My quirky behavior.

When driving through traffic, I find myself analyzing traffic flow in the "fluid dynamic" sense. Propagation of traffic waves as drivers stop & go. There are many situations that are analagous to electrical phenomenon!

Standing waves...
"wire capacity/ampacity"
Resistance
charge buildup

and so on..

 

Yes, I definately do this kind of thing. Unless you do it yourself, you just won't understand it, thats why it annoys most people :lol:

I tend to analyse things, try to impove things. Everywhere I go, I see bad designs, and I "fix" them in my head. Sometimes I fix things for real, but only if they have broken :lol:

I'm curious about the operation of just about every electronic appliance, apart from computers, which don't really bear thinking about. Theres certainly no way of practically assembling your own from ICs and things cheaper than a real one, so i'm not that interested in them.

I very much enjoy practical projects myself, not much of a theory person, though sometimes they drive me a bit mad :lol:

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Angry!? I'm absolutely electrolytic!

Music web page:
http://www.music-playground.net/artist/drem/

 

The surprising thing to me is that a lot of people don't wonder about stuff. You guys ever watch Leno's "Jaywalking" segments? I am always amazed that he can find people who are so ignorant of the world around them. Last night he found a gal who thought that the U.S. is in South America. Another one thought Mt. Rushmore is a volcano.
I realize this was a geography question, but I think a large percentage of the population is just wrapped up in their little worlds, and couldn't care less about how things work, or where things are, or what's going on in the world, or...
That's what makes us weird. We are a minority.

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Ron

 

I love going to the Landfill! Me and my dad went to dump stuff and I came back with a Hi-Fi and what looked to me like THE FIRST EVER LAPTOP.

Its a Toshiba T3100e:
I looked it up on the net and it has a 12Mhz Processor! :lol: and a 20mb hard drive. It has 2 serial ports, a parallel port and a floppy drive. It works on DOS.
This ideal for me as a way of interfacing between a PC and circuits. I only know console programming in C++ and evil microsoft cant block me from using the serial port as I/o. Maybe a program to control MIDI messages for my Synths on stage!

But, this is definetly a minority. Who else except electronics geeks would EVER use a serial port these days.

I think of this to explain P=IV: (my lecturer started it and I added to it, Im sure were not the first though)

If you were standing at the bottom of a waterfall. The amount of water falling on your head represents I, and the height of the waterfall represents V. The resultant pressure of the water is power. So if you had and extremely high voltage, but just a drop of water (current) you wouldnt have a sore head.

Its not foolproof but water is great for electronic analogies:
Resistor= Dam? Capacitor= Resevoir?

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My Space

 

I still use my 20MHz Toshiba T1900 laptop - running M$ Windoze 3.1 on top of M$DOS 6.1
It may be a trick of the light but I still reckon it works just as good now as it did 12 years ago - it starts up just as fast as my 1Gig Dell Inspiron laptop crippled with M$ Windoze ME (don't laugh !).
I use serial ports a lot - they are STILL a common standard in industry DESPITE Compaq et al insisting we no longer require RS232.
It is NOT obsolite - I am waiting now for a brand new data acquisition system with RS232 and RS485 comms links, the RS232 will connect to a GPS clock, all for a project at work.

Back to the thread ... strange ideas ...
I get accused of being doo-lally about some of my brain waves such as fitting a resistance thermometer inside a bee hive to see how constant the temperature is for day/night and summer/winter - feeding to a little data logger.
I hooked my logic analyser up to my son's car engine fuel injectors to monitor their timing - I reckon you could do a pretty good fuel consumption calculation from this data ! ... Actually we are considering building on this idea to make some form of custom display permanently on the dash, using a microcontroller to do the timing calcs, showing RPM, fuel consumption, MPG, lambda etc, maybe on a small graphic LCD.

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I need a memory upgrade ...
My head is full !

 

That bugs me too...the thing that ticks me off even more is the diehard sports fans that can rattle of the stats of pretty much every NFL player in the league...sure you may know how many yards Joe Blow ran for last season...but do you know how to change the oil in your own car?
I see knowing all those stats as pointless knowledge...I'd rather know the basic astable 555 circuit so that I wont have to look it up every time...maybe its just me...

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Jeff
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

I see it in even my own friends. This one friend of mine who is a girl thought this:
1. Chinese people speak Asian.
2. Where we live: San Diego, is on the East coast.
3. She wasn't sure if we lived in South or North America.
4. I had her believing that Columbus discovered America in 1892.
5. The list goes on . . .

Yeah, it always amazes me how people take so many things for granted, and just use them, but not care how or why they work, not only in the world of electronics, but, everything!

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I'm no electronics god, i just talk too much.

