What happened to Phil Allison?

Sun Aug 29, 2010 6:07 pm   

On Sat, 28 Aug 2010 20:10:14 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman_at_ieee.org> wrote:


---
Au contraire.

Given the small number your recent off-topic posts (thank you for
that) and the smiley at the end of my statement, one who claims
adequacy of language skills should have beeh able to glean meaning
from the sentence.
---


---
Who was talking about _you_ being able to think of a topic you know
nothing about?
---


---
Yes, of course, because it would have been more appropriate.
---


---
Then, since you are part of the set, "everybody", you acknowledge that
your knowledge is fundamentally subjective and, regardless of having
been tested against what you percieve to be reality, remains
subjective.
---


---
Oh, my, a gratuitous insult with no basis in fact.

I suppose that's another example of your powers of objective
observation and rational arrival at conclusions.

Chicken Little certainly had nothing on you!
---


---
The fly in that ointment is that since you admit to subjectivity you
may very well _believe_ that you know something about what you're
talking about and would consider any disagreement with your belief to
be wrong, but you could easily be off the mark.
---


---
Which does nothing to prove that my statement was wrong, but rather
side-steps the issue by throwing in another gratuitous, racist, insult
with no basis in fact, which is one of the devices you use to evade
what you can't deal with.

---
JF

Sun Aug 29, 2010 8:07 pm   

Bill Sloman wrote:

<snip>



Hmmm. A search in Mouser for the 555 yields 6 pages. On the
first page alone you'll find that there are 152,667 555s in
stock. Searching for 555s in Digikey yields 4 pages of results,
all in stock. The quantity on the first page alone totally
swamps the Mouser quantities - well over 400,000 in stock.

Mouser and Digikey (and others) seem to have a better grip on
reality than you do, focusing on the viability of the part,
rather than what you see as its "obsolence".

Ed




> Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:32 pm   

On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:07:49 -0400, ehsjr <ehsjr_at_nospamverizon.net> wrote:


Slowman *is* obsolete. Why would you expect him to see the world any
differently?

Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:31 am   

On Aug 29, 12:07 pm, ehsjr <eh...@nospamverizon.net> wrote:

There are also SMD versions of the 555, so it must have current
applications..

-Bill

Mon Aug 30, 2010 6:03 am   

On Aug 30, 10:59 am, Bill Bowden <wrongaddr...@att.net> wrote:

John Fields isn't the only engineer who is still repeating what worked
for him forty years ago. It doesn't make the 555 (or the 741) any less
obsolete.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:41 am   

On Aug 30, 5:07 am, ehsjr <eh...@nospamverizon.net> wrote:

The 555 is a legacy part - like the the 741 - and still sells in large
numbers. When the 555 was introduced it did provide a compact and
adequate solution to a commonly encountered problem, and was designed
into a lot of products. Some of these are still in production.

As with all frequently used parts, it is still beoing incoprporated
into new designs. Hobbyists and amateurs copy old designs, because
they know - or at least fondly believe - that they work, and don't
know enough to design anything better.

Some professional designers - like John Fields - who should know
better, still design around legacy parts, because it lets them recycle
old designs which they know to be reliable. If you are designing
something in a hurry, or don't want to risk designing something that
you can't be sure will work out of the box, using familiar - if
obsolete - parts can be a good short term strategy.

The catch with the 555 is that it combines a part nobody really ought
to use these days - a monostable - with a rather poor quality bipolar
power transistor, and uses the same ground return pin for both
devices. There are a few situations where these defects aren't
troublesome, but modern designers tend to make their time control
signals in the digital domain, and use then to drive a MOSFET switch.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:42 am   

On Aug 30, 3:07 am, John Fields <jfie...@austininstruments.com> wrote:

Far from it. You've been championing the 555 here for years, as if it
was a device that competent designers might still be designing in.
Nobody else who posts here seems to have used it for many years.


