Good morning, or afternoon, or whenever (or wherever) you are viewing this. My name is Gordon Margulieux. After 40+ years as an EE HW/SW/Test engineer with Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology and Garmin AT, I semi-retired to beautiful South Central Idaho, USA. My last full-time job was with Garmin AT in Salem, OR, as a senior EMC engineer. Being retired doesn’t mean we stop doing the things we enjoyed throughout our careers. I want to keep fresh and up-to-date and hopefully pass on some of the things I’ve learned to a small group of students at our local middle/high school where I occasionally substitute teach. As I tell my friends, I’m retired but still active. I have been a member of the Element 14 community almost from its start, but due to my work load in those early years, most of that involvement has been limited.
I know video blogging is not new, but to me it is. In the olden days, individuals like me were told “we have the face for radio” so please bear with as I explore the concept. I will try to keep my video to a minimum for your stake.
My concept in experimenting with a new (at least to me) product is to test its limits and maybe break a few. So like a few other experimenters in this project, I will be put a few of the samples supplied into a slightly elevated environment. The samples are thermal activated switches so elevated temperature is a must, but I expect my method maybe a little different. I also plan on cycling the switches through cycling the heating element. There is one more environment variable I will be adding to my tests, but more about that outlined in my test plan that follows.
My Test Plan -
As mentioned above, I plan on cycling the temperature and monitoring the turn on & off temperatures, but also plan on including the effects of external magnetic fields by the use of a home-made Helmholtz coil. The amplitude of the magnetic field from the Helmholtz coil is limited by the amplitude of the coil current, so I may need to supplement the field with permanent magnetics. In my experiments, I will be testing different orientation of the reed switches. The setup diagram is shown below:
The remote power switch control lines (CTL) can be configured with a jumper to either turn the switched power on when the reed switch is open or closed. The temperature will be monitored using a K-type thermocouple attached to an Agilent (Keysight) U1242A multimeter. The magnetic field setup will be calibrated using the magnetic sensor built into the SiLab’s Thunderboard Sense 2 dev kit.
The actual setup is shown below:
Sincerely,
Gordon Margulieux (a.k.a. gordonmx)
P.S. I sorry for the late blog entry. If appears I have been fighting off a slight case of Covid-19.
