So there I was, (relatively) innocently reading a website about serial port communication.
I probably should have stopped right there, but being the suicidal masochist I am, I decided that my brain needed the extra punishment.
This is because my brain has this strange idea that reading something on a website written by psychotic clowns will eventually translate into me actually understanding the subject about which said psychotic clowns wrote said website.
Very surprisingly, I even got 3 or 4 paragraphs in without immediately resorting to use of my trusty katana.
It was on the paragraph just after that which describes Mark as being a negative little shit and how he wanted to transition to Space (because that was much more positive) where I noticed the next line:
"Data bits are transmitted upside down and backwards."
Well, that just put the icing on the cake. In fact it didn't just put the icing on the cake, it bought the ingredients, read the recipe book and baked the cake first, before coating it in strawberry-flavoured death. It then mercilessly grabbed my head with a hydraulic robotic arm and slammed my face violently and repeatedly into the finished product.
The most depressing part of the matter is that since Electronics Engineers are notorious for being completely insane I should have been expecting something like this. I really should have been prepared, and sharpened my katana beforehand.
So now I have to waste time while I get it ready, and I just can't wait to feel that rush of adrenaline as the blade penetrates my intestines and severs my spinal cord on the way out.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Transistors (aka, the Penile iNversion Pantomime)
The most annoying and depressing failures are when stupid inconsistencies because retards can't be arsed following the same damn conventions. This can turn the simplest task into a five hour google orgy trying hopelessly to marry the wildly divergent conventions used by various self-glorified authors. Slashing at ones wrists viciously with a chainsaw is the only chance one has of remaining sane during such death like experiences.
This exact problem is the reason I found myself on a plane over the antarctic preparing to skydive without a parachute for the first time last wednesday. Transistors. They have haunted my dreams for a week now, the climax always involving me spontaneously jabbing the emitter of a scungy old PNP transistor into an important looking blood vessel and raking it along the vessel until I become covered in sticky red wetness.
The offence which caused this particular black mood was an intense confusion over the classification of transistors. I don't blame KiCad, the PCB design software I use. It was written by a chronically psychotic mental patient from western France. I can therefore understand when the five transistors in its severely limited component catalogue have completely weird and annoying names, unrelated to anything that exists in the real world. Lady Ada (www.ladyada.net) on the other hand is less excusable. As a supposedly reputable vendor of useful EE projects, one would expect its documentation to be of a high standard. I was therefore maddened beyond recovery when I found that their transistors were labelled with some useless proprietary brands' nonsense.
Searching through every conceivable source of information about transistors I drove myself to the point of sheer exhaustion and was literally about to cut my throat when I came across an answer. I found someone who had sacrificed their time in an attempt to achieve unity between the many diverse transistor categories. According to this new theory, it did not matter which bloody transistor I specified in the PCB design software. All that mattered is that I differentiated between the PNP transistors and the NPN's. See below for the gory details of how this can be easily managed.
In conclusion, I have once again traveled to hell and back again over an insanely trivial issue. Transistor manufacturers, their standards, and people who subscribe to their standards should all be shot in the kneecap immediately. The next time something this messed up happens, I'm going to save myself the massive google orgy, and just listen to the chronically psychotic mental patient from western France.
Appendix: How to differentiate PNP and NPN transistors.
All I am concerned with here, and all that matters to me, is what happens on the schematic level of the PCB. Here on the schematic level the only difference between the PNP and the NPN is the direction of the arrow on the E pin. If it's pointing in then it's a PNP. If it's not pointing inwards then it's an NPN. The following simple formula can be used as memory aids.
iN = pNp (because they both have N as the second character)
alternatively:
Pointing iN Proudly = PNP
Not Pointing iNwards = NPN
or my personal favourite:
Poking iN Pervasively = PNP
Nastily Protruding kNeecap = NPN
This exact problem is the reason I found myself on a plane over the antarctic preparing to skydive without a parachute for the first time last wednesday. Transistors. They have haunted my dreams for a week now, the climax always involving me spontaneously jabbing the emitter of a scungy old PNP transistor into an important looking blood vessel and raking it along the vessel until I become covered in sticky red wetness.
