Status: badly dislocated.
Before I try picking up loose threads, I'm going to catch up a bit on reviews. I've lost count of how many I owe, but I'll try to do six today. After that, I have about four hours of physical design work to do ... and some hope that it will work out. If not, it's a big delay while I think more things out. If it does work, then I can move on to the next part--about 700 parts on twelve copies of a circuit board. I'm planning how to order the work so I can test it section by section.
I've got three boxes inside my front door with expensive shelf parts. Wire shelves, the kind you put together with a rubber mallet. It's too noisy to do at night, so I have to figure out when to do it. And this is a too-clever splice job, for space for all the boxes and bins of resistors and capacitors and diodes ... and badly needed. Actually, I need about sixty feet of shelf space. This will get me about twelve--and not all of it within easy reach.
My little constant-current circuit works so well that I can try reversing it to operate off the Vcc rail, skipping the current mirror. It will drop only about 400 mV more, and I can spare that. That is, if it works using the complementary transistors I've got. Worst case is that it works, but barely well enough. That's one more thing to breadboard and test.
I lost most of Monday and Tuesday to that mystery contest. I've got an entry that could have used more editing--but I got it in just under the wire. If anybody cares to have a look at it, I'd be grateful, even though it's too late to put changes in.
