1. Foreword

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I decided to create this website as a form of autobiography of various projects and interests I have followed in my life, written in a way I hope is interesting and informative for others who may be considering similar adventures.

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A word of warning - unlike most websites, this one isn't refined with colourful pages and pretty diagrams. I simply don't have the time to do this, so you will find many unrefined photographs of pages from the personal logbooks I keep for each project. These are to assist others who have similar equipment issues - I thought it would be better to offer the information as it is rather than nothing at all. For now, I hope you will forgive the untidiness but hopefully benefit from the raw content.

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By far the most detail is in the description of my current pet scientific project to build a personal LIBS (Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) system to reveal the elemental composition of matter.
 

REFERENCES SECTION

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Do please utilise my References Glossary that hopefully provides definitions for all acronyms throughout this website. It may at first appear pedantic but is there to introduce as many people as possible to my fields of interest regardless of their level of knowledge. The LHC project in particular spans several scientific disciplines and is largely meaningless without the assistance of a glossary.
 

However I fully recognise the inconvenience of this and I hope to implement a floating help feature similar to Wikipedia. First I have to learn html!

The Links sections contain a vast number of URLs to scientific papers and documents covering many topics.

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SI UNITS

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Pedantry! To those who live their lives by SI unit syntax, generally I adhere, but I deliberately omit a space between the value and the unit as I have found this variation flows better in text.

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BUYING TO A BUDGET

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Up until 2020 I bought most equipment from eBay USA which is why most things are priced in dollars. I live on a tight budget and limited purchases to around $200. I recognise that's still a sizeable sum for others, and there are far cheaper ways of achieving my goals using DIY materials, particularly as some of my purchases may appear esoteric or overkill for the task at hand. After 2020 things got harder as by then shipping had increased significantly and after Brexit, import duty also increased. Thanks largely to the UK's then Conservative government, eBay USA was no longer the bargain it was and I am now mostly limited to eBay UK which has far less surplus instrumentation, lasers, and analytical equipment.

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EQUIPMENT RATIONALE

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The main driving factor for me is to acquire professional equipment as an investment for future use. I also get a lot of pleasure from taking it apart to see how it works, and fixing it if it's broken. Given much of it is obsolete, I have found it's often cheaper buying another complete unit than individual components that are invariably only available from the USA, invoking sky-high shipping and import $ on both the item price as well as the shipping price itself.

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OTHER STUFF

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The site also includes descriptions of some of my other projects and my various adventures abroad, motorcycles and macro photography.

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HISTORY

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I started off as a UK degree qualified (B.Sc Computer Systems Design: hardware and software) computer logic design engineer in the age when Texas Instruments was primarily a logic chip manufacturer, and their 7400 series TTL logic (which came into being around 1966) was the mainstay of commercial logic design, and DTL and RTL were still a recent memory, long before programmable chips and microcontrollers

let alone personal computers. It was the heady days of DEC computers when printed circuit boards were laid out by hand using sticky tape and we still had black and white TVs. To quote Douglas Adams:

'In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri'.
 

Although primarily interested in digital electronics, I recognised the importance of software and my selected degree included both hardware and software tuition and even then, one of the included subjects was AI. I learned to program in multiple languages: Algol (algorithmic Language), Basic (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), BCPL (Basic ComPuter Language, forerunner to 'C'), Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language) and Fortran (Formula Translation). We were also introduced to specialist languages: APL ('A Programming Language' for matrix algebra) with a math symbol oriented keyboard, Gedanken ('thoughts'), Lisp (List Processing often used in AI), Snobol (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language), Simula (simulations) and of course hardware Assembly language.

My university had a DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer which occupied an entire (and very large) room; floppy discs hadn't been invented and we used punched cards and Teletypes. One of the software sciences lecturers had one of the new and rare CRT monitors greatly envied by all students. I remember getting 99 errors one day by omitting a full stop at the end of a statement line in COBOL, and congratulating myself on crashing the Fortran compiler with an obscure error for which there was no error message.

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The Computing Department allocated 'Resource Control Units' to us each week, which decremented as we used computer time. In the early hours of the morning nerds like myself learned how to contact the ethereal Godlike Operators in the computer room to encourage them to extend RCUs for free, probably because by then they just wanted to go home. I was an owl, and I remember spending many nights playing Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek on Teletypes until 2am when the Operators left and the computer was shut down. Incidentally, the way to defeat the Klingons was to get them to align in a long line in space and then fly towards one on the end and fire at it, upon which all of the Klingons fired back, wiping themselves out.

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From then until now electronics has always been a hobby and when I bought my first (and so far, only) house, I gradually built up its smallest bedroom into an electronics lab. I never did get around to removing the previous owner's nursery wallpaper which is cringingly embarrassing in some of my research photos. Nowadays it would probably fall under the somewhat dubious title of a man-cave and whilst the equipment it houses was mostly bought very cheaply on the surplus market, typically eBay USA, I have made a point of buying good stuff rather than rubbish. It is perhaps ironic a lot of the instruments I have were top of the range when I first started work.

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In industry I found myself designing and working on divers products, ranging from digital logic cards and ferrite core stores to analogue and digital telephone and audio communications interfaces, PC peripherals, automotive, rail, aeronautical and marine control systems. Having maintained an interest in software from my degree, as well as designing hardware I also programmed in bit slice processor logic, programmable logic, assembly language and high level languages, often carrying these extra skills into personal projects I developed over many evenings in my fledgling home lab.

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Over the years my home projects became more complex and I began to learn from these too, applying the same professional approach as at work. The LIBS system is my current project and it encompasses everything I have learned in life, presenting me with new challenges and knowledge as each day passes.

These challenges are not without their issues: this project is non-commercial and is purely for my own education and fun however I am not part of any scientific community, and cannot justify subscriptions to industrial research sites, therefore I pretty much work alone gleaning knowledge and answers solely
from the free Internet. As a result of this, whilst I offer here observations and knowledge I have built up over time, there remain many questions I cannot answer, which I am continually seeking to resolve in my research online or in my lab.

I would like to think of myself as an amateur scientist, but I am not sure if I am qualified to make such a remark.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoy visiting my website.