The offence which caused this particular black mood was an intense confusion over the classification of transistors. I don't blame KiCad, the PCB design software I use. It was written by a chronically psychotic mental patient from western France. I can therefore understand when the five transistors in its severely limited component catalogue have completely weird and annoying names, unrelated to anything that exists in the real world. Lady Ada (www.ladyada.net) on the other hand is less excusable. As a supposedly reputable vendor of useful EE projects, one would expect its documentation to be of a high standard. I was therefore maddened beyond recovery when I found that their transistors were labelled with some useless proprietary brands' nonsense.
Searching through every conceivable source of information about transistors I drove myself to the point of sheer exhaustion and was literally about to cut my throat when I came across an answer. I found someone who had sacrificed their time in an attempt to achieve unity between the many diverse transistor categories. According to this new theory, it did not matter which bloody transistor I specified in the PCB design software. All that mattered is that I differentiated between the PNP transistors and the NPN's. See below for the gory details of how this can be easily managed.
In conclusion, I have once again traveled to hell and back again over an insanely trivial issue. Transistor manufacturers, their standards, and people who subscribe to their standards should all be shot in the kneecap immediately. The next time something this messed up happens, I'm going to save myself the massive google orgy, and just listen to the chronically psychotic mental patient from western France.
Appendix: How to differentiate PNP and NPN transistors.
All I am concerned with here, and all that matters to me, is what happens on the schematic level of the PCB. Here on the schematic level the only difference between the PNP and the NPN is the direction of the arrow on the E pin. If it's pointing in then it's a PNP. If it's not pointing inwards then it's an NPN. The following simple formula can be used as memory aids.
iN = pNp (because they both have N as the second character)
alternatively:
Pointing iN Proudly = PNP
Not Pointing iNwards = NPN
or my personal favourite:
Poking iN Pervasively = PNP
Nastily Protruding kNeecap = NPN
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Don't forget to maim yourself, please.
It is certainly a great honor to be working on this blog. So honorable in fact that I almost just disemboweled myself with a katana.
At times, I think of myself as a madman, yet other times, a sane human being. Neither of these could be further from the truth - as I am, in fact - not a human being at all, but merely the incomprehensibly depressed and tortured soul of a dead rat caught up in the eternal freezing damnation of a commercial aircon unit. In a back-street supermarket. In the bad part of town.
Well, that is how my life feels sometimes. Those are the good days.
But, let us not dwell on my problems. Let us dwell on yours. Who knows what my next post will bring? Perhaps a story you can relate to yourself. Perhaps it will make you cry. Maybe it will make you howl in anguish at a concrete wall. It may move you. It may even move you so much that it moves you right off the roof of a high-rise apartment and into midday traffic 13 stories below.
All you can do is wait, and hope my next post bears absolutely no resemblance to your own life.
At times, I think of myself as a madman, yet other times, a sane human being. Neither of these could be further from the truth - as I am, in fact - not a human being at all, but merely the incomprehensibly depressed and tortured soul of a dead rat caught up in the eternal freezing damnation of a commercial aircon unit. In a back-street supermarket. In the bad part of town.
Well, that is how my life feels sometimes. Those are the good days.
But, let us not dwell on my problems. Let us dwell on yours. Who knows what my next post will bring? Perhaps a story you can relate to yourself. Perhaps it will make you cry. Maybe it will make you howl in anguish at a concrete wall. It may move you. It may even move you so much that it moves you right off the roof of a high-rise apartment and into midday traffic 13 stories below.
All you can do is wait, and hope my next post bears absolutely no resemblance to your own life.
Introduction
This is the EE Emo Fail Blog. This blog is going to be bloody depressing, so now would be a good time to piss off and never come back. Over the coming months I am going to document my utterly futile EE projects on this blog with an emphasis on the negative feelings that I experience whilst attempting but completely failing to achieve anything. To ensure that I don't waste your time, I will try to capture as many boring details as possible in each blog, to help you avoid the excruciatingly painful process of extracting the information out of me later through the retarded comment system. Despite this you should stop reading this dumb blog right now, erase it from your cache (both the one in your computer and the one in your brain), and go about your abysmal life in happy ignorance. In a sorry attempt to retain some kind of sanity in this blog, I have invited the amazingly wrist-cutting genious of Agent24 to co-author. Not unfamiliar with pain, Agent24 is able to complement my awfully monotonous style with dry tales of sorrow, so morbid that your life will somehow seem almost acceptable in comparison. Just remember that every moment you spend reading this blog is a moment closer to your death. Be wise, close the tab, and do something worthwhile if such a thing exists.
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