What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[Urs42]

looks nice and compact, what did you pay for it?
and more importantly, is it worth it?

I got it from here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/STM32-OLED-T12-A-T12-Soldering-Station-Oled-Digital-Portable-Soldering-Station-Automatic-Dormancy-Soldering-Iron/32823360298.html

It seems to be nice and it does get hot and will melt solder but i did not do a lot of testing.

[sunspots]

I missed this reply before I made my other post. Okay perhaps I'll rethink my selection.

[Mr. Scram]

Today I received my FG-100 DDS Function Generator. Taking Dave's advice, I took it apart before I turned it on. In the reviews Rubicon caps are supposedly used. In mine there are labels on the capacitors I can actually believe. One of the posts the screen is mounted on is not present. The teardown also revealed another cute detail: the silkscreen near the power button actually says ROWER, instead of POWER. Looking at photo's online, other boards actually got this right. Other labels also seem misspelled, different or absent. That surprises me, because it means someone either copied the model quite convincingly, save a few details. The screws that hold the case together actually came pre-stripped. Not too surprising, except for the fact that they were stripped in the wrong direction, so in the loosening direction rather than the fastening, and one screw has differently shaped head. To me, this suggests the screws may have been reused. I happened to have some hex socket bolts that are the same size and roughly the same length, so I replaced the lot. Even though this might all sound fairy negative, the construction is actually decent and feels pretty solid. The board looks soldered properly and clean. It feels and looks more solid than other cheap Chinese tools I have bought.



Of course, none of that matters much. What counts is how the thing works. Unfortunately, my oscilloscope is on the fritz, but a quick check with my DMM shows the frequency being 1 Hz off consistently. That is good enough for my purposes.

It certainly isn't the most capable or impressive signal generator on the market, but it will do. For now, I'd rather spend my money on other tools. Until I grow the need for a more competent generator, this is actually a very neat and cheap little tool.

[Sarajouksa]

I got my metcal mx500 station yesterday, got it from ebay.

It came with a stand, a new handpiece, 3 used but working tips, and 2 new tips.
I also got the DS1 desoldering tool, a spool of good leaded kester solder and 100f spool of solderwick, which is also good quality it seems.
A pretty good deal i think.


What i love about the station is that its built like a tank; the amount of tips avaliable is very nice(sttc026 is awesome); tip to grip distance is very short aswell, even shorter than weller WMP handpiece, which i really like.

Also tested the DS1 desoldering gun at work, after giving it a proper clean. That thing just blew my mind.
Now i just need to get some kind of pressurized air supply at home, so i can use it. I was thinking about a high pressure bottle of air, that i could refill after emptying it, should work well in theory, since im not going to use it very often.

The desoldering tool is still at work, i started making a holder for the gun since it didnt come with one, and i cant even use it at home anyway.
Also made a removable brass wool cover for the iron holder, should have probably made the hole a bit bigger

[boffin]

A set of storage bins.  Dull, but $12 for 18 bins, hard to beat.

http://frys.com/product/8943453

[bjcuizon]

Is that two giant magnets on the left?

Looks like some of those metal project enclosures..maybe the die-cast or aluminum one. 

[nanofrog]

I'd definitely say project boxes as neodymium magnets of that size are very heavy (the bin would be notably sagging at best).

[SeanB]

Definitely project boxes, if those were magnets they would be covered with every bit of ferrous swarf from the area, plus the meter would be stuck to them as well, because of the steel parts in the batteries, the screws and other steel parts in there like the buzzer and the leads of the components.

[boffin]

It's more fun to watch the comments than actually confirm what those two metallic blocks really are.

But in reality, they're actually just boring old project boxes

[nctnico]

It's more fun to watch the comments than actually confirm what those two metallic blocks really are.

Now that is evil! 

[neo]

It's more fun to watch the comments than actually confirm what those two metallic blocks really are.

Now that is evil! 

There are visible seams on those two metal things, which leads me to conclude that they are project boxes.
If they were neodymium magnets;
They would be so heavy they would break the shelf.
They would bind together.
Every metal object in a radius would be attached to them.
There would be no seams.

[TerraHertz]

Now some bright spark will manufacture giant magnets molded to look like diecast boxes.

[TheSteve]

It's more fun to watch the comments than actually confirm what those two metallic blocks really are.

But in reality, they're actually just boring old project boxes

Look like Hammond boxes to me, possibly from RP.

[PartialDischarge]

I will refund my VMWare purchase and give Parallels a try. If everything fails, I will consider BootCamp.

Well, you forgot VirtualBox, its faster than VM or Parallels and free. You'll have to install some add-ons but will probably suit your needs.

[ruairi]

Analog System Lab Kit Pro. Didn't exactly bought it. It is from the TI summer giveaway.



Alexander.

What's the TI Summer Giveaway? I couldn't find an trace of it with a google search.

That kit looks really interesting.  I've wanted to do their TI Precision Labs - Op Amp course for a while since I heard the Art Kay interview on the Amp Hour.  The board is $200 so it will be a little while.

