First Post

BACK TO BLOGGING AND RANTING!!! 

   
     When I first started Hong's Electronics, It was originally a blog and I just did it for fun. Today, it is a business that sells kits and posts reviews, tutorials, teardowns, and hacks. I am trying to go back to daily posts with photos and what I am up to. This might be slightly harder now, because I can't really talk about what I do at my internship with Sierra Nevada Corporation.

    On to life & Circuits... Well life has been pretty good for me in the past few months, I got a new internship, and got a lot of retro test equipment to play around with (from Midwest Electronics Surplus). Also, my birthday is in a few days! I may go black Friday shopping, but I'm planning on staying home and enjoying time with my relatives. I still have to clean my room and my basement lab, before my relatives arrive. I plan on also trying to build the VFD Clock during this break and maybe work on that MATLAB Extra credit assignment for Linear Systems.

BOOM!

     I love Wright State, but in general I think most of the undergraduate electrical courses are pretty useless for a seasoned electronics hobbyist like myself. I often get ticked off by textbook problems (Especially in circuits I, during spring semester), hooking up a large value capacitor to a negative voltage source. I know that at that value of capacitance, the capacitor is polarized and to hook it up in reverse just makes me cringe. What if a student actually tried to build a circuit based of that problem? Unaware of what might happen, would probably stick his/her head right above the capacitor and BOOM! 

     Theory sometimes just makes me sick (and quite bored), there needs to be more hands on experience in some of these courses. Electronic devices and circuits has a pretty good textbook, but the lab is terrible because a lot of the circuits in the lab manual are poorly designed. You build the circuit in the book and all of sudden a resistor, diode, or capacitor heats up and blows up! The manual was written by a leader in power electronics and he also happens to be a professor at Wright State! I actually may want to talk him about the lab manual, because there are few labs where the transistors are obsolete. I really think undergrad needs a bit of an overhaul, but other than that I really don't think I have any other reason to complain, because after all the program is ABET accredited and the tuition is blessedly low compared to other state institutions within the state of Ohio.

      Sometimes I wish I could just drop out, try to find a full time electrical engineering job and bluff my way through the interview (Say that I actually graduated), and use my experience from hobby electronics and internships (4 years total) to get a entry level engineering job. Either that or try to put all my effort into Hong's Electronics.I know I can do fairly well in an interview, because if you have engineers as your interviewers, you just have to show up really early and strike a conversation with one of them and just kind of "Nerd out" talk about your personal projects and it's very likely that they are also a hobbyist, so they will understand the experience that comes with it and since there are so few students that are hobbyists, it will really make you stand out.

     I don't think I have the courage at the moment to drop out of school, and also I don't have a clear business plan for Hong's Electronics. So, going freelance could be semi-difficult and painful. So, it looks like I will have to stay in school till I get my MSEE. I am really hoping I get a security clearance at this job, because around Dayton it opens a lot of doors. All the defense contractors!

      About that test equipment I picked up today... On the way home, I stopped by Midwest surplus electronics and the carts of vintage test equipment were still in the back and Roger and Dave convinced me to buy all of it for just $50!!!! I got this really nice Tektronix tube driven square wave generator, I can't wait to open it up see the tubes. It is quite a monster piece of equipment, but for something that is slightly older than my 7704A mainframe scope, it is state of the art and is completely worth it! My boss, who used to work at Midwest surplus is probably going to laugh when I tell him about it on Monday. 

Big package with tubes, just to generate square waves!

       Onto another rant concerning education and test equipment, I ABSOLUTELY HATE PEOPLE PRESSING THE AUTOSCALE BUTTON ON DIGITAL SCOPES!!!! UGHHHHH. AUTOSCALE is for dummies and for people who don't know how to use an oscilloscope. It is completely useless for one time events like pulses! Also, when other students are clueless as to what they are doing, they start pressing random buttons and they end up messing up a lot of the settings, the most annoying one, but easiest for me to fix is the probe settings. 

Here it is, the Autoscale (Stupid person) button!

     If you have read this far, thank you for reading and I hope you continue to read my thoughts. And learn how to solder folks! Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!