![]() ![]() We didn’t need the internet, we were already online before! We had digital video conferencing in Germany, via ISDN. The digital age had already begun when the microelectronic was invented. Moral of the storry: History wasn’t as gray as some people make it sound. They were to be found in train stations, air ports, postal offices, in public areas of bigger cities (say,in front of a museum). ![]() Here in former W-Germany, we had public BTX terminals before reunion. By then, tens of thousand individuals (or more) already had an email address at CompuServe, Nifty or a national telecommunications service. E-mail existed before the interne was made accessible to the public in the 90s. It was one of the earliest technologies to overcome boarders. We had international e-mail in the 80s, already. CP/M PCs since the 70s, arcade cabs, Packet Radio, international news agencies via RTTY on shortwave, CompuServe in US/Canada/etc, Videotex in Europe (BTX, Minitel), Nifty in Japan etc. Most of this was already available in the early 80s. ![]() “I’m so happy to have PCs, the internet, smartphones, and dozens of other modern pieces of technology.” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed (and still do to some extent) the challenge of writing base level code to registers and optimizing the routines to run in minimum memory, or faster, and such back in 80s and 90s, but also enjoy all the tools, processors, we have today and not be bothered with mode 13, drawing an anti-aliasing line/circle in assembly, or whatever! Only way to progress is to build on the foundation that is already laid, so to speak, rather than keep rebuilding the foundation. I use a library already written to tell it to go 50% and it does. For simple example, I don’t write the ‘PWM’ code for running a servo. We can write our code at a higher level and not be distracted with the actual low level workings, which in theory, should allow us to build more complex things easier and in a timely manner. One the thing the ‘black box’ has done, is allowed us to think at a ‘higher’ level of functionality. You can still read/write registers of the GPIO for example, but not to the extend of what we ‘used to have to do’. We still have ‘some’ that with our SBCs and micro controllers. For any other cases I’d suggest adding conformal coating – I used dedicated polyurethane spray.Īs for headphones amp the spacings were much more than 0,5mm, and the spacing between any pin and (powder-painted) case was 3mm, with plastic insulation sheet taken from broken ATX PSU (one of the trolls wanted to know, what was the specified norm for that sheet). It’s more than enough for devices used at home. My rule of thumb is based on IPC2221B, for traces with no coating. Not mentioning that access to many of them is behind a paywall, and no sane amateur will pay for them. When asked of concrete rules and recommendations they couldn’t even indicate a relevant norm, as there are few different documents, some proper for Poland, some proper for EU, and some covering USA, and neither quite match. There was a big one when a respected maker presented his headphone amplifier in metal case, and few trolls attacked him for “not enough spacing”. I had this discussion before, on forums. Posted in Parts Tagged buck, buck converter, converter, dc, dc-dc, mp9486, power supply Post navigation Take a look at this explanation we featured a while back to see more about how buck converters, the more easily understood among them, work. ![]() The board is assembled in an incredibly tiny package with inputs and outputs readily accessible, so it would be fairly simple to add one into a project rather than designing it from scratch.Įven though buck converters, and other DC converters like boost and the mysterious buck-boost converter, seem like magic even to us, there is some interesting electrical theory going on if you’re willing to dive into the inner workings of high-frequency switching. The circuit was modified a little bit to support the higher input voltage ranges and improve its stability and reliability. While it is possible to use a multipurpose microcontroller like something from Atmel to perform the switching operation needed for DC-DC converters, using a purpose-built chip saves a lot of headache. The buck converter was designed by using a MP9486 chip. This one can take a huge range of input voltages to output a constant 5V. Someone from that time would have needed a huge clunky machine like a motor-generator set to convert DC voltages, but we can do it with ease using a few integrated circuits. Computers are everywhere now and are much more reliable, but there are other less obvious changes as well. For those living before the invention of the transistor, the modern world must appear almost magical. ![]()
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