial sector, I imagine that you'll soon experience budget cuts. I also wonder if there will be a run on companies buying equipment beofre the end of the year. Engineering equipment budgets after run out on December 31, so there's often a flurry of equipment putchases in December. Do you expect to buy equipment on the belief that budgets with shrink next year?

Aside from equipment-budget cuts, do you see other budget cuts coming? By that I mean engineering jobs.

October 7, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

October 4, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The International System of Units (SI), defines the meter as the basic unit of length, but perhaps the Smoot would be preferable.

Fifty years ago this week, the world added another basic measurement to a long list of measurements: the Smoot. Named for Oliver Smoot, the unit defines the length of the Massachusetts Ave. Bridge, which runs from MIT on the Cambridge side of the Charles River to Boston. On a cold night in 1958 several of Smoot's fraternity brothers used him to mark the length of the bridge. When the bridge was rebuilt is was remarked in smoots. Read about the Smoot and the ceremony marking its 50th anniversary.

October 2, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

During my last summer of college, I worked for a power-supply company characterizing transistors with a curve tracer. Curve tracers are no longer manufactured, and engineers now either use a source-measure unit (SMU) or they build their own with a computer, a power supply, and a DMM. What have you done when you needed a system to characterize devices for DC characteristics? Have you purchased an SMU or built your own system? If you bought, what tipped the scales that way? If you built your own system, did you save money? How long did you spend programming the system? Whichever decision you made, was it the right one? Or, perhaps you found a curve tracer, either in some back room or on eBay, that you use instead.

Feel free to comment or send e-mail to m.rowe@tmworld.com.

September 12, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

After reading "Mosquito control" in the TMW September print issue, Jiri Polivka of Spaceklabs writes:

...Read More