gEDA-user: Design Lab Equipment

[Dave McGuire]

On Apr 1, 2007, at 10:42 AM, John Griessen wrote:
> I'll look at your schematic soon.  Al was surely thinking of
> a full analog curve tracer  "like Heathkit made".  A USB powered  
> one would not be as much
> device-smokin' fun...
> A powered curve tracer with an ethernet port to automate it would  
> be a good lead in
> to real world tests of power handling parts -- where they can build  
> up heat for so long during a pulsed situation,
> then you have to stop and wait for cooling....
>
> The knob cranking curve tracer with newbie operator often
> kills parts before they ever get to those zones of  
> operation....unless you use a short pulse duration, with more  
> complexity of design and operation.
>
> Even for a starter curve tracer, I'd want it to deal with power  
> circuits, so 150V,  300V in Europe.

   I started to design a digitally-controlled curve tracer last  
summer, but I got busy searching for a new house and then moving.  I  
hope to work on it again but I don't see myself doing it before  
summer or autumn.

   My design was somewhat unusual in that its user interface is a  
terminal (or terminal emulator on a computer) and I was going to  
write the firmware to produce graphs in real time on the terminal  
using ReGIS (a very old DEC line-oriented graphics protocol for  
terminals) or Tek4010/4014.

            -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL