The Internet has made life much easier for engineers, fledgling and otherwise. We are looking for the various bits and pieces we need to add on to the Hamsters. In the olden days, we'd be pawing through smudgy catalogs (which we could do now; we have plenty lying around the lab), squinting at fine print and blurry pictures of chips, or flipping through industry magazines to look at ads. Thanks to the Internet, we can do that online! In addition to the visual zoom, advantages are that we can download a complete spec sheet for anything we're interested in and even order free samples.
I am loving the free sample thing. Yeah, we only get two chips, or whatever, but we'll be able to plug them in and test them out before we buy the eight that we need. Besides, as we are still very much in the fledgling stage of our lives as engineers, we find the language on the spec sheets to be obscure and sometimes the only way for us to get a clue is to plug-n-chug.
Some things we have to buy up front. In the spirit of plug-n-chug, we're ordering six different kinds of temperature sensors because we're not sure which will work with the Hamsters and the total is only going to be ten dollars, well within the departmental budget.
We can also use information resources to clear up professor-induced confusion. For example, I am told to get an amplifier with a certain gain. "Look for an instrumentation amplifier," Dr. Smith says. I find one that looks good, order samples, and pass the spec sheet on to Dr. Smith, who points out a few days later that this amplifier is for DC signals, not AC.
"So I think you need an instrumentation amplifier," he says.
"But, that was—" I return to the altar of Google, make the appropriate sacrifices, and find a definition for "instrumentation amplifier" (an amplifier optimized for use with DC signals). I go on to find a nifty "isolation amplifier" which works for AC signals. I'm not sure it's what we need, but, whoo, free samples!
356 words | January 27, 2005 08:25 PM | Ivory tower