Sunday, October 18, 2009

Actual Progress On A Project? Can It BE?!

I spent almost an hour working on a project today. This, for those of you readers who are not yourselves parents, homeowners, car mechanics, plumbers, landscapers, veterinarians, and full-time employees, is a rare thing.

About *mumble* years ago, I started work on a piece of test equipment for characterizing transistors. It went through several revisions, and was actually completely functional at one point . . . until an overlooked connection caused a minor explosion in one of the power supplies. Thus discouraged, it sat there mostly untouched for the last year-ish.

Part of this tester is a heated, thermostatically-controlled test bed so the transistors I will test will be nice and comfy and cozy warm. I spent just under an hour getting some really good data on how it performs under a few different circumstances. The control is pretty tight for a first-iteration cobbled-together experiment, but I think it can be better. Just around +/-1.5% variation over 4 minutes with no external heating or cooling is not too shabby, but I think it can be better.

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