Since you seem to be the only person around here who still believes
that the 555 is "recommended for new designs", based on your unique
talents as a a circuit designer, you'd be a better candidate any
Chicken Little award.


You would like to think that, wouldn't you. You may dream that you may
be able to persuade other people to share that view, but it's just a
dream John. Time to wake up to reality.


Of course not. That was covered in the previous paragraph, to which
you provided an evasive and unconvincing response.


Since "Texan" is not a racial designation, the observation cannot be
racist. Considering the enthusiasm with which you cast aspersions, the
insult is one that you have earned, so it isn't gratuitous. And I
certainly haven't side-stepped the issue of your incapacity to say
what you mean, or failure to understand plain English, both of which
you managed to demonstrate yet again.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Mon Aug 30, 2010 9:39 am   

Bill Bowden wrote:


Unlike Sloman.


--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.

Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:09 pm   

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman_at_ieee.org> wrote:
: John Fields <jfie...@austininstruments.com> wrote:
: > BillSloman
: >
: >>I know you don't have a high opinion of my expertise - you mostly lack
: >>the wit to know what I'm talking about - but I'm curious as to what
: > >> ---
: > >> If you have to ask, then there are two.
: > >> ---

Bill, please just ignore JF. I'm sure I'm not the only one here
who appreciated your older habit of (mostly) refraining from personal
insults or splitting hairs, and rather concentraing on real
argumentation. I have appreciated that, whether the subject was
on- or off-topic, and regardless of whether I agree or disagree with you.
There are many other such personalities in this NG.

Then there are a lot of uninteresting barking dogs, proliferation
of whose posts was obviously the trigger for this very thread, too.
If you keep barking back you risk starting to look similar.

Now that we're here: what you think of the paper
by Giusi, Crupi and Pace in the 2008 Rev.Sci.Instr.? If I understand
it correctly, they are using the trick of cross-correlating the signals
through two different amplifiers (it think van der Ziel introduced
this method originally) to get rid of the amplifier noises, but they claim
to do it for voltage and current noises simultaneously. This appears
fishy to me.

Regards,
Mikko

Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:01 pm   

Okkim Atnarivik wrote:

Do you have a link for it? I suppose that you could do that by using N
pairs of amplifiers, with resistors between the pairs' inputs and the
unknown, like this:

In
|\
0-*--R2R2-*--| \
| | | >------0 Out1
| | | /
| | |/
| |
| |
| | |\
| *--| \
| | >------0 Out2
| | /
| |/
|
|
| |\
*--R2R2-*--| \
| | >------0 Out3
| | /
| |/
|
|
| |\
*--| \
| >------0 Out4
| /
|/

With N pairs of amps, you have 4N+1 free parameters (source noise plus
(for each pair) resistor noise, each amps' own voltage noise, and the
pairwise sums of their current noise).

The same N pairs will have (1/2)N(N-1) cross-correlations, so the
problem becomes soluble when

N**2-N > 2(4N+1)

i.e.

N^^2 - 9N - 2 > 0,

so you need at least 4 pairs (8 amps).

I'm doing something like this in a more deterministic situation to get
rid of sensor errors.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:04 pm   

Phil Hobbs wrote:

All that work, followed by a face plant. 10 pairs of course.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Mon Aug 30, 2010 3:14 pm   

In <c663eaf2-94da-4b11-97d3-d6bdbdbfd7dc_at_s24g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
Bill Sloman wrote in part:


I use the 555, usually favoring the Texas Instruments TLC555.

I even used National's LM555 as a MOSFET driver before MOSFET drivers
became inexpensive.
--
- Don Klipstein (don_at_misty.com)

Mon Aug 30, 2010 5:02 pm   

On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:03:30 -0700, Bill Sloman wrote:


If you want to work at the cutting edge, be sure to have plenty of
Band-Aids around ;-)

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)

Mon Aug 30, 2010 5:48 pm   

Bill Sloman wrote:

<snip>

There's still a place in the world for monostables. As long as you
don't care if the timing is off by a factor of 2 either way, they work
fine. And obsolescent or not, the 555 will very likely still be
available after today's latest magic micro is gone. It also doesn't
need programming support. Monostables are good for pulse stretching,
for instance, where you don't know when the pulse is going to arrive
with respect to the uC clock.

