Even though I got the capacitors and transistors in for my Wurlitzer 200A, I decided to write about something else before I started documenting the hopefully successful re-build of my vintage piano.

Generation Y has a strong reputation of feeling entitled and wanting to do things their own way. The question I have today is:

To break or not to break?

Should the spirits and ideas of young upstart Millennials be squashed in order to show them the ways of a company? When we bring in new employees into an organization, what is their greatest strength? Is it their new ideas? Or is it their ability to perform the normal tasks, but maybe better than their predecessor? Is it their ability to stand out or to fit in? Is it to buck the bureaucracy or to massage it? Let’s look at some situations.

I’ve been having what some would call an identity crisis. How, you ask? I’ve been working on digital electronics.

*GASP*!

I found out that in the early 90s and even earlier, analog engineers routinely switched from working in the analog domain to the digital domain…because it was paying really great. Not only that, most analog engineers had the expertise to do what most early digital engineers were doing (basically stringing together a lot of digital gates in DIP packages). It wasn’t until later that digital engineers started acting more as programmers and VHDL/Verilog experts.

Ah summertime. What a great time of year. There are tons of things to do, but none match the splendor and diversity of a county fair…especially in middle of nowhere Ohio. Between eating pizza subs, watching horses pull stuff and admiring the great bounty of mullets that only rural areas could give us (“Strong crop of mullets on the back 40 this year, Pa!”), I found something genuinely interesting.

In a cramped show trailer, I happened upon a nice older gentleman whom I’ll call Hank (cotton candy causes memory loss). He was selling a range of products from CornStoves.com, which is a distributor for a range of pellet stoves. Neither the website nor the product is particularly flashy; basically there is a thermostat that controls a hopper, which can hold wood pellets, or sometimes grain. When it gets below the set temperature, the thermostat kicks on and releases a few of the tiny pellets into the already raging, but compact fire (500°F and up in those tiny piles). This method allows for only using the amount of energy needed and not much more. Depending on whether the system is a boiler or a furnace, the pile of burning pellets then heats liquid or air respectively and then goes through a heat exchanger. I immediately asked Hank if my house would smell like popcorn, but he calmly explained that the heat exchanger would not usually allow that. He was nice enough to humor me though, and told me that it might smell like popcorn outside my house. He also told me that a retrofit system for an existing 1500 sq. ft. house would cost about $5000 or so. It would tie into an existing furnace’s ducts and then kick on instead of the regular furnace (with the option to use the original furnace). I though this was a pretty interesting idea.

There are so many great examples of open source these days. I find more and more that I can accomplish just about any task, either online or in the real world, with the aid of open source, especially software. For a relatively recent grad, I appreciate any opportunity to save money for the future. This could easily be the same case if I ever have the opportunity to start a business, as not many entrepreneurs relish the thought of paying thousands for an enterprise solution software package (such as Oracle). Let’s look at a few examples:

When I started writing on my blog, I promised myself that it would not be about personal issues (“my roommate won’t pickup his socks!”) or rants about everyday happenings (“The people at the grocery store are slow!”). But I feel that reviewing the past 25 years of my life is good from a historical perspective and in terms of this blog so readers know more about where I’m coming from.

I am constantly amazed at how lucky I have been. I was born a white middle class male to loving parents and into a great family that encouraged my academic and intellectual achievement. I was also born in the United States of America, in an English speaking community that was voted one of the safest in America throughout my childhood. I’d say this already puts me in the top .1% of the world in terms of being dealt some great cards. Add to that the opportunities I’ve had with the school I was able to attend and the jobs I successfully interviewed for and I can’t think of many better situations. On top of all that, I work at a great company with lots of educational opportunities and I do something I really enjoy.

My friend Trevor has an intriguing post about methods of mapping the brain. This is of interest to me because of how I have been reading “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil. Trevor talks about research into “seeing” water flow in the brain, as opposed to glucose or electrical signals or bloodflow. It’s a really cool idea to help understand how the brain works and how it could help humans relate to the world around them.

I have a friend who alerted me to a company out in New Mexico known as Solar Automation. They don’t make solar panels; rather, they make the equipment to make solar panel arrays. However, what I find most intriguing about the company is their concept of Micro-Factories. In the case of Solar Automation, the basic idea is that a small team of people are capable of creating solar arrays by soldering the tiny wires with non-lead solder. This same concept could be expanded to many other applications, including mechanical or auto assembly, textiles, food preparation (already done at caterers, really).

I recently had a high school friend visit and while watching the Olympics and having some beers, conversation turned to China (and the rest of the world). I know, I know, I’ve recently talked about the Olympics and China and such; But this is different. The conversation moved to energy and how it relates to national security, which I also have read about recently in a trade journal. Basically he brought up the astute point that renewable energy needs to be our number one priority in the coming years. We’re not talking 20 or 30 years…we’re talking 2 or 3. Really, it’s that important.

The other morning I heard a great story on NPR about people in China and their interest in basketball. I was really interested to learn how they believed basketball allowed them to express their individuality. One of them dreamed out loud of being able to dunk and how this was their ultimate dream of freedom.

Aside from the question of how many different ways there are to dunk, it got me thinking about Chinese culture and how it has contributed to their success over the past 8 years or so. It is no secret that the Chinese culture, and specifically the government, stresses conformity. One might think that this would hinder the technological progress in China, but they are quickly becoming a technology leader in the world (it is important to note that a good deal of the continued success of China is companies outside the country driving progress…but not all of it). Add to that how more and more design work is being offshored, due to the low cost and higher supply of design engineers. A slew of questions have popped up in my mind when I think about these kinds of things.

As promised, this post is a follow up post to explain the real-world behavior of an op amp. Here we will continue to anthropomorphize op amps in order to better understand their behavior and what they “want” to do. Also, we will look at some more complicated (but common) op amp configurations so that they are easily recognizable. Let’s begin.

First, let’s look at the symbol for the op amp: