A Page from the Past

Every great product begins with some good design ideas and guidelines. The OrCAD suite of EDA design tools started out with the Schematic Design Tool (SDT) in 1984, a modest yet promising beginning no doubt. OrCAD went on to take the PCB design industry by storm after its PCB and VST products made their appearances, giving the average hardware design engineer a powerful EDA tools on an affordable PC platform instead of an expensive workstation.

Thanks to OrCAD founders John Durbetaki, Ken Seymour, and Keith Seymour for their pioneering vision and daring venture into unchartered waters. Thirty years later, there is now a thriving Old Dos OrCAD community that makes these amazing tools freely available to everyone, complete with original user and reference manuals. All you need is a virtual PC installed that runs on MS-DOS and you're good to go!

 

Of Jigs and Gigs

To be honest, writing can be fun yet demanding. Fun in the sense I got to decide on the content and style; demanding because it's a fine line I'm walking to balance fact and humor, both of which are essential for an overall enjoyable reading experience. For chapter 3, Building Test Jigs, I have interjected some gigs in the form of TCM analogy and personal anecdotes.

Here's a two-page sample:

I would like to take this opportunity to appeal to readers who have bought my books to also leave a comment on the Amazon product page (if you have not already done so). Your feedback is important to let me know if I'm doing it right (my style of writing), as well as a morale boost for me.

A little encouragement goes a long way, especially for a writer like me. You, my readers, are the only real people in an author's world and works. Some have become companions to me in this lonely journey of mine, for which I am most grateful.

Stay safe and well, my friends!

Let's Go On Dutch!

Just three days after I mentioned about new readers from Poland, I was notified that there was a purchase from the remaining Amazon online bookstore in the Netherlands.

Of course, readers from countries outside of the twelve Amazon presence can still order my books via its nearest online bookstore without too much hassle. And as much as I can tell from the 129 flags in the visitors counter, I have no idea on the exact countries my readers came from. If you're one of those who are following my blog, do leave a comment and let me know. It would be a great motivation to authors like myself.

Thank you and stay well and safe in these uncertain times, my friends!

 

Basic Diagnostic Skills

Had been working on Chapter 3 of my book titled Basic Diagnostic Skills and realized that there is so much to cover it took longer than expected. Thankfully, I'm putting the finishing touch for the Summary end and will proceed to write the next chapter soon.

Here's a two-page sample:

The challenge is how to balance the content so that it covers the essentials without overbearing on a topic of interest. I would suspect that as I write the rest of the chapters, I may revisit and revise some of the earlier contents when inspiration strikes. That has happened for the last five engineering books I wrote and this one won't be the exception either.

So stay tune for more updates.