I recently did a laser locker (using both current and temperature tuning
to get wide range and good bandwidth) that was almost all analogue,
including two feedback loops, laser and Peltier current drivers, and a
triangular sweep for lock acquisition. It does need a small micro off
on one corner to mind the store, but nothing more than that. You turn
the thing on, and a few seconds later the laser is in lock, with a
linewidth that should be less than 100 Hz.

If the projected volume were greater, it would be worth implementing
some of that in a uC, but nothing like all of it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Mon Aug 30, 2010 6:43 pm   

On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:42:01 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman_at_ieee.org> wrote:


---
Competent designers design in what they know works and meets the cost
and performance constraints associated with their project without
asking for my help.

I recommend the 555 here, sometimes, because it's a handy little chip
with a huge number of uses, and is especially attractive for newbies
and hobbyists to use because it's easy to figure out and easy to use.

On a newsgroup, especially, when a querant wants a quick solution for
a minor problem and has no intention of ever going beyond that point,
a 555 is often _the_ perfect solution.

Your disdain for it and your neverending tirade against those of us
who can use it and recomment it to advantage is telling, in that in
order to have your way you'd force the querant into using a
microcontroller, where the steep learning curve and the unnecessary $$
spent would guarantee failure, instead of showing him the easy way out
and taking time out of your life helping instead of damning.

Having read through the thread and noted that others still use the
555, I must say that your: "Nobody else who posts here seems to have
used it for many years.", above, is a little less than objective,
wouldn't you agree?
---


---
Can you cite a reference where a 555 manufacturer explicitly states:
"Not recommended for new design?"

I can't; and here's where I've been:

http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ne555.pdf

Notice the data sheet is for the bipolar 555 and was revised only a
couple of months ago (June, 2010)

Also, notice from:

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/ne555.html#inventory

That the device is active and is stocked by every major _industrial_
distributor in the world.

Looking now at their CMOS 555:

http://focus-webapps.ti.com/general/docs/sitesearch/searchdevice.tsp;jsessionid=KI2IKXSTF4GLLQC1JAVR3KQ?partNumber=TLC555

Notice that the device is active and there's even a high-rel "M"
(Military?) version available.


Going to National yields:

http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM555.html#Order

for the bipolar part, and:

http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LMC555.html#Order

for the CMOS part.

Which shows that they're also actively making 555's, but I'm sure
you'll notice gleefully that four versions are obsolete.

Maxim also makes a CMOS 555, the ICM 7555, and we haven't even touched
on the 556.

So, all in all, the sky isn't falling, which was my point, and why the
Chicken Little award is yours.
---

---
Hey, I'm not the one who's been preaching the gospel of the evil 555
going belly-up, while all the while millions of them are being
designed into and used all over the world in all kinds of products, am
I?
---


---
In your eyes perhaps, but then there are those who are so blind they
_will_ not see.
---



---
It is when it's used that way, which is precisely what you did.

Here, in your sentence:

"Sadly, it wasn't a straw man, though you will obviously have trouble
following the logic that demonstrates that you are an inarticulate
Texan nitwit suffering from persistent delusions of competence."

Notice that "Texan" could have been left out without changing the
sentence substantially, but you chose to add a little injury to insult
in much the same way one would use "cheap Jew", "dumb Polack",
"Australian cocksucker", or any of the other pejorative racial slurs
one ascribes to a group in order to vilify its members.
---


---
Ah, but the aspersions I cast are deserved, so my enthusiasm in
casting them has nothing to do with the insult.

Rather, you understand the validity of the aspersions and then
generate gratuitous insults in an attempt to save face by diversion.
---


---
Empty, nonsensical rhetoric.

---
JF