Episode: 3064
Title: HPR3064: How I got started in Electronics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3064/hpr3064.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:05:52

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,064 for Thursday, 30 April 2020. Today's show is entitled,
How I Got Started in Electronics. It is hosted by Archer 72,
and is about seven minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
How I Got Started in Electronics and some job stuff.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hi, this is Archer 72,
and I'd like to thank HPR for providing the servers to record to.
This is going to be a little bit all over a place,
but HPR was asking for shows,
and they had a little bit of things to say,
so I wanted to talk a little bit about my interest in electronics.
Started when I was 10,
I found a train set in the basement,
and decided to set it up.
It was just a little old track,
and I had a really basic transformer,
and I didn't do much with it after that.
I played with a couple of little engines,
and oh yeah,
and I forgot the very first time I got any taste of electricity,
so to speak, was when,
according to my instructor,
I felt a sine wave at three years old
when I couldn't keep my little hands out of the power outlets.
And thankfully in the US,
where the house voltage is 110 volts and about 220,
I managed to survive.
A few years later,
I get a bigger power supply of transformer,
and more complex layout,
which I make foldable
out of the way at the ping pong table,
which also folded down,
so that we could have some family time.
I didn't have a way to simulate this train,
fully starting and taking time to stop,
so I added a decent sized capacitor at the track output.
I think it was about a thousand microfarads.
That was also when I learned a solder,
because the rail connectors would have intermittent contact.
I'd also have,
to use a heasing clip in order not to melt the track,
plastic track ties.
I also made up custom levers
that went through the plywood to activate tracks,
which is with solenoids.
I remember correctly,
there were catalogues for MCM electronics
and all electronics,
which I'll include in the show notes.
And at this point,
I think MCM electronics
became another company like Newark.
That's where I found the parts
for this and other projects.
I still have a bunch of atrial scale cars and engines
in my parents' house.
When I was building this layout,
I learned how to use a hot resistance wire,
my dad,
and we cut Styrofoam
as a base for some of the scenery.
Also, I did a lot of bit of wire framing
to do some of the inclines.
And for realism,
I was in a crushing of coal with a hammer
to make realistic size pieces
for the co-oppers.
I should have actually used a mask,
because I breathed in a lot of dust in that process.
I dumped my midteens.
I was still on the trains,
but I took more to building circuits
from any engineer project books.
They had a radio shack.
And there's archive.org,
like the guy I could put in the show notes too.
My favorite project at the time
was a mini-stun gun
that I made using a pre-built inverter
from the catalogs that I had mentioned.
And I put it,
provided a hundred volts
from the inverter circuit.
And I ran into a,
I think it was called deck stacked
a bluer circuit.
The result was a 1,200 volts
at a few micro-amps,
as far as I can measure.
And in a couple of moves,
I managed to lose it.
I wish I had it around.
I continued my interest
when I was building
an electronics one.
I was building speed carrying closures
for a sound system
in my 1986 Chevy celebrity
station wagon,
which was my first car.
I ran a high-amperage cable
across one fair-eyed capacitor
to account for the amplifier's current draw.
And I built a custom board
to hold those amplifiers
that fit in the rumble seat of the wagon.
In 1985,
I was about the same time
I was working with the car amps.
And I had my first long-time job
in the printed circuit board industry.
I walked on the mechanical assembly
for a year.
And I myself and the SMT
department are asking around
and SMT is surface mass soldering.
And I asked to learn how to do
the SMT soldering and repair.
This lasted about five years
until I moved on to a medical
device from manufacturer Baxter,
which is spelled Baxter Healthcare.
Here are the robust
infusion pumps for about six years.
These pumps would be set
for a flow rate for vinyl fluids,
of course electronically,
through a keybed.
You know, detect air pockets
if the tube was pinched off
or if the patient laid on it in the bed.
I had a variety of jobs after that,
mostly in contracting and manufacturing
for PCB boardhouses.
The last job before this
was working on machines
that analyze trace amounts of nitrogen
to packaging environment.
All right.
Now they make floats
where most of them make use
or actually all of them make use
of a sensor package
for temperature pressure and salinity.
It depths of 2,000 meters
to study environmental issues.
They have room for other packages
if they have to do custom jobs
for other clients.
And up is a result
in not the same thing,
just one of them was
to study hurricanes.
If anybody else
has any interesting experiences
they would like to share,
please consider recording a show
for Hacqq Public Radio.
This has been Archer 72.
Thank you for listening.
Remember to support Free Software.
Thank you.
Bye.
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