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Engineering delay...


Jim Jannard

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They're not going to answer such specific questions until the product is ready to be released.

 

Just keep your shirt on, hold your horses and sit tight :)

 

Even an email going "We are not ready to share that info" or even a flat out "no" would have been aok. Silence is just a tad fustrating.

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Even an email going "We are not ready to share that info" or even a flat out "no" would have been aok. Silence is just a tad fustrating.

 

Well, cut them some slack right now -- they are really busy. Ask them again once the camera starts shipping.

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Aren't cameras like these: http://www.kinor.ru/products/camera/dc2k/ http://www.kinor.ru/products/camera/dc4k already foreshadowing what's going to happen to the digiCine market and be very serious competition to RED, etc? Anyone know if they are real yet? (Ooo I like my new word. I'll call my own new cam the DigiCine 3000!)

 

 

cam_hsdc_lg.jpg

Edited by Adam Thompson
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Hmm, IMHO.... I design from L- and C-band to X- and Ku-band. people who haven't usually fail because of much tighter tolerances required at higher frequencies which are critical as well choosing cheap and horrible FR4 for circuits instead of good Taconic or Rogers materials because they can save $. Let's put some soldmask on a 2.4GHz line and not bother to calculate the impedance as it now changes because you've sandwhiched the copper between FR4 and soldermask. It can make a huge difference. Attention to detail is required.

 

This is an interesting example of just that.

 

ziggyzaggyyu0.jpg

 

This is a part of the HDMI switching portion of a Chinese made home theater system. They have produced four versions of this, supposed to be 1.65 gigabit per second handling. Some of the boards work, some work a bit, others are useless. The lab prototype probably used such good material as you say, because against the price of making just a few boards, the material cost would be nothing.

 

Then they turn the working design over to the mass producer and they no longer have a working design! Because the cost of the board suddenly becomes important and they use cheap rubbish.

 

I have suggested they start again and don't put any lacquer on the board, or at least not on the balanced line tracks, and THIS time make your damned prototype on the sort of board the manufacturer will be using!

 

I had this problem years ago even with simple consumer equipment with cheap phenolic PC board. You could not get prototype boards made with anything but fiberglass, but when your final product was turned out on phenolic, it didn't always work the way you thought! In the end, I went to the bulk PC board manufacturer and got him to give me some of the phenolic photoresisted board so I could make my OWN damned prototypes!

 

Which was good, because that me hours instead of days and cost nearly nothing as well:-)

 

By the way, how did you come to be posting here? I see you only just joined up.

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This is a part of the HDMI switching portion of a Chinese made home theater system. They have produced four versions of this, supposed to be 1.65 gigabit per second handling. Some of the boards work, some work a bit, others are useless...............Then they turn the working design over to the mass producer and they no longer have a working design! Because the cost of the board suddenly becomes important and they use cheap rubbish.

The Chinese don't seem to be capable of learning the lessons the Japanese got from Dr. Deming. If another emerging industrial nation like India learns those lessons well, the Chinese are toast. There are companies all over the world that would love to get rid of the ulcers they get from the Chinese disregard for quality control as well as their contempt for reliability and trust in business dealings

 

http://www.managementwisdom.com/index.html

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I am guessing the board in question is a high-frequency device. I suspect it may be something even simpler than board-trace impedence. At the rate they are moving data around I bet it could be anything made of metal in the proximity. A standoff, a power cable, anything could act as an antenna.

 

One problem I have seen on boards from every segment of electronics is poorly designed ground planes. They will put a huge ground plane, only to divide it in half because some other line has to traverse the board. That leaves just a small area for the grounded noise to go from one side of the plane to another. I have heard that this small bridge can even set up its own resonance between planes and begin oscilating with the noise. crazy stuff.

 

If I were Jim, and he may have already done this, hire a board designer. There are a lot of good ones out there, I am sure, and I bet that would be the fastest path to market. They have seen it all, and maybe just getting a few fresh eyes on the board could reveal a simple RF problem that everyone overlooked.

