The Shipping News - The End

The wait is finally over. The EasyPIC 3 from MikroElektronika finally arrived! The board has no apparent damage, despite a slightly dented box. There was the expected PIC16F877A-I/P MPU, the Real-Time Clock board and Compact Flash expansions. There was also a surprise PIC18F4550-I/P MPU. I'll have to look it up.

Sadly I don't know when I'm going to have the time to power it up and run it through it's paces. There are many DIP switches so this is a case where reading the manual is mandatory...

The Shipping News II

The EasyPIC 3 from MikroElektronika still hasn't arrived. Not that big a deal except tomorrow is the last day of my Spring Break. So any free time I might have had will be over... Still about 11 more days before I can start really whining.

Geek Notes: Electronic Water

For most people, me included, find it difficult to intuit electrical behavior. I spent time trying to find analogies to the real world. I'd considered a "water-based" system to emulate electron flow. Voltage, Current, Power, Resistors and simple Diodes seemed simple. Capacitors and Transformers left me stumped. My understanding of Transistors was rather weak at the time, yet I still saw the analogy to a "water-based" system would be strained at best. I evenually come to the conclusion that the only real analogy to electron flow was electron flow.

While researching an earlier Geek Notes entry I came across a term that was new to me; The "Hydraulic Analogy" of Electricity in the Wikipedia. After a review I see I simply wasn't creative enough to come up with appropriate analogies. I'm not going to try and describe the system in detail here (see the Wikipedia link). It's far from perfect, but I find it helpful.