A little bit of electronics 101 for the HTM professional community. As much as medical device technology advances and shapes itself as something out of a Star Trek fantasy movie. The building blocks of these electronically core driven magical devices are powered in the background by the likes of basic discreet components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors, coils and the list goes on.
The title of this week’s blog chat, “Better be right or your great big venture goes west” is only one of many mnemonics that we as HTM service professionals learned through our electronic technology education as a way to remember the resistor color code. Other versions of this mnemonic “brain teaser” are not as favorable some would say and most likely considered offensive – you know the dirty ones I’m talking about! The colors Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet (Purple), Gray and White are the bandings of common resistors – the value designation of this discreet component is a ringing example of a technology building block that must always be remembered and understood so as to assess its ohm value.
Discreet components such as the resistor, capacitor, transistor, coil and relay seem to be non-existent in today’s troubleshooting processes. And why would it, I mean every electronic device today is operated by some software operating system and to repair it we just reload software, maybe change a board and presto – it’s fixed! Well, sometimes and maybe not at all. The knowledge and understanding of troubleshooting to the component level is said to be a lost art. I believe it not to be and those skilled HTM professionals that can navigate through a schematic, measure the voltage at the emitter of a transistor or ring out a wire through a relay panel will still be needed more than ever in this ever changing medical equipment service model.
My final closing thoughts – OHM’s law is not dead, DeMorgam’s Theorem (an OR for a AND) is still alive and the skill to understand as well as troubleshoot to the component level will always be relied upon by those advanced HTM professionals in the field slugging it out every day.