William Chops Westfield wrote:
>
>     > >   I'm a student and I'm doing the final project.
>
>     > Than you should have already learned where to lookup such things...
>
> Only if he goes to a "lesser" school.  At the good schools, you get occupied
> by electron mobility, circuit analysis and "object design" (I guess.  Im my
> day it was "top down vs bottom up", and "recursive descent vs uh...")
> Useful things like how to find and read a manufacturers data sheet are not
> part of the ciriculum.
>
> BillW

  Too true!  I once spent 25 minutes convincing an honors student in a
local college that such a thing as a 10-turn dial potentiometer existed
(Asking him to explain to me what, exactly, the locking 10-turn
(calibration?) pot on the partially disassembled (HP OScope?  Signal
generator?  I think it was a 'scope) we were sitting next to, WAS,
stumped him for 10+ of those minutes, admittedly <G>  He finally hemmed
& hawed & admitted that maybe such a thing existed <G>)  He'd used a
10-turn trim pot, of course, for the lab he'd taken (making a 1 uA
current meter with an op amp was the lab project there when I took that
lab.  Oooh aah.  High tech <EG>)

  Lock that man in a room with a Digi-Key catalog for a month <G>

  Takes a mix of tech knowledge & engineering knowledge to make a really
Good electrical engineer - you can't do a quality design job on
something if you don't know what parts exist to create it with, and you
can't do well unless you know what the "gotchas" are in there as well.
Some schools just teach theory...  Helps if engineers & techs know &
trust each other, too <G>

  Mark, mwillis@nwlink.com