[julianhigginson]

Here's what I got today: VMWare Fusion 8.5 for Mac and Windows 10 Pro USB edition.
VMWare failed me considerably in terms of performance, Windows 10 is sluggish, Altium Designer is barely usable.
I will refund my VMWare purchase and give Parallels a try. If everything fails, I will consider BootCamp.
CrossOver doesn't work at all. DXP.exe can't start. With Win10 bottle, AD17 can't even finish installing. With Win7 bottle, AD17 installs, but can't run.

gosh... that sounds painful.

Wouldn't it just be easier to buy a thinkpad workstation class laptop? they cost similar to a macbook, but have real graphics cards. And they are running win10 when you lift them out of the box for the first time.

[Mr. Scram]

gosh... that sounds painful.

Wouldn't it just be easier to buy a thinkpad workstation class laptop? they cost similar to a macbook, but have real graphics cards. And they are running win10 when you lift them out of the box for the first time.

You say that as if it's an advantage

[julianhigginson]

You say that as if it's an advantage

It is, if you need to do work... 

[julianhigginson]

I bought my Mac solely for OSX development, but I also want to have a backup Windows machine in case of a power loss or for mobile working.

fair enough!
it's a shame mac are so anal about VM-ing their OS.
I'd consider buying mac os to run in a VM if it were available...

I guess the other option is have a mac mini for the apple dev stuff? I know a few who did that, but depends on if you want to do iOS dev on the go?

Altium should work fine on a media centre PC. I did it a few years ago as a stop gap measure and it wasn't as bad as I was expecting.... It's not doing massive game style rendering even for its 3d view, or doing lots of crazy background realtime stuff... just needs basic screen drawing capabilities most of the time, and enough RAM to hold off too much swapfile usage (but again AD files are relatively small anyway)  then you just wait a bit longer when it performs the DRC or runs the outjob. :-)

[Mr. Scram]

fair enough!
it's a shame mac are so anal about VM-ing their OS.
I'd consider buying mac os to run in a VM if it were available...

It's not just VM's. Apple makes a point of not selling OS X without an accompanying Apple device.

[nfmax]

I bought a book!

Arthur & I were postgrads together in what was then the Optical Fibre Group at Southampton University. Many years later our paths crossed again, this time working together in fibre-optic sensing. Now Arthur has written a book about the technology, a good high-level introduction, if you are interested, with lots of applications information & many references.

[Kryoclasm]

A Fluke 8860A Multimeter. 
It is in route, so here is a good pic from the internet.

[Howardlong]

Here's what I got today: VMWare Fusion 8.5 for Mac and Windows 10 Pro USB edition.
VMWare failed me considerably in terms of performance, Windows 10 is sluggish, Altium Designer is barely usable.
I will refund my VMWare purchase and give Parallels a try. If everything fails, I will consider BootCamp.
CrossOver doesn't work at all. DXP.exe can't start. With Win10 bottle, AD17 can't even finish installing. With Win7 bottle, AD17 installs, but can't run.

When I took the dive into Mac land a few years ago for OS X and IOS development, I initially tried to use Fusion to do all my Windows stuff thinking it'd not be so bad. I gave up after a couple of days. One of the benefits of Fusion in those days was that it'd run you Bootcamp partition as a VM, thus saving having to have multiple copies of Windows. The problem was that it broke the copy protection in several software packages, many of which were dependent on a constant MAC address. Each time I flipped between runnng Windows natively in Bootcamp and then back as a VM, the MAC address changed, the software phones home, and things like backups and compilers stopped working.

For work, as well as the meaty dual Xeon desktop I built, for my laptop which is a 2012 Mac book pro retina, I now run 99% in native Windows as a large bootcamp partition, and only go into OS X sparingly when I have to test or develop something for OS X, or need to access the App store or provision something.

As a Windows PC, the various Macs I've purchased haven't been half bad. I gritted my teeth when I bought that MBPr, but I don't regret it as it's aged well, and I'd have to pay >$2.5k to get a marginally better performing unit for my needs.

Along the way I learned that there's no way reasonably to do IOS and OS X development without a proper Mac. Hackintoshes are also too much pain, you're fighting to get it working all the time, and bits of it frequently don't work unless you have exactly the right hardware.

Unless I needed to do OS X or IOS development now, nowadays I can no longer recommend most Macs as unlike those I purchased a few short years ago, they are not upgradeable which I find staggeringly bad from a company that bangs on about its green credentials.

[julianhigginson]

I bought a book!

Arthur & I were postgrads together in what was then the Optical Fibre Group at Southampton University. Many years later our paths crossed again, this time working together in fibre-optic sensing. Now Arthur has written a book about the technology, a good high-level introduction, if you are interested, with lots of applications information & many references.

Amazon says it's unreleased. Did you buy direct from Wiley?

hardcover and ebook seem available in plenty of places already since early this year, including amazon.... Softcover version is the one that's about to be released.

[BU508A]

I bought a book!

I have bought a book as well: