Paul Rako now edits Design Ideas

Paul, my congrats on your new assignment! Wish you best of luck in keeping this vital EDN column up and running. Kind regards - Alex Bell, NYC (EDN veteran writer/reader :)

Paul, I'd want to add the following request. Please, keep more attention on quality of circuit diagrams. Using of OrCAD and scrutiny would be good way for it. I say about it, because a few my ideas (and not only my) have been published with mistakes in Figures. Once one of figures was missing in the final printing copy. I understand it was my faults, too. But ... In my country we say "one head is good, but two head are the best" especially if it is the head of such engineer as you.

Congratulation on your on the new work field. I am one from EDN DI's contributors. I hope this interesting column will have new face and content. I have in view that circuits "with 3 resistor and one diode" will not occupy too much on DI's pages. I agree with you that DIs must be DIs.
Have a nice work!

Congratulations, Paul! I look for great things from you, as usual. I know you will enhance the quality of the Design Ideas published.

Okay, Paul, got a good case for you, a nice gray area. National Semi Linear Brief 5 (March 1969, search on the web for High Q Notch filter) shows a notch filter with an adjustable Q (figure 3). Now go to EDN March 3, 2005 issue and Design Ideas--"Bandpass filter features adjustable Q and constant maximum gain". Take a look at figure 1 and compare. All the group from Spain did was add a summing amp to the National Circuit to turn it from a notch to a bandpass. It's fairly obvious idea (I was just about to do that when I found these links), so it is or isn't it a 'Design Idea'?

Paul, In response to those who don't like manufacturers entries, how about another name for them, since some of them are really great, although some are not. And even the ones that are sort of obvious, but come from college students in other parts of the world, can be educational. Such as "high-speed counter built from CD4001 quad-nor gates". It is educational to see that there are other ways of making things work, besides using a custom ASIC. As for the anti-spam qualifiers, how about some simple math, (add the second and fourth numbers), which a spam machine could not figure out.

Maybe Paul R should consider the power of an expert forum in rating what designs are fit for publication. Man-centuries of expertise and judgement would/could/should accompany final designs.
As one of those grizzled EE veterans, I have seen some rather naive and appnote-like designs of late in Design Ideas, with not much cleverness a la Williams, Pease, or Woodward.
Ratings and raters themselves would be rated, with no anonymity allowed. Habitual plagiarizers, trolls, or ratings abusers would be put on probation, banned later if protracted.

Paul: The Design Ideas are one of my favorite parts of the magazine, bar none.
WRT commenting, I've had numerous difficulties. I think pulling the text into Notepad (or Outlook) to hold while I'm trying to feed it into the comment system works as well as anything.
Regards to all.

Congratulations on becoming editor of the Design Ideas section, Paul! It's my favorite part of the magazine.
On ideas for improvements:
I routinely cut out the good ones and save them in a file. So it would be nice if you don't put them back-to-back. Fill the partial-page space between them with ads. (That's what you usually do anyway. :-)
It's important that the idea be completely presented. No "Here's a great idea; go to this website for details." It shouldn't depend on a software listing or board layout in some obscure format or from a website that won't be available a year from now. If it's a software design idea, at least publish the gist of the algorithm, so it will make sense even if the web page is gone or unusable.
You may not be the patent office; but you should look at the ideas like a patent examiner. There needs to be at least one clever unique idea that isn't obvious. If one person builds a yes/no "executive decision maker" with a 555 timer, it isn't clever unique or unobvious to replace the 555 with a micro.
I too hate manufacturer advertisements thinly disguised as design ideas. Same old circuit, but with their $1 chip instead of an industry standard $0.25 chip.
Finally, look at some of the old "Electronic Circuits Sourcebooks" by John Markus. He really mastered the art of collecting clever circuits. A single page might have six unique ideas for ways to solve a particular problem, with just the circuit and a single paragraph on each.

Paul -- Go Luck on the new challenge. I know I'm somewhere in that new backlog of yours....however, I do know that quicker response (even if it is 'what the...is this?') will encourage more submissions, at least from me.

I think the idea of being "banned" is a bit harsh; not everyone has a photographic memory of the last 30 years of EDN design ideas. What about a significantly different application of previous circuitry? That get you banned too? If someone submitted a circuit from the Markus book, "Modern Electronic Circuits Reference Manual" pg 741, previously published in EDN Oct 1, 1971 - enough to get you banned? (You could just say no one designs with SCRs anymore...)

