Science/Engineering/Technical forums

My name is David Speck, and I found this forum by a link from the Fusor.net forum. I have been a long time follower of the Tesla mailing list as well.

I've had a life long interest in things electronic, especially if they glow nicely. I do eye surgery for a living, but electronics for fun. (If you try to do medicine for fun, they put you in jail!)

I have the parts for a fusor, but no space or time to assemble one. Another dream is to recreate "The World's Largest Cosmic Ray Spark Chamber" that I saw at the 1964-65 NY World's Fair. See:

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/index.php?showtopic=3353&hl=%20spark%20%20chamber&st=0

Right now, the joys of solo practice make it easier for me to accumulate components than to put things together, but I can still dream. I have a large collection of NIM and CAMAC equipment, some of which actually works.

Right now, one pursuit I am chasing is to find documentation for a LeCroy "Magic" CAMAC controller. I'd love to discuss CAMAC implementations with someone who's had experience with them. I have a great number of CAMAC modules (an entire car full, to be precise) that were given to me, but no documentation on any of them, and all the manufacturers and the requisite documentation seems to have disappeared. I wonder if anyone has had any luck deducing their command sequences without an operator's manual.

I'll look forward to following the exploits of the list.

Dave Speck

Wow, I almost can't believe that! I was *there* myself, helping demo my Dad's "EVA" design from Melpar -- The "Electronic Voice Analog" which was the forerunner of all modern speech bandwidth compression codecs. Back in that day, there wasn't much digital stuff around, it was mostly analog, but got pretty good bit compression for encryption (for the Navy).

I was also more impressed with that spark chamber than just about anything else there -- we might have bumped elbows at that one. Someday, just for grins, I'd love to make one myself. In my dream world, I'd be able to do it with something like conductive glass so you could see through the whole thing as it worked - Martha Stewart, eat your heart out, you can't make this coffee table ornament! Sadly, it probably wouldn't last too long as the sparks would probably pit the glass and make marks, if not evap the ITO or whatever, but it sure would be cool!

This evolved from the main difficulty these things have -- getting flat enough plates. Glass tends to be really flat when you get it, and smooth besides....

Anyway, welcome! We have a lot of forums here to kinda try and keep things classified and easy to search for. We are at this time concentrating on things people actually did -- things from the horse's mouth, so to speak. We have some trash forums for "talk about anything" and those self-erase after awhile so we don't clutter the "meat" parts. If I've missed a category (likely) then let me know....we'll try and fit all practical science/tech in here somehow without making the tree too complex.