In Circuits and Systems I, Prof Emad informed the class that sign matters. A student requesting to receive partial credit on an exam question because she only got the sign wrong would receive no mercy. “What’s the difference between + 5 Volts and – 5 Volts?” Prof Emad pointedly stated, “10 Volts.” Ever since Ben…
Tag: Rookie Mistakes
A Difference in Ovens
I first heard this story as part of Kwabena’s presentation on OpenMV, a camera board. He spoke at the Oct 2016 Open Source Hardware Summit in Portland Oregon. As he described the path from idea to product I had an inkling this would be a good story for The Engineers’ Daughter. –Anne Meixner Ibrahim dreamed…
Proving You Can Find a Needle: From the Weak Write Test Mode Saga
Needles don’t occur in every haystack. Suppose you have developed a new method to detect a needle. Now prove it! Easy, you say—just toss some needles into a haystack and go find them. I faced this scenario with proving that Weak Write Test Mode would work. Two things needed to be proved: Did the new…
LOMAC Tester—Knowing Your Measurement Capabilities
Neither Chris nor I knew much about the LOMAC tester; Fred as the equipment owner did. It sure would have saved some work if we had talked with Fred. This is a story of how doing things in an incremental fashion creates more work. Efficiency is one of the E’s of engineering; it often requires…
When I Really learned Ohm’s Law
Doc Fry first taught me Ohm’s Law; V=IxR. As a high school senior I joined my younger sister Margaret in Introduction to Electronics. For labs we played with vacuum tubes, voltage sources, resistors. I recall the countless times we had a mess of wires on our breadboard and nothing worked. We quickly learned the first…