From the mail bag!

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say how wonderful the latest episodes of “The desk of LadyAda” have been. The New Year’s Eve episode with you and Tony D. was amazingly beautiful example of how software engineers and electrical engineers can collaborate combining their own skill set with the other one. Being primarily a software person myself, I was right there with Tony when he was asking you all the questions about the transistor such as how do you know the pinouts, how do you know what size base resistor to use etc. Those were all the questions I would’ve asked. It was funny to me because it seemed like he was scared when you pulled out transistor as if to say “oh no something I don’t understand” and you seem to have a similar reaction when he would pull up one of the complicated dashboards to some of the IOT support sites. You were doing things that he did not completely understand. He was doing things that you did not completely understand. And together made something really cool. The whole thing was a real role model for how to do teamwork.

Also I freaked out when I saw the recent episode where you tore down the Heath Kit power supply. I’m guessing it was back in the early 1980s that my dad and I had purchased the exact same kit. It was an extensive course in basic electronics and the power supply and signal generator was sort of your >> workbench for doing all the experiments that were in the manuals. Whoever gave it to do said they had scanned books and included some audio files. I can tell you that originally it came with three or four huge padded three ring binders that included cassette tapes giving you a lecture in basic electronics. Then the manuals followed up the audio lessons and gave you problems to solve or self quizzes. And then it had some basic experiments you can perform. The power supply you tore down was shipped in kit form and had to assemble it yourself placing all the through hole components, soldering it together, and physically assembling it. We built lots of little fun projects on that breadboard. Made a 555 oscillator connected to a bunch of 7400 TTL series ICs. Built a four bit binary counter out of flip-flops that drove for little LEDs. I was into the blinking lights 30 years ago 🙂 We even found a TTL chip that would take four bits binary and drive a seven segment red LED digit. We never really built anything useful but we sure had fun tinkering. So saying that old blue power supply and signal generator board brought back lots of fun memories.

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Anyway I just wanted to tell you how amazing your latest work has been.

Brought back wonderful memories.

Chris