Re: USB microscopes for very small SMT

In article <494C1555.7050506@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...>
Joerg wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
krw wrote:
In article <uOS2l.3143$jZ1.984@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...>
Yes, the web is best for publishing these days. No censoring
from peer reviewers or editors and not much in cost.
Hard to make money though.

I wouldn't do that for the money.
Some are independently wealthy. Others aren't. ;-)

I am not. Wealth is not the way to heaven. Or as the apostle Paul
said "You came onto the earth with nothing and you sure can't take
anything out of it".

Money isn't everything, unless the cupboards are bare. There are
so many things to do, an effort like that had better pay well on
the monetary scale. A couple of friends wrote a SOI text and paid
dearly for the effort with spousal grief. If they got paid it was
a minisule amount.

I wrote a book because (a) most of my optics colleagues were
suddenly gone, and (b) I'd seen the amount of waste and pain that
resulted from people making the same mistakes over and over again,
and I thought I could help.

The other two benefits are business development if you're a
consultant (see Howard Johnson) and job portability if you aren't.
Anyway, you guys should complain--there are at least 10 times more
electronics folk than optical ones, so your customer base won't be
too shabby by comparision. ;)


So true. I am involved with optics stuff now. Five things I observed:

a. A lot of stuff is in the gray zone. You've got to know or be
surrounded by people who know. I guess some people feel about analog
the same way.

b. Many companies in the laser/fiber/optics world are rather
short-lived. Me, feeling like the hero of the hour: "Hey, I found a
part that might just be the ticket" ... "Oh, forget it, that company
croaked last year, it's probably a parking lot by now".

c. Even when high level experts of the trade say it can't be done,
that does not mean that it can't be done. I found a really nice
saying on a web site: Man who says it cannot be done must not slow
down man who is doing it.

d. Disconnect between electronics and optics engineering. I've seen
controller eval boards where I slapped my forehead. Stuff with large
heat sinks that us dudes would do with a handful of 3-cent
transistors, the el-cheapo TO-92 plastic variety. And then us dudes
are completely lost when they talk about nanometers and picometers
and we must frantically translate all that into the Hertzian domain.
To many optics engineers, except for line width Hertz must be a car
rental place.

e. Optics folks love freaking expensive butterfly packages that are
an utter nightmare from an RF point of view. Gimmee a TO-package, any
TO package, and I'm happy.


Great list. One of the things about starting out in electronics as a
kid and then doing physics and astronomy in university is that I
picked up the all the math I needed along the way, with the result
that my training centres on that gray area. There's a _lot_ of
low-hanging fruit still there.


And pretty soon we'll both be "senior gleaners" ;-)

I never liked math, only learned what I really needed. Sometimes that
still haunts me. I had to calculate an elliptic filter with a weird load
on there this morning. Boy, had that math stuff become rusty. Almost
took a pick-axe to get it going again.


Nah, I just turned 49. Besides, I possess the fountain of youth--my
beloved wife is older than I am. ;)

That works for me too. ;-)

--
Keith
.

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