Has never been a believer in buying things off the shelf when building them would do just as well. A few cases in point:<\/p>\n
1) When I was a kid, I used to love Capsella (actually, I still do, and my collection of the stuff now is prodigious, I just never have time to play with it any more). He built me, out of a radio shack kit and some truly ingenous hacks, including drilling appropriate sized holes in screws so that they could be used as terminals for the capsella jumper wires, a remote control for my capsella. <\/p>\n
Later, capsella came out with a commercial remote, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the one he built – it was infrared, for one thing, whereas his was 27Mhz RF..<\/p>\n
2) FOr one of the churches we attended, he built a remote mixing console, complete with multiple modes (preset and remote), a box that you could basically wander around the church with ajusting levels, seperate feedback-removing shelving filters for every one of the inputs, and other features that boggle the mind. Not to mention the ‘supress-the-air-conditioning’ button, which may not have been the best idea because I think the chiller tended to freeze up the lines when they didn’t have air flowing over them at the other end – but used a really interesting hack to take advantage of unused bandwidth on the buzzer lines that notified the ushers when it was time to bring people in.. <\/p>\n
Now, the amazing thing about all this is that *everything* he did there, pretty much, took hours – even tens or hundreds of hours – and in many cases, it was available off the shelf. But, in all of it, he achived a level of craftsmanship I can only aspire to. Whether roll-your-own was the best move or not, you have to admire the quality level he achived in roll-your-own. Once, after getting the power supply for some widget or other put entirely togeather, he realized he had forgotten a fuse. Now, my usual reaction to goofs of this nature is to shrug and figure there’s a circuit breaker in the basement for just that reason, but he actually disassembled the entire mechanical collection o bits, added a fuse, and put it all back togeather – at a cost of some 2 hours, as I recall.<\/p>\n
As I said, quality. And no, he doesn’t read my journal. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
As a side note, I think he got this from my Uncle Joe, who perhaps I should have had more exposure to.. Uncle Joe was a engineer, and in his 60s undertook to build a retaining wall for the creek below his house. several hundred bags of cement later.. well, let’s just say that the retaining wall will outlast the house – and, possibly, the creek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has never been a believer in buying things off the shelf when building them would do just as well. A few cases in point: 1) When I was a kid, I used to love Capsella (actually, I still do, and my collection of the stuff now is prodigious, I just never have time to play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}