I just accepted a job with Asylum Research. It’s a company based in Santa Barbara, CA that makes some of the best AFM/SPM instrumentation on the planet. There are a lot of talented and nice people there that I’ve met in the past few weeks. The move from Pittsburgh has been long and hard, but I’m finally starting to get settled back into things and starting to dig back into projects that I was working on before the whole move. I brought 3 projects from Pittsburgh to tide me over while I search for places to get new projects. (Goodwill out here sucks)
- Samsung SyncMaster 305T BGA separation issue
- Pioneer SA-9100 receiver protection circuit tripped
- Pioneer CT-F1000 clutch slip, not sure if there are any electrical issues yet
As of writing this post, I actually have finished the first one, and made large jumps of progress on the second two, but I didn’t document any of it (not really a regular part of my workflow yet, but I would really like to get in the habit of it so that I don’t have to go backwards after I’m done to show some work. I also picked up a new logic analyzer/scope combo (HP 1661AS) in hopes that I would be able to save images off the floppy drive and put them on my PC, instead of using a camera on the CRT. It looks like it does have the capability, but the USB floppy drive I have either doesn’t work or the scope is writing in some weird format that I can’t get the computer to see. In either case, I really don’t like how to use the new one, so I’m offloading it in favor of the 1652B. It has a mouse which is cool, but using it kind of sucks, and if you don’t use it, it sucks more, because the menus are laid out for using the mouse. The colors are also bad and don’t look very nice, compared to the crisp screen on the 1652B. Not sure how they doubled the spec over 10 years and somehow made the UI unusable, but maybe this was when HP started making some suspect business choices.
I got the new analyzer from this neat electronics surplus store Apex Electronics in Sun Valley, CA. It’s a bit north of Hollywood, and talking to the clerk it seems that’s where most of their business comes from. While a lot of the instrumentation and parts there are working, it looks like not many electronics hobbyists go there. The guy at the counter was surprised when I said the purchase was for personal use. He used to be a service engineer at JEOL, which is pretty neat. As a side note, there are a LOT of JEOL SEMs on craigslist here for something like $5-10k, which seems pretty affordable for a machine that fills a whole room. A lot of the trick there is knowing how to connect and use it all, I guess. Back to Apex, it’s definitely one of the coolest places I’ve been ever, and definitely the coolest place I’ve seen in CA. I would highly recommend it even just for strolling around. They have a lot of real estate and it’s piled high with equipment and other bits.