I don't comment on EDN often, but on all submission forms everywhere, I 'Ctrl-A, Crtl-C, End' to save it to clipboard before submitting because I have lost far too many comments/complaints/reviews when I didn't, who knows why, it is just a very common problem. I use ClipX to extend my clipboard, that helps if I don't notice the loss immediately.
On some blogs some commenters always post twice in quick succession, is that due to double clicking the button?

Hi Paul,
Congratulation on your new challenge.
I would like to make two requests/suggestions.
1) Please get all Design Ideas into a searchable data base, including stuff from
before the magazine had a PDF existence (If that means scanning back issues, I
would be glad to help)
2) I would like to see less ideas from vendors that just show off their chip.
These are just app notes. (I guess you could have a new feature called "recent
app notes" with a link to vendor sites). If you still continue with these
vendor submissions, a particularly annoying aspect is the ones that come from a
boutique vendor, for whom getting parts is a major chore.
Cheers,
Philip

There's a timeout set up by those "IT GENIUSES" that Rako gives excessive accolades to. If you spend time reading the blog, you've spent too much time to enter a comment. What I do is write, then ctrl-x my comments text, refresh the page, ctrl-v the comments back in and submit immediately. That gets rid of that asinine timeout. Margery's blog is especially notorious for timing out.
Rako - you need to ask or a standard format submissions - formats you can IMPORT - to not only save time, but to eliminate redraw errors. I built a 100W Ampzilla (eiter that or a Tiger...i don't remember) from scratch, including etching boards, in high school - back when 20W MOSFETS were a buck a watt. I plugged in and popped all four. The editor of Popular Electronics (or Radio Electronics, not sure anymore) decided to "pretty" the schematic and f'd up the bias circuit...as a kid, I just ASSumed it would work as drawn. The irony is they made the PCB recommended layout from that redrawn schematic. I wound up popping another set of FETs and gave up - bought the kit....made with, and from, the original schematics.

Bandini, there are two shortcomings with the comment system. One, sometimes the CAPTCHA is not properly applied and your message is rejected. The second "shortcoming" is that comments do not instantly show up anymore. I suspect that is a design decision to ward off spammers. I recommend that you keep on commenting, but just develop the new reflex that I have had to develop. That is, do a CTRL-A, CTRL-C (select all, copy) and paste it into a notepad application. I have found that all my posts that got past the captcha eventually were posted.

@commenting wasts.

I too thought my comments were not getting posted, but what happened is that we started putting the latest comments at the top, right under the post, not the right above the comment box. If you get the page that says “Your comments has been received” I have never had it not get posted. The only comments that I delete are spam comments for mail enhancement and such and any comments that are abusive or flame-war material, and you sound like a reasonable person, so I don’t think that is the problem. This comment of yours sure posted..

Also, even when you get the page that says your comment has been added, for now, we have to run a chron job so that your comment won’t appear for 10 or even 20 minutes..

The other thing I have had make my comments not show ups is that I use noScript to blog JavaScript. Every blog I know of, Wordpress, Movable Type, NSTien, Joombla, you name it, needs JavaScript to work. So if you have JavaScript turned off you will just get a blank page instead of one that says “Your comment has been received.”.

The only other thing that I can see that would limit comments is that you have some insane high setting for security in your browser..

My management is sure talking your comment seriously. Can you tell us any specifics about your browser or anything else that happens?.

Oh, there is one weird thing we do on article comments, not blog comments. For an article, when the comments go past the tenth one or so, it gets cut off and to see them you have to click on any comment to go to the “talk-back” page,and then there is a “Next” link that you can scroll to all the comments. We know this is schwacked, when we got 70 comments on my Bob Pease and Jim Williams obituaries, a lot of people thought their comment was lost, when it really was just on the talk-back comment page. So we are certainly working on changing this, but all web development takes time and this is a big change. Don’t blame us, it was our former owners who sold us to UBM that did this, and we don’t like it either..

And folks, do you have trouble publishing comments?

Paul, best of luck to you, this is a big assignment. I don't think the readers of Design Ideas have any idea of how much work it takes to edit them and get them in shape for publication: "if it looks easy, it's only because you have never done it yourself."
Bill Schweber, Planet Analog/Power Management Desingline/Medical Designline at EETimes (UBM)

I take the occasional time to "comment" and then see it never published - waste of my time, and I wonder how many others? Bye. Bandini.