Ok dog, you got my Sat morning coffee slot
What follows is the info I said I would give if you were interested. I tried to strike a balance in the writing style, just hope I found the right one to help you
It's long, but don't skip any parts, as they build upon each other and towards the end it gets "fast and furious".
To do this, I needed diagrams so all of it is in graphics format. The images are
PNG format, and I know Internet Explorer doesn't like them very well, so you may have to either a) use Netscape or b) download the images and look at them at your leisure with something like IrfanView. Sorry, but's it's the only way I could do it and not make the images really large in storage size (don't want to abuse Joe's server).
This first pic is a version of your 8 armed block showing how I divided it up into pieces to be able to use the method the rest of it shows you. Hopefully when your done reading you'll see how to do the calcs, understand a little more about flow issues, and even a little something about electronics.
Let the picture show commence
