What’s the coolest piece of tech you got the chance to interact with on your job?

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Location 57.1511 N, -170.2501 W

U.S. Coast Guard Loran Station St Paul, Saint Paul Alaska. This was a one-month temporary assignment where they needed an experienced transmitter technician to cover while the replacement was identified.

St. Paul is certainly cold. The diesel engines purred, and the transmitter was a wonder of technology. The transmitter’s water cooled F1086 vacuum tubes were the highlight of the tour.

Note: This post is part of DigiKey’s celebration of engineering week. The question was selected from social media feeds.

The coolest piece of tech is the one that inspires you

What would you do on an island 300 miles past the point of nowhere?

One month isn’t a long time. As far as professional duties were concerned, it was appropriate to maintain the status quo to provide continuity for the new technical supervisor.

To keep busy, I purchased the equipment necessary to program the PIC16C71 as shown in this picture. This included a laptop, two ceramic chips, a UV erasure, several books describing the PIC and a collection of parts: some from DigiKey and some from Radio Shack.

Figure 1: Image of the author’s first microcontroller project.
Figure 1: Image of the author’s first microcontroller project.1205×904 170 KB

Figure 1: Image of the author’s first microcontroller project. The LEDs would move back and forth with a brief tone emitted once every cycle.

For that entire month, I dedicated myself to learning PIC 16 programming. That’s over 100 hours dedicated to a single task. I learned assembly language techniques for functions, jumps, and acceptable program organization.

Years later, I discovered that I had done things the hard way as the very first program featured a timer-based Interrupt Service Routing (ISR). Concepts such as saving the microcontroller’s context (W and status registers) and polling for the source of the interrupt were among the first lessons learned.

The 8-bit Microchip PIC will always be the coolest piece of tech because it was an essential learning process that reshaped the way I thought about technology. In one month, I learned some of the most valuable lessons in electronics that started me on the journey to my current position at DigiKey.

The time spent with the PIC16 microcontroller was as profound as first learning how to compute Ohm’s law. This was also a wonderful lesson in interpreting microcontroller data sheets.

Parting thoughts

The PIC16 is forever part of my story.

I’d love to hear your answer—what’s the coolest piece of tech you got the chance to interact with.

By the way, in northern Minnesota it is perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition, especially when it’s too cold outside to worry about grammar. We just say, “Do you want to come with?” It’s much easier that saying, “Will you please take a moment to share your story to inspire the future generation of engineers?”

Sincerely,

Aaron

Figure 2: Image of a F1086 vacuum tube.
Figure 2: Image of a F1086 vacuum tube.389×586 25.9 KB

Image of a F1086 vacuum tube which is the hottest piece of technology I have ever worked with.

About this author

Aaron Dahlen, LCDR USCG (Ret.), serves as an application engineer at DigiKey. He has a unique electronics and automation foundation built over a 27-year military career as a technician and engineer which was further enhanced by 12 years of teaching (interwoven). With an MSEE degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato, Dahlen has taught in an ABET-accredited EE program, served as the program coordinator for an EET program, and taught component-level repair to military electronics technicians. Dahlen has returned to his Northern Minnesota home and thoroughly enjoys researching and writing articles such as this.

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Interesting story, @APDahlen.
I haven’t seen that type of veroboard before. Seemingly optimized for DIL packages. Didn’t know PICs were once UV-erasable. How did you regulate the supply voltage?

During pre-professional era, the coolest thing for me was probably Z80 (Zilog). Had no chance to play with the actual HW, thus learned the assembler by writing code using paper and pencil. Was dreaming to own one day Luxor’s ABC80, containing the Z80. That never happened. The first CPU to run compiled assembly code was then Intel’s 8085 (on Nokia MikroMikko 1). That was cool as well.
During the professional era the coolest tech piece (so far) is probably HP’s 8510 VNA. Bulky, but fun to use of. A real instrument. A legend.
Cheers, heke

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Hello @heke,

Did I hear the Z80 (original form factor) was going to be discontinued? I wonder how many people learned on this chip.

I also wonder how many of today’s student learn assembler.

Back in the "good old days i had one PIC in the project and one under the UV light. The turnaround time between successive programming was about 2 minutes. Never was I so happy as when I changed to flash.

Regulation - 3 AA batteries or a 7805.

The board was from Radio Shack - designed to match their single rail breadboards. This is the same idea as this modern part.

I once visited the HP factory near Santa Rosa California. I don’t remember if they made HP’s 8510 VNA at that facility, but they did have a fiber optics line and a spectrum analyzer line.

Cordially,

Aaron

P.S. Regarding HP, of all the instruments, I’ve spent more time with 5061 and 5071 than any other. Tick tock!

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HP 8753A - Vector Network Analyzer (300kHz-3 GHz)

Wow, this amazing instrument was the perfect complement to the field that I entered as a junior engineer assisting in the development of MRI radio receivers. The instrument’s ability to measure signals and gains across a wide specrum became our critical window into the RF world for successful designs.

8753a-vna
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For me personally, the Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) helped spark 3 mental evolutions in the following areas:

  1. Connections - The simple connecting lines I saw in textbook circuits or block diagrams, now demanded great care and effort to maintain impedances and terminations to pass / measure RF signals accuractly. Funny how the reflection diagrams in my transmission line course that once seemed a bit abstract to me, now meant something significant!

  2. Components - During my EE education, I took the RLC symbols and values at face value. Now, my young EE mind was blown: Cs with series L, Ls with parallel C, Rs with both! While my over simplified circiut simulation showed an ideal response across the spectrum, the VNA revealed a behavior with unexpected peaks, valleys and artifacts that warranted a higher level of understanding of these components.

  3. Instruments - I began to see the VNA as a marvel of design. Initially, I naively wondered how does the VNA measure signals directly at such high frequncies? However, the block diagram revealed a smarter strategy: all frequencies are first heterodyned down to a single intermediate frequency and then to DC for many practical reasons. Whoa! I entered a land of giants - tall thinkers and doers who understood the fundamentals of measurements and techniques at a deep level. The VNA had sparked a higher level of wonder, passion and joy of learning for me.

Wielding the VNA was an exciting, insightful and humbling experience. You could spend a lifetime studying this multifaceted beast: oscillators, mixers, reflection bridges, filters, data converters, control loops as well as noise, linearity, numerical algorithms and still have room for learning and further development.

The overall experience also served as a tough bootcamp that prepared me for critical future designs where component behaviors and measurements felt familiar and less intimidating.

What’s cool about any of these instruments is their ability extend our insight, capabilty and passion in our field.

Rick
eCircuit Center

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Hello @RickAnalogF1,

Score!

Did I tell you that I spent 27 years on the U.S. Coast Guard.

There were only a few times that I was tempted to depart the service. Once was after I visited a HP factory near Santa Rosa, CA. They manufactured a related spectrum analyzer and fiber optic equipment. It was amazing to watch the workers assemble the units. The oscillators were especially challenging as an arm of workers constructed and then adjusted the modules under dual lens magnifiers.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Sincerely,

Aaron

P.S. The other time was for a position with Eimac vacuum tubes in the Bay Area.

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