Chris Jones

@Gammitin ...come in collections of five.

Simpler times! Hours and hours of fun!

@shortwave78 It's good to see the old girl back in action.

My 🇬🇧Plessey PR 2250 receiver radio is back! 🥳 A serious power supply failure had also damaged the synthesizer module. Now everything is fine. It works great!

@cqcqcqdx If you assume those colours are correct in Europe, you'll have a "shocking" experience

Electrical Wire Color Codes:

@DanielBogdanoff Embedded electronics and firmware: analogue/digital/fpga/signal processing/high speed/power. Everything from schematic design through PCBs, firmware and manufacturing management.

Electrical Engineering Twitter Role Call! If you want a feed full of EE/electronics go though and connect with all the profiles that respond. Add yourself -> post what you do in < 5 words (stealing this idea from⬇️, I love it!)

@MolloyLaurence I want to understand this too. I'm very often working on code that belongs to other people, and I have to respect their intellectual property and privacy.

Does anyone have any pointers to any diagrams explaining what happens with Agentic IDEs when you ask a question of your codebase? I really want to understand what process does what with your data, when and where, both from a data security and an input token perspective.

@ATaylorFPGA @blind_via Software engineering would be very different if typing "make" cost £10k, like it frequently does in hardware engineering.

@blind_via That and hardware is hard, there is no quick iteration and each iteration comes with a very visible $ cost associated with it.

This is because software has consistently stolen Electrical Engineers by giving them more money. I heard it over and over again, people who went to school for electronics end up doing software jobs because they pay more.

@Lord_Arse Yes! We used to get them in the book club at school.

Did you ever read the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books?

@olegkutkov Hear hear. The Linux box I have on my hardware bench has a 4-port PCIe serial card and I love having the real ports available, being able to unplug and replug things without re-enumerating and devices getting stuck.

PCIe to RS232 is essential part of any modern computer

@Tedisiek Congratulations!

It’s been a hectic week. Had a phone call last Friday. It now appears I have a daughter as well as a son. 4 weeks old and so tiny 🤯 Amazing how life changes in a week 🤣

@JohnBrown4x4 Gorgeous. I loved my 300Tdi 110.

Gotta love a Tdi

@PolishPalace @toadmeister The difference I see is that, in general, the UK tax system trusts that the taxpayer is telling the truth, with the threat of an audit only if something looks dodgy. The Polish system doesn't trust the taxpayer and demands crazy detail: the JPK and now the astonishing KSeF.

@mjtech01 @toadmeister ah, you're in Poland. My wife does our tax... but our business is not especially complicated. Hospitality with some classic cars thrown in. The UK's tax manual has notoriously expanded massively over the years. Probably every bureaucracy does this. Including Poland...

Mass immigration and the ethnographic transformation of Britain is one factor in why Lionel Shriver fled to Portugal. But the final straw was HMRC's maddening new requirement to file tax returns five times a year. dailysceptic.org/2026/03/01/why…

@ElecNotes Yes, I learned much of my electronics craft in the 1980s using my dad's old 1950s editions of "Practical Wireless" together with various old valves and components I found in a box in the loft. My first successful radio was based around an EF80 valve with a reaction control.

Did you ever own a valve / tube radio? When I was a schoolboy with little money and people knew of my interest in radio, I would often be given radios by people who said: If you can fix it we'll have it back otherwise you can have it for the bits. Needless to say, with little test equipment and only learning about electronics, I could rarely fix them. But I often spent a lot of my money on parts to try to get them going, only to fail. But what did happen occasionally was I was given something that was working. One such radio was a Decca Portrola 52. This was was a semi-portable radiogram (combination of radio & gramophone) launched in 1952 providing reasonable quality reproduction and long & medium wave radio coverage. I think I was given it around 1966. I could even tune it down to the bottom of the medium wave band and catch the odd amateur radio transmission on 160 metres. I often listenied to the pirate radio stations that were popular around the UK at that time. As for the record player (vinyl player) section, it was rather old and I'm sure I ruined many a vinyl record on it, but it played the music. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the equipment, so this diagram I drew is the best I can do,. Do you have any radios which were part of your youth, and possibly you introduction to radio and technology? #electronics #vintageradio #valves #tubes #vacuumtubes #learningelectronics #electronicsnotes

@PolishPalace @toadmeister Neither have I, to be honest, but I'm basing my prejudices on the Polish one, which gets more and more demanding as time goes on. Maxing Tax Digital is a walk in the park in comparison.

@mjtech01 @toadmeister it's never "the EU" is it? This is something that die hard Brexiters don't get. Each country has its own sovereignty, that thing that Brexiters thought would be repatriated, but hasn't been. The UK, rule takers not rule makers now. (I have no idea about Portugal's tax system)

@PolishPalace @toadmeister If the complexity of the tax system is her main issue, then I suspect she's got an unpleasant shock coming by moving into the EU.

@toadmeister you can't blame her. Life in the EU is so much better. And freer. The UK has long been the bossiest country in Europe. Something the Brexiters didn't get, though we tried to tell them. Post Brexit it seems it's even worse

@RetroNora7734 I had an office in the OMIG building for the first few months of the pandemic. But that meant I never went there, so we parted ways.

TCXO-3 by Unitra OMIG

@tomfleet That's what happens when you put too much data on them. It starts to pile up in one corner and the weight of it bends the PCB. Try to spread the icons on your desktop around more evenly. That should help a bit.

Well, this is new. PC wont turn on today. Remove the lid, and am met with a strange sight. One of my NVMe drives has... Warped?! This was absolutely not like this when I installed it. Nor serviced it a few months back...

@ElecNotes I designed a schematic with lots of SOT23 transistors and diodes on it, then gave the netlist to someone else who did the layout in a different CAD package. Their pin numbering for SOT23 was different to mine, and every single one was wrong.

What is the most expensive mistake you’ve ever made on a PCB design? Was it a swapped footprint, a backward capacitor, or a missed ground plane? Let’s hear your stories below (if you dare own up) 👇

@Tedisiek *two* Thermomix jugs? Na bogato!

Got dinner guests coming. Might as well use every single cooking appliance I can find.

@ArtElectrics My parents' house still has one, where it's been not blowing its rewireable fuses since 1986. And I've got a single-way one, salvaged from a storage heater installation, that I use to switch power to my workbench. Proper protection is upstream but I like the 2-pole Wylex switch!

Here is a very old school consumer unit for you 👀 Ever seen one of these before?

@SystemControl5 @RetroNora7734 Looks like Cadmium plating to me. It used to be very popular but was phased out because the chemicals used to do it are horribly poisonous.

@RetroNora7734 Is that finish on the chassis zinc coating? I wonder why the industry moved away from that, looks great.

The institution of German EBay has done irreversible damage to my wallet. EAW P8000 (8-bit version) poor man version of P8000 16-bit version, multiuser machine running East German version of UNIX (WEGA).