cheryl

~laughing softly~ Now the computer stuff... i try to only know enough to be dangerous... i'm fortunate, that most of the time my bosses are really good mentors as well. So no matter what else is going on, they're doing their best to look out for me, giving me good opportunities and making certain i work at the things that are keeping me from getting further more quickly. When they're doing that good of a job looking out for you, they tend not to screw up on the other things, like working with management and getting the resources we need... But....its just a good family there. As dysfunctional as it can be at times with a bunch of geeky engineers.

~grinning~ Oh yeah...they still teach that in school. Not the troubleshooting technique You used, though...that's great! In fact, when recently coaching Sciece Olympiad, we used breadboards to mock up circuits for "battery buggy" (little battery powered cars) and also for creating a pattern of wires, chips, leds, and such for one student to write instructions, and a second student to follow and try to create the same thing. i never had to follow the instructions of another, but rather got to mock up the circuits myself...so i had a lot more flexibility. In my breadboards used at Science Olympiad now, i still have my pre-cut, pre-bent jumper wires for connecting grounds and power. i tried to lay those out first so that they laid down flat upon the board and didn't get in the way of the other wires that i would need to fiddle with more often in my design. ~grinning~ The guys loved to work with me. Besides the fact that it was easier to troubleshoot, see, and change the design on a "neatly" wired breadboard...the pieces tended to stay in a LOT better. On some of the boards, they had been used and reused so many times that keeping the wires in where they were supposed to be was a big plus!

Ewwww....that sounds awful!! Naaahhhh..... When i was working on systems for space research with the university, we were so small we were able to do the soldering ourselves. i was never a part of the actual launch so i don't know what was required once the team actually started to work with NASA. In my job these days...since we are actually a manufacturing/production company, we BETTER know how to solder and solder well. The design, test, and experimental stuff is all done at our benches. The actual production stuff is done on the production floors...but all of those people are employees of the company. i have never heard of any union issues, disputes, dues, or anything. It is possible that the people we hire are members of some union....but i can't imagine i would have worked with these people for 8 years and not have heard any mention of union issues....especially in this environment when we have had to lay people off.

~gasping~ At least get a sample of their work first.

The old zit-poppers? ~laughing~ We still have a few of those around, but don't use them too often. Its mainly solder tweezers for the caps and resistors and an iron for the connectors and encoders (thank goodness those are still through-hole...the longevity and durability just seems to be better). The shop does the more sophisticated soldering stuff...i just do stuff from my bench.

Greetings, Aman, The problems i tend to see varies by the vendor/manufacturer of the board, and the cost. Typically, the higher the cost of the board, the better the type of test the board is put through before being released. On the older equipment, assuming no user error (blown fuses, fried resistors...or my favorite..."the voltage leaked out of the capacitor as smoke" ) i tend to see problems due to the frequent handling of equipment...BNC or N connectors bent, often where they connect to the board, encoders that have worn out, dim displays, loosened jumpers... In a couple of cases, we have even worn out the memory simply from the number of times the unit has been calibrated (you can only read/write to it so many times after all). Most often...i see failures with the power supplies. They tend to be OEM'd by the equipment manufacturers rather than produced in-house, and i don't know if the quality isn't up to snuff, or if small changes made in the manufacture of the power supplies that "shouldn't" make any difference indeed do. Then...on the newer equipment, i see failures that i suspect have to do with either bad solder, slightly misaligned components, or hairline fractures of the boards, that got worsened during shipping. It seems, though, that doing self-repair or component-level repair is going away quickly...so with these failures, especially while the unit is under warranty, we don't spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Even if a site has the ability to do surface mount soldering (i'm fortunate to have great eyesight and a very steady hand), these new chips...even if they can be purchased, require special hoods or mountings to solder them to the board without damaging them in the process. So...any more...we seem to troubleshoot down to the module, then check a couple obvious things (specifically fuses and connections) and consider ourselves lucky if we can get ahold of a new module. It has forced us to look at the repair strategy for a company. In some cases, we have selected more expensive products because they gave a longer warranty, had a better repair strategy, were easier to work with, or were more reliable. And...with some instruments...the extended warranty option turned out to be worth its weight in gold. All depends upon how much the equipment gets abused. :help: ~blush~ Sorry...i can tend to ramble on a bit...

The stuff that I know about ranges from the Agilent 54621D Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (have you tried one of these yet? omg...it works so smoothly with the oscilloscope part and SO much easier to use than a big ole logic analyzer) with a bandwidth of 60 MHz, 2 analog channels and 16 digital chanels with 25 ps of graticule resolution for about $4k to the Agilent 1680AD, 136 channels, 800 MHz with a time tag resolution of 4 ns for about half of what you paid for back then. Obviously, we purchase a lot of stuff from Agilent Technologies.