Stock Electronic Image FAILS

[Housedad]

I am fairly sure that the quality of their "100% online" education matches the quality of their advertising. That's what you get with "100% online" - no labs so nobody to show you how a scope probe works ...

They give you a stupid pictoral diagram and expect you to practice with a stick.

Oh, you mean the way I'm learning on my own now.  At least I saved all that tuition money.

[mc172]

Not sure if this has been posted before but I found this on the front page of the AVX footprint guide.

https://www.avx.com/download/software/literature/AVX-Footprint-Library.pdf

[schmitt trigger]

The saving grace on this photo is the use of a very narrow depth of field makes an interesting image from an otherwise pedestrian subject.

[floobydust]

It's fake depth-of-field blur and fake smoke. That brand new soldering iron made a few more stock pics:  https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Niyazz?searchterm=component

[Brumby]

Yeah - that iron doesn't look like it's seen the sun on a hot day, let alone get hot enough to melt solder.

That previous one with the probe, though ....  Is that TIG welding I see?

[Edison]

So now I am amused, best for New Year's eve   

[timelessbeing]

GOLD!

I wonder why that's such a popular image.
Here is a major electronics distributor. Does nobody at the company object to this?

[amyk]

Being a distributor just means they sell stuff, not necessarily that they know about the things they're selling...

[electromotive]

ok not electronic releadet but a translate fail:


from a Ebay Seller.
Run for my life?  Does the sell so much crap....   

Looks like they ran themselves into an arrhythmia and died by the looks of it.

[Brumby]

Reminds me of a story where a young American soldier on a base in Vietnam was sent over to ask the Aussies if they could borrow their cherry picker.  The request was approved with the line "Go for your life" - which the young soldier apparently took the wrong way and scampered off like an Olympic sprinter.

[timelessbeing]

Being a distributor just means they sell stuff, not necessarily that they know about the things they're selling...

"Future Electronics’ Advanced Engineers are system design experts, with in-depth knowledge on a variety of design approaches ... Advanced Engineers are Factory Certified by a range of suppliers on a wide breadth of technologies... These highly trained Advanced Engineers are an extension of our suppliers’ engineering teams"

Large pictures like that emblazoned across a website just don't portray "highly trained" to me. 

[Homer J Simpson]

Check out 8:30 to 9:00

[PA0PBZ]

Check out 8:30 to 9:00

 

[lowimpedance]

 ...... ...... no wonder things went fubar.

[Red Squirrel]

Did..... they just connect jumper cables straight to a chip package? 

And was that a motherboard, like, for a computer? 

I think I actually saw this documentary, I never noticed the absurdity of those parts.   

[Whales]

Ah, the PLCC-AB holder variant with large power-rail pads on either side of the holder.  Beautiful to see them, they're not very popular these days.

[McBryce]

If you have your own nuclear power source you can afford to have power hungry ICs. 

McBryce.

[Cyberdragon]

Talking about cringeworthy nuclear facilities, I have a story to share.

My professor was working on a consulting job where he needed a personal favor from me testing some power devices for a generator of a nuclear plant which I will not disclose.

Through the project, I was given more information on the plant, and I am really glad that I don't live close it.

The nuclear plant has two diesel generators per nuclear generator in case there's a total loss of grid power and a nuclear generator failure as well as a local grid failure that prevents energy from the grid, the reactor itself or another reactor in the plant, to feed power to the cooling system.

The plant uses Fukushima design, and we all know what happens if it loses all cooling power.

Each diesel generator runs on a non-inverter design (it was designed in the 70s), and it has an exciting field coil driven by an AC-DC converter that stabilizes output voltage (AVC/AGC).

The exciting coil driver is based on SCRs, fed directly from the output of the generator.

Well, here's the problem. On safety drills, they discovered each of their generators fails every around 100 hours of operation, and they tasked us to find out why.

Here's the fun part after we inspected the driver:

1. There's absolutely no decoupling on ICs. Analog chips and discrete logic chips are powered without local decoupling caps, and there're no decoupling planes. Two layer boards, that's it.
2. There's no di/dt and dv/dt protection on gate drivers. The units started to fail in the new century as old diodes ran out, and new diodes are faster, thus creating more di/dt. They tried to source old-design diodes from an Indian company making so called 100% clone of old devices, but apparently the new clones are way faster than the old ones.
3. They literally used LM723 as opamps. That's right, they never had a single real opamp in their circuit.
4. Their over voltage protection uses a selenium rectifier as zener stack, and the connection is through a 4m roundtrip cable. That offers zero protection on transients.
5. Their driver is based on SCRs, and common sense tells me if you use a majority carrier device, you use transient absorbers. No, the original designer didn't give a heck about it. No snubbers, no TVS, no nothing.
6. And the best part. The system is so vulnerable that any external EMI knocks it out. We were not even able to get a scope in the control chassis without disturbing it. We ended up having to bring in a battery powered, EMI optimized, high speed data logger to capture waveforms.

And the bonus point, it is still running, though the authority has given them a specified deadline to fix everything.

People with rediculous solid state rubbish are always oblivious to the simplest solutions...

[windsmurf]

Measuring a backwards printed capacitor.

[Bud]

The 50V cap is generating a lot of voltage, 220 AC.    This is what flux capacitors do !

[Cyberdragon]

And wrapping the leads around the probes. Plan on soldering it there? (while holding the hot end of course) So much wrong...

[bitwelder]

Thanks to the Wider measurement range you can even find when the battery is at 0.00 V!
How can you live without it...

[Cyberdragon]

but...that is 0.000 volts...

[bsfeechannel]

I always find it difficult to install through-hole components on surface-mount pads.

[Cubdriver]

I always find it difficult to install through-hole components on surface-mount pads.

Try hitting them with a bigger hammer to drive the pins in.

At