Bench Talk

I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. From time to time I find myself on the major road artery that takes drivers from downtown Dallas out towards its suburbs. This heavily trafficked highway is known here locally as North Central Expressway; a freeway section of U.S. Highway 75 between downtown Dallas and McKinney, TX. On a recent Friday afternoon, just after 5 p.m., caught in the chaos and rush and what felt like the entire city of Dallas attempting to get onto this road and get back to respective homes, I saw a large billboard off in the distance. Due to my slow pace as a result of the rush-hour grid lock I could make out a light bulb on the far away billboard. But as of yet it was too far away for me to make out what the message of the sign was really about.

Sir Mix-a-Lot. Whether you’ve heard his name on the radio, on TV or in the news, you can’t help but remember the fun and infectious beats of his classic hits like, “Posse on Broadway” or the often covered hit “Baby Got Back”. But, what many people don’t realize is that Sir Mix-a-Lot is an avid electronics geek (and a great Mouser Electronics customer!) I had the privilege to speak with the man himself about his hobby, his craft and the future of the DIY music industry.

Yun may mean “cloud” in Chinese, there is nothing cloudy about the potential of this version of the popular Arduino platform. In fact, the Yun has quickly become a top microcontroller board of choice when I need to develop a quick, inexpensive proof-of-concept.

When I was in college, I held 3 part time jobs, of which one of them was tutoring Physics. Not that I was an expert or anything, but someone had to do it. Most of the time I spent the tutoring hours working on my own assignments. All of it is just a blur now, except one person, a nun. She was determined to make a passing grade, and she started coming in about a third of the way through the semester. I quickly figured out that algebra is kind of important to physical laws like F=mA. It seemed so simple to me, so intuitive, so I started out rattling off what force was, mass, and how acceleration played a part. The glazed look in her eyes told me I needed to step back a bit. So we began exploring the mathematical relationship.

I often find myself at the end of the incredulous question, “What are you doing?” My perfunctory responses run from “adjusting the clock” to “checking the charge this capacitor can hold.” The next question often is something like, “Why did you think it was OK to pull wiring out of the wall in your classroom?” or “Why is our microwave in several pieces?”

The 2014 South by Southwest Festival was this past weekend, and I was able to attend with some of my Mouser colleagues. March 13-15 was the Music Gear Expo, where we set up our booth. We were showcasing our Pro Audio line, which includes Bourns' guitar potentiometers and Neutrik's super-cool silentPlug.

In my role I get to try out lots of cool things. However, some of the favorite things that I get to try out are the most practical. Several years ago the U.S. Congress and the President adopted the Energy Independence and Security Act. The goal of this legislation was an effort to move the country to becoming more environmentally friendly. As a result of this legislation incandescent bulbs would be phased out over time.

I spent most of Saturday at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History for Engineer’s Week. I sat at a table with half a dozen kids at a time, showing them how to connect little DC motors to batteries, and exploring and explaining series and parallel connections for the braver ones. We had several DC motors with a glue stick off center on the shaft of the motor so it would wobble, and velcro attached the motor and battery holder with alligator clip leads to a scrub brush. The result was a giant hex bug popping around on the table. Some kids were very interested in how they could take it further, and others had glazed expressions. For the ones that wanted to go further, I showed them how to connect three 9V batteries in series to feed the motor 27 volts… and it really buzzed. Then I told them we were on the Mars Rover team and had to make sure that even if a lead broke, the rover would still go.

Hello, everyone! My series of posts are going to deal with applications of open source hardware. My goals are to share applications using open source hardware and teach some fundamentals of electronics and software to turn these projects from concept to reality. To make things easy as possible, I will put links to Mouser’s website so you can get parts ordered fast and get to making cool things sooner rather than later.

A decade ago, back when Xilinx’s Virtex®-4 and Spartan™-3, and Altera’s Stratix®-II were new products, it was my job at Texas Instruments (TI) to partner with the leading FPGA manufacturers to produce power management solutions that benefited our joint customers. Multiple power rails, power-up sequencing, tight tolerances, transient response, system reliability, total solution cost, and size – these were all things we were concerned with even then.