Re: gEDA-user: Design Lab Equipment

[al davis <ad136@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 31 March 2007 15:57, John Griessen wrote:
> Mainly though, no one is going to succeed with a kit product
> based on anything but high performance and quality. Competing
> on cost by having low quality won't work. 

What is "quality"?

It depends what you want to do.  It is like software.  If the 
free/open-source kit offers something, it could be successful.  
I am not talking about competing with Agilent, Tektronix, or 
Fluke.

The idea is to make simple equipment of the kind you might wish 
for that isn't available.

How about .,,..  transistor curve tracer.  How much do they 
cost?  Why doesn't every college EE department have one on 
every bench? 

The professional ones are very expensive.  Heathkit used to make 
one that was cheap and good.  It didn't have the voltage and 
current range of the expensive ones, and it used a separate 
oscilloscope for display.  Thinking of a college lab, if it 
goes to 30 volts, 100 ma, that's plenty.  It is easy to do 
better than that.

Having been a professor, and taught many college labs, I see 
many opportunities like this.

> I see this as one 
> of the unsolved problems in the marketplace, where ordinary
> Fluke meters are a "solved problem" that I and any of us
> niche market operators should not attempt to touch.  Or get
> burned.

An alternative to the Fluke meters is not one of those 
opportunities, unless it is part of meeting a goal of a 100% 
free/open-source lab and the rest of it is already done.


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