[E3-hacking] E2 PBL response

[Peter Washington]

Hello folks,

My name is Peter Washington, (alias Pugwash), and I've been helping Ralph Corderoy for some time now providing electronics expertise
to back up his prowess on the software side.  I started life as an electronic engineer speciallising in Micro's and then moved over
the fence to software.

I'm a bit of a newcomer, (complete virgin actually), to newsgroups and mailing list, so please bear with me.

I've been following everything on this list avidly, and I'd like to congratulate Matt on the stirling work he's done in getting the
E2 to talk to us and add my own congratulations to Ralph on his superb analysis of the E2 PBL.

I actually own 2 E2's and an E3, one E2 is my main house phone and is registered with Amstrad, the other is in bits in my back
bedroom on a "Breadboard", (a lump of wood big enough to hold the parts of the case that I need and the motherboard on some plastic
pillars), hooked up to a PC running Linux.

I should be receiving a batch of 5 MAX3232's today and I will be making up a voltage level shifter as soon as possible on some
veroboard.  I'm going to need to provide a second jack plug so that I can plug in to the E2 OR the E3 as I wish.

If Ralph and Matt would like to supply me with a combined, modified exp.exe shortly, I will try the same tests on the E2 then the
E3.

I completely agree with Matt on 2 important matters :-

1.	Trust the Maxim datasheets over any other source.
	(I think the Hardware Recyling circuit has used 0.1mF to 0.1 micro Farads, lack of the Greek mu)
2.	Putting Vcc into the Gnd Pin of any chip will definitely damage it IF any other pin is connected to a voltage around about Vcc.
The "Magic Blue Smoke" gets boiled off and it stops working ;-(

I think that with the particular mix of people we now seem to have looking at this problem we should have it licked pretty quickly.

On another subject entirely, (which should probably be handled further in some other forum), Ralph and I have been talking about
home made Digital Storage Oscilloscopes recently, if either Matt or David would like to join forces with us maybe we could have a
bash at actually making something.

Cheers Peter