[sdiy] Making an 8038 not suck

[Aaron Lanterman]

Hi there,

One of my students is interested in playing around with the ICL8038. I'd 
be interested in doing something useful since there is a ton of them 
sitting around in a random drawer in one of the labs that hasn't been 
touched in ages, probably.

I know they have a limited sweep range, and inherently linear control, and 
have been generally declared to suck, but I still thought it would be a 
useful student exercise to see what they could coax out of it. Normally I 
would steer them elsewhere, but we have so many 8038s sitting around 
unused...

Two quick questions:

1) I recalled Thomas Henry was able to decrease the amount of suck in the 
8038 my some cleverness. His site, sadly, is long gone, but I found a 
discussion on the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20031014162445/www.midwest-analog.com/diylvco.html

Sadly, the schematic is not achived. Does anyone have that?

2) The SDIY archives make reference to an electronotes article in which 
someone rigs a 8038 to use exponential control. I just went through my 
electronote collection up to around 1982 and couldn't find the article, 
but that is a LOT of electronotes to go through and a lot of the material 
is buried in weird ways (and the early electronotes don't have tables of 
contents), so I could easily have missed it.

Anyone know what EN issue this is in, if it exists at all? Or even a 
ballpark guess of what year to look in?

3) Any other ideas for decreasing the suck in a 8038?

- Aaron

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.
and Demetrius T. Paris Junior Prof.    Voice:  404-385-2548
College of Electrical and Comp. Eng.   Fax:    404-894-8363
Georgia Institute of Technology        E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
Mail Code 0250                         Web:    users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma
Atlanta, GA 30332                      Office: Centergy 5212