OT: Where did you get your start?

"Chris.Gammell" wrote:
> I was just wondering how everybody got their start in DSP.

I started out using ADSP-21xx chips as fast microcontrollers in
telecom applications, mainly because their serial ports interfaced
more or less directly with our serial backplane. Some of our
interfaces handled digital data, some voice and some high-quality
audio. We eventually started putting more and more of the audio
signal processing and timing management into the DSP firmware.

-- Dave Tweed

Gary Sokolich wrote:
> In fact, you are so technically 
> inept that not too long ago you had to go begging in sci.physics for 
> someone to lead you hand in solving a simple second-order partial 
> differential equation that is discussed in virtually every introductory 
> textbook on acoustics.  

Moron.  It was a *non-linear* differential equation and it derived from 
_my_ analysis of the problem.  (If you can show priority on that 
analysis please do so.)  Where else do you think the distortion 
components could have come from?  If you didn't understand that when you 
saw it you don't have any business talking about it.  You never did 
understand a thing about the problem.

> Worse yet, you were ultimately told by Zigoteau, 
> your hand-holder in sci.physics, that you really had no idea what you were 
> doing.  

You got that much right.  I had no idea how to find a solution to that 
equation and needed help.  Zigoteau immediately saw the correct 
formulation and the expansion required for an approximate solution and 
couldn't understand why I didn't.  Ah, well.

It must be cool to be like Gary Sokolich and never, ever need help with 
anything.  It must not be cool, though, to have such a mortal fear of 
being wrong that it prevents you from ever offering any help or any 
technical substance to a discussion either.

BTW, Gary, have you seen this:

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate 
telecommunications or other types of communications that are 
transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing 
his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any 
person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 
or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

 From H.R.3402 signed into federal law 1/5/2006


Bob
-- 

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler."

                                              A. Einstein

Jerry Avins wrote:

> I'd like to say "Now I are one," [...]

That expression looks weird to a non-native speaker. What does it 
mean?


Martin

-- 
Quidquid latine scriptum sit, altum viditur.

Martin Eisenberg wrote:
> Jerry Avins wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'd like to say "Now I are one," [...]
> 
> 
> That expression looks weird to a non-native speaker. What does it 
> mean?

There was a wry slogan, sometimes seen on a tee shirt: "Fore years ago, 
I cudn't even spell 'ingeneer'; now I are one." It was a parody of 
liberal arts types thinking that technical == stupid. I'm pleased to see 
that nerds are now in style.

Somewhere, I wrote about the psych major from Brooklyn College whose 
thesis was that people went into engineering because they couldn't hack 
Shakespeare and Kant, and asked me, as President of our Tau Beta Pi 
chapter, to help her with her study. She changed her tune when she got 
the results.

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

Martin Eisenberg wrote:

> Jerry Avins wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'd like to say "Now I are one," [...]
> 
> 
> That expression looks weird to a non-native speaker. What does it 
> mean?
> 
> 
> Martin
> 

It means he has a long memory for bad jokes.

The complete quotation, as I heard it as a freshman engineering student 
in 1961, was "I used to couldn't spell enginuur, now I are one". 
[Grammar and spelling errors part of quote.]

Richard Owlett wrote:

>   ...  "I used to couldn't spell enginuur, now I are one". 

OK. Have it your way. :-)

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:31:39 -0600, "Chris.Gammell" <cjg11@case.edu>
wrote:

>Hey all,
>
>I was just wondering how everybody got their start in DSP. I am personally
>geting mine by working with FPGAs and Simulink tools. Also, I am working my
>way into hand coding DSP chips (hence the reason I'm here!). Anyway, just
>wondering, as I think it's interesting to know where people came from and
>such. I hope to especially hear from the *ahem* experienced (prominent,
>older, whatever) members. Thanks!
>
>Chris

I had the good fortune of graduating from college during the Reagan
years when jobs were plentiful.  All I was interested in at the time
was getting to do some interesting digital design work, and wound up
at Goodyear Aerospace helping to design gate-level implementations of
synthetic aperture radar processing algorithms.   It was an ideal
first job for me and I loved it.   I hadn't been especially interested
in signal processing until then, I'd even thought it was a bit too
esoteric for my taste, but I really enjoyed it.

Like some other folks here, I've not spent much of my career working
with programmable DSP chips, although I have done some of that.   Most
of it has been either research, systems work, or RTL design to twiddle
bits in useful ways.

Can't complain too much, I guess.  ;)



Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms, Intel Corp.
My opinions may not be Intel's opinions.
http://www.ericjacobsen.org

Richard Owlett wrote:

> Martin Eisenberg wrote:
>
>> Jerry Avins wrote:
>> 
>>>I'd like to say "Now I are one," [...]
>> 
>> That expression looks weird to a non-native speaker. What does
>> it mean?
>
> It means he has a long memory for bad jokes.

