Soft question, I'm a rising college freshman interested in studying EE (we don't declare a major in our engineering school until start of the sophomore year). I have a teeny bit of knowledge regarding electricity and electronics, and was wondering if ordering the new Art of Electronics and reading it for leisure would be feasible.

@inkyvoyd Yes, for sure. It's not a college textbook. It's meant for self-study.

@ThePhoton, (softer question) do you have any advice for reading it? I read the first few chapters of the second edition, but I really seem to struggle with the topic of transistors and amplifiers in general - well, at least my failure to design a proper CdS cell light detector circuit seems to indicate so.

@inkyvoyd Sorry, haven't read AoE since I was in high school (and I didn't really get it back then either), so no specific advice.

morning

Yup

good morning

I saw your new question, didn't read it yet

Was in the lab all day yesterday

Well, except for those few moments I was at this PC

@Asmyldof well actually I asked on the main site to not just use your time. I want the attention of the whole internet

@Christoph greedy!

I was just telling you that I did see it

:-)

I'm tempted to comment that STM32F4 question, but I have never used eclipse

there's tons of tutorials out there

I find eclipse annoying, bulky and slow

same here. I use Code::Blocks for all my embedded programming

But that's just my Code::BLocks/MSVS/DevCpp/Vim/Standard-Notepad talking

:-)

Used to do windows programming in Notepad before I heard of gVim for windows

Was fun

Stupid Borland didn't want to cooperate with me handling the windows message queue myself

So I chucked it

Something just occurred to me....

Distract me, internet!

Maybe not...

What is it the last days with all these people and microphones?

New idiotic legislation in the US to do with spying or something?

@Asmyldof Do I have to sign up to like your tweet?

@ThePhoton Not as far as I'm concerned.

Missed my Rigol delivery :-(

Again tomorrow!

People wearing lacquered loafers on naked feet need to be shot

So heres a thought, I hook my device ground to the scope via the ground port on the front and then use the probes as direct poking devices so i don't have to deal with ground clips when poking around

This works fine for me, although I'm not sure how smart it is with this set up

2A HP Supply, floating rails (do not reference V- prong to GND prong on the supply), devices grounded through the scope

@crasic not clipping the grounding ends to ground will give doubtful AC performance

Tip specifications are assuming the entirety of the cable, with the weird wiggly wire, functions as a coaxial conductor

Gotcha, I already know it causes ac issues but for basic diagnostics it makes life easy

I leave the probe ground floating but its coupled to ground at the scope via the scope ground connector

@Asmyldof Gotcha, good to know, not too many ground points on this board

also there are 3 or 4 different grounds depending on how you look at it :\

Just connect a flexible wire to a ground point somewhere in the middle of where you measure, clip the clips to that

Not perfect yet, but 100x better

AGND while measuring Ddomain still better than NOGND

Though, makes for cute ringing if your board is designed reasonably well

Next to signal with proper ground >> Close to signal with proper ground >> Board mid with proper ground >> Board edge with proper ground >> Next to signal with wrong ground >> close to signal with wrong ground >> board mid with wrong ground >> board edge with wrong ground >> grounded through loopy wire on scope >> grounded through loopy wire to some other EarthGND >> NoGND

>> up the ptoot