[sdiy] testing transistor pairs

[Eric Brombaugh]

John Luciani wrote:
> On 5/4/06, mark adams <sparkymja0 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> testing transistors  NPN's 3083, 1583, ssm2210 etc.. linear to expo 
>> voltage
>> to current conversion.
>>
>> spit out ic versus vbe plots on a curve tracer.  problem curve tracer 
>> spits
>> out more than oneof these plots at a time.
>>
>> trying now to  take the logarithm of ic points  to recover a straight 
>> line
>> so that I can see some variation. Get the data that slides off the
>> exponential curve.
>>
>> Any thoghts?
>
> Perl ;-)
Hear Hear!

Perl is one of the most useful tools in my kit. I'd lump it in there 
with C and Matlab as things that every EE ought to have some familiarity 
with. A couple years back John Cooley had this to say:

"And one of the most embarrassing problems I've found at client sites is 
when some of their key engineers on a troubled project really don't know 
Perl." 
http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/columns/industry_gadfly/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17407920

If you know some Perl you can tear apart any text file thrown at you, 
rearrange it, analyze it and do useful things with the results. I've 
even used it for things like computing wavetables and running simple 
discrete-time simulations. It's fast, flexible and very forgiving.

The downside is that it's a very rich language and although easy to 
start, difficult to master. I've been using it for five or six years and 
still consider myself a n00b.

Too  much information? :)

Eric