[sdiy] Is everything digital?

[Tim Daugard]

> My electronics education taught me that "digital" circuitry had a
discrete
> number of normal states (that is, ignoring any malfunction of the
> equipment, etc). By far, the most common digital circuitry in use
today is
> binary digital circuitry. There should be no reason we couldn't
> *theoretically* have digital circuitry with a billion possible voltage
> states. I've personally seen trinary digital circuitry, and I'm sure
that
> other circuitry has been built with four or more discrete voltage
levels.

I built a foot pedal switch board that uses trinary "logic". Two wires
and ground result in nine distinct states. It uses transistors to set
levels and opamps to decode the levels. This is digital? right.

> So, perhaps "digital" isn't a totally incorrect word? I would agree
that
> quantized is also a good term to use.

My next switch board projuct was going to go for 8 states on 1 wire and
ground. This means I can use a standard guitar cable to control eight
signal paths.

I don't know who started this conversation - Earthlink was down
yesterday and I think I didn't see the orginal message, but I hope I'm
on track.

Tim Daugard
AG4GZ 30.4078N 86.6227W Alt: 3.7 M
http://home.sprintmail.com/~daugard/synth.htm