Well, Jerry's got a long memory, and those things we least
desire to carry around have a way of sticking best...

> The complete quotation, as I heard it as a freshman engineering
> student in 1961, was "I used to couldn't spell enginuur, now I
> are one". [Grammar and spelling errors part of quote.]

Thanks, you two!


Martin

-- 
Quidquid latine scriptum sit, altum viditur.

Chris.Gammell wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was just wondering how everybody got their start in DSP. I am personally
> geting mine by working with FPGAs and Simulink tools. Also, I am working my
> way into hand coding DSP chips (hence the reason I'm here!). Anyway, just
> wondering, as I think it's interesting to know where people came from and
> such. I hope to especially hear from the *ahem* experienced (prominent,
> older, whatever) members. Thanks!

If you include "noisy" on the list, I might qualify to answer...?

My working carreer started with a summer vacancy at a metal factory
when I
was 18. My job was to monitor and run the furnaces, and we had
basically
a computer that plotted various measurements to help us find out the
state
of the furnace. So my first job was applied data analysis and
interpretation.
I learned very early on the hazards of getting things wrong. On one
occation
I was -- literally -- a mere 50 cm from burning to death, a situation I
got myself
into because we were not able to see or interpret some very subtle
clues in
the measurements, that just MIGHT have warned us, had we seen them.

Or maybe not.

Then I went to college, starting out in a computer science class. The
first year
was spent learning the basics of electrical engineering and digital
computers,
the second was spent learning the internal workings on the 8086/80286
(and
corresponding maths processors) microprocessors. By the start of the
third
year, the 386 was released and I found it ridiculous to spend six
months learning
a new microprocessor, only to have to do it again a year later. So I
started
to see what the computer could be used for. Hence, I discovered DSP.

After that, I went to university and so on, focusing on applied DSP,
and later
on DSP applied to acoustics and seismics. As for me, the focus has
always
been on the application. Somebody have a task they want to get done,
and
there is a risk as well as a cost, associated with attempting to get
the job done.
I have always focused on getting the job done while minimizing the cost
AND
the risk, which is a bit odd amongst the people I have worked with. A
lot of
other people (most?) don't think the risk is a lot to worry about, but
that
almost-burned incident very early on may have "twisted" my mind in that

respect.

Rune

Chris.Gammell wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was just wondering how everybody got their start in DSP. I am personally
> geting mine by working with FPGAs and Simulink tools. Also, I am working my
> way into hand coding DSP chips (hence the reason I'm here!). Anyway, just
> wondering, as I think it's interesting to know where people came from and
> such. I hope to especially hear from the *ahem* experienced (prominent,
> older, whatever) members. Thanks!
>
> Chris

Well, since everybody else is dusting off their old stories,
mine combines this thread and "Now I are wun"...

Working as a computer tech at NASA Bermuda (tough duty)
in the late '60s, I learned to program the RCA 4101 computer
used to compute antenna pointing information from NORAD
Orbital Elements and wound up being reassigned to Goddard
Space Flight Center to take over the programming at the 3
NASA sites where these were installed: Bermuda, Tanarive,
Madagascar, and Carnarvon, Australia.

Some scientist wallahs from NRL were trying to identify
interstellar water vapor sources to be used for a proposed
passive submarine navigation system.  The 9-meter dish of the
radar had a very high surface smoothness and the location at
Carnarvon made an excellent site for the examination of the
Southern Hemisphere sky for such sources so I was requested
to write a sidereal tracking program for the antennas, which
took about 3 months.

The first test of the system was scheduled for Bermuda and I
was sent down to support them.  The radar crew installed the
NRL horn and receiver at the focal point of the antenna and ran
cable the signal cable down to the slip rings (Az/El mount).
The NRL folks hooked the other end of the signal cable to an
integrating strip recorder.  I pointed the antenna at the RA / DEC
position of a known source and we sat down to drink coffee and
wait while the pen plotted a series of flat lines on yards of paper
until finally a bump started to appear and became, over time, a
bell-shaped curve of the averaged signal of the source.

After 2 hours of looking at the recorder, I asked the NRL guys
what could be done to detect the presence of a desired signal
more quickly and they said that integrating the RMS of the
signal would speed the process up significantly. It occurred
to me that the 4101 also collected receiver signal strength from
the radar receiver via 12-bit A/D converters, of which it had
several to spare (at a rack apiece) so I asked them how one
would mathematically do an RMS (duh).

By the end of the night I had coded, in assembly language, a
program that computed the RMS of a 12-bit A/D value and
output the result via D/A to our radar strip-chart recorder.  The
next day, as the NRL folks slept, we connected the output of
their receiver to a spare A/D and the second night night we spent
10 minutes detecting a source that had taken us about an hour
to spot the previous night.

That was in 1970.  My first hands-on with a DSP chip was the
AD-21062 in 2000 doing high-precision laser ranging using the
BittWare library.

Regards,
Ken Asbury