Saturday, June 4, 2011

Feynman on Fixing things

More on Raspberry Pi, with a long quote from Feynman « Mathematics under the Microscope: "Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that’s a condenser, here’s a this, there’s a that; they were all labeled. And if wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn’t tell what was the matter by looking at it, you’d test it with your voltmeter and see whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred, DC. So it wasn’t hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going on inside, noticing that something wasn’t working right, and fixing it."

1 comment:

  1. I love to fix old electronics, im currently starting to rebuild a older 100Mhz computer though spare parts are taking a while to find.
    I had to fix an old wined up radio a couple of years ago, took me ages to figure what the problem was but when i got it fixed i was offered $100 for it and i found it on a scrap heap.
    there some thing great about taking some thing broken and fixing it up i just love it.

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