 

I often have contempt for the people who "time" traffic lights. I usually think about how I would go about timing traffic lights so if I it one (or any one in the sequence), I should only have to stop once. Not every 3rd block.

Other times I find myself doing optimization problems in my head, or working out the math for something that weird. I once thought about designing a circuit so I could turn the traffic lights green on command when I was approaching. But then I figured that would be dangerous, so I decided that if I were going to do it I would just have to start the traffic light in it's sequence approximately 15 seconds before I get to the light.

As you can see I really have issues with traffic lights...

 

funny about the quirky ideas. I find myself thinking up of wacky ideas too. like when i went over to my cousin's house, he had his old wooden fort set up. it had a flat roof which could be accessed by a ladder. I found myself thinking "I wonder if I could bundle up a couple PVC conduit pipes and nail them to a 2-by-4, string the bundle like a bow, put the assembly on a tripod, and put it on the roof, thereby creating a mounted crossbow? it would be perfect for the snow"

yeah i get it too.

 

When my city converted all traffic lights to LEDs they installed count-down timers for pedestrians. They have big numbers that I can see quite far away so when driving I know exactly when a green light will expire.

The city installed a solar-powered big-numbered speedometer at the side of the major street near my home. It states the legal limit and shows your actual speed. I floor my car's accelerator whenever I see it! :lol:

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Uncle $crooge

 

it is a very nice thouht that, as an actually intelligent minority, we have had the brains and the will to actually combine and merge our knowledge in a big forum. it is sad to think that we are a minority, but at least we aren't stupid. i see too many advertisements and infomercials that rely on the fact that the majority of the worlds population is stupid, ignorant, and completely stubbornly against reality.

this is the kind of stuff that can really get you into a depression. it also gives me a headache when i thnik about why and how the world got stupid. religions, politics, advertsements, television sitcoms and cartoons, etc.

sigh... :cry:

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message posted just in case anybody cares


Electronics engineer in High-School Training

 

You're not the only one to have considered this (myself included)...

http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html
http://www.ece.osu.edu/~coifman/shock/
http://www.nbi.dk/~horlyck/shocks.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_..._3_99/bob1.htm
http://www.dctech.com/physics/features/0700.php
http://www.animana.org/tab3/34playin...ficwaves.shtml

 

ahaha using a microphone to measure the dogs panting speed, i did exactly the same thing to my lawn mower to work out its maximum RPM last weekend.

I assume you are like me...intelligent and cocky (same minds think alike)

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www.winpicprog.co.uk - Great PIC language tutorials.

 

:lol: So I'm not the only one!!

I'm not cocky though, I'm rather humble...my uncle is a cocky mechanical engineer, and I dont want to be like that.

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Jeff
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

I know this is an older thread but I just have to comment on the old
computer thing. I've found you can get quite a bit of use out of older
computers by rewriting some of the routines in the bios. While the
older 286, 386, 486 & earlier pentium computers suck at running
Windoze they can actually be quite useful using good old DOS
(Freedos even has the source code available) some parallel or
serial (Parallel prefered) ports and firing up the old soldering iron
to add goodies to them. Heck you can even add your own custom
ports to the older ISA bus motherboards and have one hell of
an embedded controller. Yeah it takes time and a lot of the bioses
are soldered in but as for speed they can't be beat. Now I'm not
recommending you use it for something that a good old 8x52 of
even a PIC can do in a smaller space. But when you think of it
they do have support for things like video and dynamic memory
management for what in the embedded realm is a crazy amount
of memory. And this even applies to older laptops. Where else can
you get an embedded controller with an LCD & or RGB video output?!?!?

It takes a bit more work but let me tell you it's really worth it.
I even took an old touch screen laptop and built a video game for my
cats a while back. And they actually like trying to punch the mice and
birds on the display. If they nail 5 or so critters in a row a solonoid
releases treats into the bowl next to the screen. It has had the side
effect of them poking my regular laptop from time to time if I forget
to close it when I wander off.

So go ahead and play with those old computers. They're cheap
and there are plenty of hardware hacking sites that will tell you
how to interface them to the outside world. And don't forget that
good old DOS kicks butt speed wise on those older units and gives
you hard disk interfaces and the possibilities are only limited by
your imagination and time rather than your budget. There's a
lot of older software out there too so you can write your routines
in C, C++, Pascal, Forth or whatever trips your trigger. Personally
I like to use assembly for it's small size and super speed in small
machines. And it makes you really think out your code. Use the
ports to communicate with some microcontrollers and the possibilities
are practically endless. And there is the added advantage of having
a built in power supply. Too cool for words. Good luck.

Dr. Atomic

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What does this button do? Oops.

I'm not really a noob but I do know when not to speak.

It is better to keep silent and have people think you are
a fool than to open your mouth and prove them right.