 

Could be rudementary and already tried out (or even implimented) but look at LVDS. Better than ballanced pairs (though very very similar) LVDS can move lots of data around a board without inducing crosstalk and is resilient to RF interference. Cheap to impliment too, check out fairchild semi or national semiconductor. They both have LVDS chips availible.

 

also once I had a problem with a board, and just put a small capacitor between the power rails and ground plane....problem solved (not that I think you haven't already thought of that)

 

Good luck...troubleshooting electronics is frustrating when you can't see exactly whats going on (even worse when you can see it, but can't fix it)

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Of course it's possible none of this has any bearing on the problems Jannard is having, but it got an interesting discussion going nonethless! It just goes to illustrate my uncle used to say:

 

"Which one of those valves (tubes) is the most important one in your TV? Well, you take any one of them out and it won't work anymore, so you tell me!"

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Guest Glen Alexander
This is an interesting example of just that.

 

ziggyzaggyyu0.jpg

 

 

Then they turn the working design over to the mass producer and they no longer have a working design! Because the cost of the board suddenly becomes important and they use cheap rubbish.

 

Which was good, because that me hours instead of days and cost nearly nothing as well:-)

 

By the way, how did you come to be posting here? I see you only just joined up.

 

You can use crappy soldermask, problem is if you design for 0.1mm and there are no quality controls and the mask just gets 'dumped' on and the mask flucuates from .1 to .5mm your nicely tuned and designed impedances go to hell real quick. I recently developed some new antennas for WiFi bands 2.4GHz and 4.9 to 5.9GHz and marketing weenies were bitching because I spec'd Rogers4003 or the Taconic equivalent. I won, no soldermask, good material.

 

I'm here because I have some art to make on film and am looking to get some good solid professional advice and on filming. I've used CCD's arrays and custom to detect submarines and stuff in the surf zone, yes i can Zemax until the cows come home but have decided I like 'organic' film look and lenses. To me, film is crafted, digital is manipulated. Just my .02.

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You can use crappy soldermask, problem is if you design for 0.1mm and there are no quality controls and the mask just gets 'dumped' on and the mask flucuates from .1 to .5mm your nicely tuned and designed impedances go to hell real quick. I recently developed some new antennas for WiFi bands 2.4GHz and 4.9 to 5.9GHz and marketing weenies were bitching because I spec'd Rogers4003 or the Taconic equivalent. I won, no soldermask, good material.

 

I'm here because I have some art to make on film and am looking to get some good solid professional advice and on filming. I've used CCD's arrays and custom to detect submarines and stuff in the surf zone, yes i can Zemax until the cows come home but have decided I like 'organic' film look and lenses. To me, film is crafted, digital is manipulated. Just my .02.

 

Well, BOTH are manipulated. It's just that a lot more massage is possible with film. A film image is a supple 17 year old body that can bend every witch way. Video is an old cow with osteoporosis that has to take every step with care :lol:

 

Meanwhile its a mild summer afternoon and Jannard is so silent I hear the crickets chirping down in the garden :rolleyes:

When is he actually going to tell us anything!

The possibility of "never" raises its supple 17 year old head :P

Edited by Werner Klipsch
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We are now officially off the engineering delay.

 

Jim

And, I would suppose, you aren't going to tell us what the problem was. Just out of interest. :lol:

 

I will confess I had to go to Wikipedia to find out who the Steven Soderburgh is! Still better someone with less track record in making money than George Lucas. At least it won't be a production that you could have shot on super-8 and people would go to see it :lol:

 

Since shooting is due to start in just a couple of weeks, he must have originally had some other acquisition scheme in planning. What was it? Genesis? D-20? CineAlta? Dare I should say it - FILM?

 

What about another Superman movie? "Superman Go away and don't Come Back" perhaps?

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