Alan Martin, EDN Engineer Extraordinaire

OK, so without any oversight or approval from the Boston gang I have unilaterally declared the existence of the EDN Engineer Extraordinaire award.  There is one judge.  It is me.  That sure cuts thought a lot of voting a red tape.  I hope this doesn’t tic off the suits in Boston since I am going to put the cost of the plaque on my expense report. They should be grateful I did not charge them the 70 bucks for the gala award ceremony at our very own Silicon Valley haven, Building T.  You can see the picture of Alan, the first recipient of the award shortly after it’s presentation by Jim Williams, EDN analog contributing hot shot.

Here is how Alan earned the award.  Our mutual friend, Martin DeLateur, international man of mystery, gave Alan a nice old broken Tektronix 7904 oscilloscope.  Martin told Alan: “Fix this thing and we can take it to the Silicon Valley Electronic Swap meet and flea market and sell it.”  So Alan kept the scope in his truck and then in his garage for about 3 months until Martin got impatient and we all descended on Alan’s house for a Sienfield-style intervention.  See, Alan’s home lab bench had become so cluttered that he could not even work on his own projects much less ours.  So martin and I helped Alan clean his bench off and get organized.  We then tore into the Tek 7904. 

Now Alan has a saying: “It’s always a capacitor”.  He jokes he had told this to Jim
Williams when he worked at Linear Technology and it turned out he was always right.  So we soon figure out the power supply is kaput, just like Alan thought and we open it up and start poking around.  I wanted to lift a leg on a diode I thought was shorted but Alan seemed to know it was a dipped tantalum cap that was shorted.  He pulled it out, replaced it and sure enough the scope came to life.  The whole effort took maybe an hour, plus the three hours to clean off his bench and tell stories and drink beer.

Alan did not notice but I saved the capacitor he replaced. I ordered this nifty plaque from the internet.  I drilled two holes on the top and glued in that bad capacitor.  I then called up Jim Williams, Bob Pease and Barry Harvey from over Intersil way.  Turns out only Jim could make it on short notice but since Alan has such a profound respect for Jim from his day reading Jim’s articles here at EDN I figure that would do just fine.  We all got together at Building T on Tuesday and gave Alan the award.  He was completely surprised.  I could prattle on about how engineers deserve far more credit for making the world a better place but I will just reprint what Alan wrote to us in an email the next day: