EEVblog #1127 - Mailbag Monday

[tchicago]

Python is a garbage. There is absolutely no excuse to write and ship software on Python.
It is a scripting language. Yes, it is okay to write some quick and dirty script to process some data on Python, run it, and then throw the script away.
And no, it is not okay redistribute those scripts for users who are not "experts" in Python scripting.

[timgiles]

LoL ChicagoT - where did you get that from!?    Python is used in many large software projects around the world, by a lot of scientists etc...

Seriously though - in terms of the video I thought you gave the items enough time and perhaps this video will end up being an outlier in terms of total run time. The oscilloscope was a bit of a let down but I must stick up for Github. What is not forgivable is instructions that are not correct. I dont think it is unusual to need to install python (or java etc...) and the people looking at purchasing this type of scope will likely know what they are getting in to.

The screwdriver did not seem to be worth the money...

[FrankBuss]

Regular mailbags is a good idea, with fewer items. But I don't know if the overpriced screwdriver was worth 15 minutes. This could have been demonstrated in 5 minutes, and then a 3rd mailbag opened.

The scope review was good. I guess lesson learnt: you shouldn't send Dave a product marketed as a competitor to other professional products, but then with hobby level quality.

[rsjsouza]

Where was your full rant mode (displayed with the oscilloscope) when faced with the amount of BS on the Wiha box, the somewhat weird mode of operation (twist then start? Give me a switch!), the slow speed?  I really think you were starstruck by the "German AU$500 screwdriver". If the same "features" were in a Chinese product, I am pretty sure your reaction would be different.

I don't think you were harsh on the oscilloscope review. Schematics are terrible and the BNC spacing is a non-starter. The rant about Github was not quite warranted but the bad instructions and the absence of a precompiled binary is a non-starter for a true product. The interface reminded me of the not-so-great elab080 I still use, but with the difference that this one is a single WinXP executable with no installer, has plenty more features and still works on Windows 10.

The scope review was good. I guess lesson learnt: you shouldn't send Dave a product marketed as a competitor to other professional products, but then with hobby level quality.

[Kleinstein]

That screw driver is a rather special tool made for working on potentially life circuits. So compare this more to an CAT 4 meter.  It's a lot about the electrical insulation and less about motor speed / battery.  I find it nice to have the supposed maximum torque on the bit's. There is positive side of having such a weak motor: one would not that likely slip on the screw head at the low torque.
The extension part might be for torque limiting (e.g. the slip clutch) and this might be a significant part of the price point.
I am still not a big fan of the implementation.

The Panasonic driver is a completely different tool - more suitable to undo the screws on the instrument and similar, but nothing you like on a life circuit. The isolated screw driver is more about working on a fuse panel or similar.

The doctors recommendation is a little odd.  There is a issue with normal screw drivers: if used a lot they put a lot of strain on the wrists and elbows. So they are really not a good idea for frequent use because of poor ergonomics.

[mancausoft]

@EEVblog Do you check if the problem with the video are related with the use of the "usb oscilloscope"?

Maybe son RF stuff/not shilded and so on?

I'm just curious, maybe  it makes sense to invest some time investigating it

[2N3055]

That screw driver is a rather special tool made for working on potentially life circuits. So compare this more to an CAT 4 meter.  It's a lot about the electrical insulation and less about motor speed / battery.  I find it nice to have the supposed maximum torque on the bit's. There is positive side of having such a weak motor: one would not that likely slip on the screw head at the low torque.
The extension part might be for torque limiting (e.g. the slip clutch) and this might be a significant part of the price point.
I am still not a big fan of the implementation.

The Panasonic driver is a completely different tool - more suitable to undo the screws on the instrument and similar, but nothing you like on a life circuit. The isolated screw driver is more about working on a fuse panel or similar.

The doctors recommendation is a little odd.  There is a issue with normal screw drivers: if used a lot they put a lot of strain on the wrists and elbows. So they are really not a good idea for frequent use because of poor ergonomics.

You are correct. This is VDE 603 certified product, certified for use on live circuits. And yes, that extension is THE torque limiter (fixed one) named easyTorque. On their full kit you get 5 of them, for different torque settings. All in all it is specialized, good quality product and expensive for that. And probably not something you would want to buy unless you need it.
It is really compact (for a electric screwdriver that has some heft to it) and cool. I would personally like it much more if they made a 100 € version that is not isolated, and a bit faster (it is kinda slow).

As for a scope mini review, I don't think he was rude. That thing is in a proof of concept prototype phase. He actually gave an effort. And, yes, I use python all the time. As a scripting engine. I also used python  few times to grab something quickly from a Picoscope. But I wouldn't have Picoscope if it didn't have functioning compiled application and if it didn't have API for a real development.

[bitwelder]

It seems the Crowdsupply page for the Haasoscope has been updated with Dave's endorsement 

[taydin]

Weird really. If the project owner did that, he probably did it to give Dave's review a positive spin  But why? I'm sure it will come out eventually.

