The Sorcerer's Progress (Page 2 of 62)

About halfway to the Ch 4 rewrite, I think.

Chapter 4 version 2.  Chapter 4 takes us back to Lifspynth.

Gauss, Volts, Amperes, Joules, Newtons, Amys.

Eh?

Erlangs.

Still  working on chapter 4.  I spent six slow but productive hours yestereve.  (Where 'eve' ends near dawn.)  It will be over 4k words.

Four words: DBMS.  Four more: ACID.

Your wish is my suggestion.

With regard to place and description, I wonder if you and I know places differently.

Before I take a trip, I often study the route with Google Maps and look over the satphotos around the places where  I will have to turn.  I study them from above and envision them as they must view from the road.  Then when I drive, I recognize those nearly as if I had seen them before.

So for me, giving a 'map' of the place is the natural kind of description.

In other news, I have a battery-powered version of the timer/flasher portion working.  The breadboard I'm working forces me to compromise the layout a bit but not too much.  I found a couple of errors in my layout drawing for that part, and discovered that the inrush for the switched power caps causes the timer to reset.  I can reduce the capacitance, but instead I want to try turning the  switching MOSFET on a little slowly.

Later!

Following up on the review -- but the whole town isn't in danger of the Elemental residue on the charm.  The Chaos-triggered fires pose some danger, but the real danger is that the charm used to be--and still is!--a Covenant Gem.

Where?  What changes?

I've been working at cross purposes the last couple of days.  My little electronics project is such a success it's keeping me from working on it, even as I'm spending time on it!

I''m trying to do all my work now on a test article that I can run on battery power.  Some things I can't do that with, but right now I most need to debug the new voltage level detector in that test article.  Problem is, a few days ago I began testing to see how long the flasher could run on battery power.  I put four new AAA batteries on it, figuring they would last for 20 to 36 hours.  Mirable dictu, I'm past 90 hours and it's just reached the 1.3 volt/cell plateau.  AAA page, first discharge curve should be the most representative load in terms of curve shape.  That means that the flasher should run for 440 to 480 hours on these tiny batteries, and over two thousand on the C cells I mean to use it with!  That's darn good--flashing hours won't take as much as I feared from battery lifetime--but I'll have to cut this test short to get work done.

I also have to work on my much-modified "pigeon" flasher--but I don't want to get tied up in that until I have the detector working.  I also have a start-up problem on the flasher: when it's turned on the capacitors draw so much current to charge that the voltage drop resets the timer.  I think I can fix this with a resistor that will slow the turn-on of the MOSFETs that feed the flasher.  It's just a matter of finding the right value.  Thing is, I want to test the fix with the cheapest carbon-zinc batteries I can get my hands on--and it's getting hard to find them nowadays.

And then the pigeon flasher.  I promised to send the final circuit drawing to the guy I cribbed it from.  It's a surprisingly subtle design that can maintain a steady flash rate over a wide voltage range.

But right now Im going to work on Chapter 4, and then I'll see if I can find those cheap batteries.

From Maxell ad of 30-odd years ago: "With some tapes, you can't tell your brass from your oboe."

My favorite: "He can't tell a burro from a burrow!"

I need to finish the thing!

Anyway, I tested the turn-on fix.  It works with the AAA alkaline Energizers, at 5.1v total.   (One mod: a Schottky barrier diode bypassing the resistor for turn-off.)  I just bought some really crappy carbon-Zinc batteries and I will test it with them, too.  If it works with those AAAs across a range of voltages, it should work with anything.

Now I have to worry about turn-off, which is slow because of the energy stored in the power-smoothing capacitors on the load side of the switch.  I'm thinking that I should switch the LED power and the other power with separate devices.  That's more circuit board space to take up.

And THEN I have to debug the detector (I've already got it built on the test article) and work on the pigeon-flasher.

And physical design, especially the layout of the input filter and the placement of the RJ-11 jack.

Gosh, I also have to test that other "works on polyethelene/polypropalene" glue.  And thread the posts in the cases.  And ....

Aaargh!  I should keep a chart like I would on a software project so I'd know what to do when I was stalled on one thing or another.

Now back to the Chapter 4 revisions.

I've reworked the first Melayne section of Chapter 4.  I won't do a repub unless a reviewer needs the points, but it's a little smaller (~350 words) and it might be more to the point.  I hope so.  It's still too long.