[tszaboo]

IDK what self-respecting person would release that scope as it is. I get it, he used eagle to make it, and eagle makes all the effort to create garbage from your design. And we saw people with OCD releasing garbage schematics, but it doesn't stop there. Here we have a 250MSPS "scope" built on a 4 layer board, with wimpy 0.2mm stracks for GND and power. Powering and FPGA and high speed ADCs. He has 1 via for the FPGA ground connection on the bottom. It is already version 9, and it has so many fundamental problems...

[taydin]

I write firmware to pay the bills, and my experience is that if the source code of a firmware is very disorganized, almost as if it came out of an obfuscator ( ), the resulting firmware's performance is usually also shit. Shitty source code suggests that the writer does not take pride in the work he produces, which eventually reflects on the performance of the end product. Somebody that takes pride in writing code will treat his source code almost like poetry, avoiding duplication, being very meticulous about indentation and white space etc etc.

I think the same can be said about circuit schematics. If the schematic is very disorganized, lacks that certain symmetry and flow, the creator of that schematic also doesn't take pride in the work he is producing. So it probably will reflect on the end product as well.

[tsman]

It seems the Crowdsupply page for the Haasoscope has been updated with Dave's endorsement 

I don't see that. Did they remove it or is there some weird caching going on here?

One question I had is solved though. The mystery photo on that display is their baby with a bottle.

At the moment it shows the data (+/-64 samples around the trigger) from one of the channels, and at startup has a pic of my baby drinking a bottle (see below) - retro cool, eh?

[woox2k]

The "new" mailbag format is fine. Of course i would like to see more items opened but i also would like to see more in-depth videos about these items (teardown/review) I understand  that Dave has limited time and i'm fine seeing short overviews of things rather than waiting for years for teardown that Dave promised but never had the time to deliver (there has been plenty of them over the years)

About the scope... At first i thought Dave was a bit too harsh on the developer but then i recognized myself messing around with "opensource closed source software killers" and immediately understood Dave's point of view. There is way too many opensource hardware/software out there that claim to be perfect/better replacements of commercial ones. Sadly most of the time these products are exactly like Dave showed here. Seemingly made by people who have no idea how people expect these things to work and what are important. Like noone cares if you can send i2c commands to your oscilloscope if you cant even get a decent signal trace on the screen. Considering that i think that harsh reviews are very important to better the future of opensource! People telling Dave to shut up since its open source help noone but they are everywhere.

[bitwelder]

It seems the Crowdsupply page for the Haasoscope has been updated with Dave's endorsement 

I don't see that. Did they remove it or is there some weird caching going on here?

Yep, now it has been removed.

[SparkyFX]

he should take this review as the raw, non sugar-coated, unadulterated truth, and fix the issues.

Actually in an apprenticeship you get that from your instructor, unfortunately you might get it unjustified or in the worst case without a constructive conclusion . But anyway, in the normal case you are supposed to get the reason as well and learn it  . 

I am not a fan of superlatives, but well that is Dave´s thing, making videos and explaining stuff to an invisible audience; waking them up from the last boring  installment they might have seen on youtube 

So i think the critic toward the schematics is quite what should have been teached: other people are supposed to understand it (it´s the only purpose of such a document, otherwise you could lay it out in mind or copy it from the breadboard, and it also names an author), so it should be drawn with that in mind, avoiding crossings, oriented in a proper way and have readability. I don´t know if all the additional label´s visibility status was saved within the document or got lost, but i think KiCAD does so.

After that, he should send the updated hardware for another mailbag. If the hardware works well this time, I'm sure everybody will just forget about all the previous mishaps and maybe recommend it to others as a quite capable poor mans scope.

Good, constructive advice, i´d say.

The Wiha screwdriver is partially a matter of taste, their isolated driver bit system is the only one with the rating i know of, so they flesh it out in more products. Makes it a double use case item, if one assumes that mechanics wouldn´t mind buying an electric screwdriver cause they can not bang a hammer on the cap (Wiha makes those as well). But be reminded that the usual 1/4" hex bits do not fit in there (tested with a Model 283109), kind of kills it for me.

[EEVblog]

I would think a typical mailbag item should be 3-5 minutes per item.  If a "two minute teardown" isn't appropriate, save the teardown for another video and get on with more of everyone's favorite segment, MAILBAG! 

I tried that, and IIRC people didn't like it.

[tchicago]

I would think a typical mailbag item should be 3-5 minutes per item.  If a "two minute teardown" isn't appropriate, save the teardown for another video and get on with more of everyone's favorite segment, MAILBAG! 

I tried that, and IIRC people didn't like it.

Don't save for later, as it may never come. I think this is why some people did not like it.

Might be interesting to try to do what's appropriate for the item. As you go through the items, do either 2-minute teardown or the bigger one as time permits. So I guess it will be fine to have something like 2-2-longer_teardown-2-2 or long_teardown-2-long_teardown.

P.S. I agree the screwdriver was pretty weak. Well made, but too slow add any efficiency. In fact, if you have many screws with many different heads to work on, the process of changing the tip will make it slower comparing to just having a handy set of regular screwdrivers.

[NiHaoMike]

I, too, wondered about the 1KV rating for the screwdriver.  I would like to see an example of the use case they had in mind - but even so, what if you are unscrewing something that did need that rating ... and then dropped a screw from the tip.   

What about working on EV battery packs?

As for the scope, if it had decent USB bandwidth, it would be a good start to a high speed digitizing system. It's open source, so someone determined can add a FX3 or whatever.

[EEVblog]

The format of this mailbag video is just fine for me. Yes, it ended up like a review of the screwdriver, but what's wrong with that? Everything that Dave explained about that screwdriver was useful information! For example, if it was just open it up and fool around a little bit for 5 minutes, we might have not seen the detail about how that screwdriver is supposed to work. It isn NOT a tool to unfasten or fasten a screw from beginning to end. It's just a tool that saves you time when the screw is already loose. The unfastening and tightening is intended to be done with a tightness hand feeling of the user. So the concept and idea behind the screwdriver is quite good! But to realize this, it is necessary to look at the tool more closely, which is what Dave did.

Same thing with the USB oscilloscope. I would have hated it if this was just an "open the box", talk about it a little bit, repeat what the manual already says and then do away with it in 5 minutes. I took in and appreciated all of the extra information that was presented, and so should the developer!

The problem is that I shoot the mailbag as if all the content is going to be in the mailbag. I do get a feel for how much I've waffled on on each item, but I'm not really sure until go do the edit.
And by the time I do the edit and go "gee, that item is a bit long and warrants it's own video", I don't really have the proper intro or summary material for either a shorter Mailbag OR a longer dedicated video, so I likely have to go back and shoot some more commentary or other footage.
So for a shorter "summary" mailbag version to work I have to know at that point what type of video I'm going to do and shoot both versions of the footage. It gets logistically messy.

[EEVblog]

If that were my "scope", I would want to kill you. Poor guy. Surely there are many good things that can be said about it. But no. Not a single one!

Err, not correct, I went out of my way to say what it might be good for and that maybe it's a good bandwidth-per-buck.
But please, tell me, what good stuff would you say about it?

[EEVblog]

I, too, wondered about the 1KV rating for the screwdriver. 

How am I supposed to test that?
This is a Whia, best in the business, I have zero doubt it's properly rated and certified as a HV screwdriver.

[EEVblog]

LoL ChicagoT - where did you get that from!?    Python is used in many large software projects around the world, by a lot of scientists etc...
Seriously though - in terms of the video I thought you gave the items enough time and perhaps this video will end up being an outlier in terms of total run time.

Yes, this one happened to be an outlier.

[EEVblog]

You are correct. This is VDE 603 certified product, certified for use on live circuits. And yes, that extension is THE torque limiter (fixed one) named easyTorque. On their full kit you get 5 of them, for different torque settings. All in all it is specialized, good quality product and expensive for that. And probably not something you would want to buy unless you need it.

If it's a torque limiter then it must be less than the 0.4Nm the instructions clearly show as being for the main motor electronic torque stop feature. So these must be a less than 0.4Nm which is naff all really. The electronic stop is barely enough for anything serious, so having less than that seems pointless 

[EEVblog]

I would think a typical mailbag item should be 3-5 minutes per item.  If a "two minute teardown" isn't appropriate, save the teardown for another video and get on with more of everyone's favorite segment, MAILBAG! 

I tried that, and IIRC people didn't like it.

Don't save for later, as it may never come. I think this is why some people did not like it.

That's the thing, if I don't shoot the video then and there it usually never happens. And as I said previously I'd then have to shoot two versions of the video, one a long detailed one, and one as a short summary for the mailbag.

[maginnovision]

I do like the 2 item mailbag, and typically I think it'll work out well. Sometimes they'll be shorter, sometimes longer. Try it a while and see where it averages.

I was in the soldering live chat checking out that schematic. I think you were very nice about the scope. I could've done a much more negative video! The schematic and board file are both bad. That UI was really awful, random offsets and noise were pretty bad. There is no room for the BNC connectors of actual scope probes. The display is useless(albeit an optional extra). Not recognizing the buttons changing state in the software is a MASSIVE fail. I really can't believe how much money this thing pulled in. I believe he's read the comments and that's why the previous "endorsement" was removed. The schematic needs to be fixed, and so does the board file. The component designators weren't just not on the board, they weren't even in the board FILE. The entire board looked to be autorouted which is a bad idea when you're trying to look at low level signals as well. I think this must be a case of "I have to get this out now or I never will".

The screwdriver seems great for working on live circuits but otherwise useless. An automotive technician would never buy one. You make the HV system safe before you do much of anything. The snap-on cordless drivers are WAY better. Adjustable clutch that also locks when not running so that you can manually torque as needed and reverse you can have the motor run while you torque away yourself. Better ergonomic design as a "gun" with a forward/reverse trigger, higher voltage, longer run time(maybe? couldn't find anything on that), faster. I'm overall neutral on it, would be a total waste for me but a potential lifesaver for someone else.