What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[julianhigginson]

Quick 6101A1 fume extractor.

Since I added a room filter with an auto/sensor mode it's clear that y desktop smoke absorber isn't effective. Just five minutes of soldering with tacky flux and the room filter kicks into overdrive to clean the whole room.

I bought from Eleshop.eu who also made a great comparison page including video/audio of various brands/models at different settings https://eleshop.eu/knowledgebase/FAQsolderfumeextractors/

I moved most of my proper office setup back to my home office for coronavirusmas, but didn't take my solder fume extractor (metcal BVX-201) because it's pretty big and setup in/through my office desk and seemed lile a bit too much effort.

I had my dyson air cleaner fan running in the room just for a bit of airflow, and it went crazy when I did some soldering. Nice to give the VOC sensor a bit of a test..  I got it during the fires so it's had a lot of chances to show that it's very good at sensing and removing PM2.5... now I've also seen it on VOC. ;-)

And now I'm reconsidering moving the fume extractor....

[ChristofferB]

I'm on a NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation Module) binge!

Just received these; a dual logic pulse counter, and RS232 computer interface for it, and a single channel pulse height analyser (window discriminator).


I must admit, I have the same admiration for these modules that people has for aerospace/space electronics and parts. These modules are produced in fairly low volume, and

identical units has been used in most if not all famous high energy physics experiments since the mid-60's, from reactor monitoring to particle accelerators, diffraction studies, cosmic ray observatories, and so on.


I'm hoping to get some modules some day with 'famous' lab inventory labels, like Oak Ridge NL, Los Alamos, CERN, etc.

[spongella]

An oldie but goodie, an Icom IC-28A 2m transceiver. 25W, 21 memories, 3 of thechannels are for using tones but will be used mostly for simplex.  Good reviews on Eham.net. I like the older radios, easier to program. Will do a complete realignment when it arrives.

[beanflying]

Denatured Alcohol  to mix up some Shellac. Also on the shelf next to it was some pure IPA in 125ml bottles but I still have enough for my 3DP and Electronics needs at this stage. Seems the panic buyers have their years supplies finally sorted

[cs.dk]

Got myself an ADS-B USB dongle + indoor antenna.. Just a RPi 3B or newer now.

[mansaxel]

Don't you mean "switch?"

Apparently.

In my case the building has already IT infrastructure there, so I don't need to worry about WiFi, thus no PoE.
I don't really care about a router too as my Internet traffic is small enough (~300Mbps) to be handled perfectly by a MacMini.
I use a 10G NIC on the MacMini and a 10G switch simply because I use my MacMini as a router and VPN, so traffics circulate in and out of it, thus I need more BW.

Ah. In my case this is the building network. This is for home. I've got 500/100 now, apparently, since the ISP decided to upgrade for the duration of the current biological situation; normally I have 100 symmetrical. The first router was a Cisco 1800 one, but I swapped it for a 7200VXR because I wanted to run a few IPv6 bells and whistles that aren't supported on the 1800. Also, it's got 3x GE on the motherboard, so fit well with the upgrade to fiber connection, which always links up in GE, regardless what one bought.

The switch I use is a NetGeat GS110EMX, which is a managed switch for $250, not a bad value.
As for my personal 10G NIC, it's just for video editing. I don't need it for basic daily work, but since I also create tutorials for the team, I'd just centralize everything.

I'm sort of spoilt with quality network hardware at work, and have been, for 20+ years. Using SOHO quality gear makes me feel as if using no-name asian multimeters with "Class III"  and "China Export"  tags on overhead 415V lines. No thanks. Proper 5yo hardware, with RS232 console ports, SSH daemons and double PSUs, freely inherited from work, is much nicer to work with.

We do a lot of video editing, at work. Lots of 100G links there, and lots of hard drives. Actually, I mostly work with building networks for HD real-time video. A different world.

[Marck]

My house is run on free second hand cisco gear from work.  All gigabit and all POE.  Not long ago I was able to swap out my sg300 switches for some neat little fan less 10 port 3560cg units.  I have a new rack coming next week so another one will go in that. And I have scored a little Industrial tplink ac access point that will allow me to use external antennas so I have a couple of antennas from a cisco mesh unit that are going up on the roof so me and my whole block will have 802.11ac wifi.

The joy of free stuff.

[technix]

Using SOHO quality gear makes me feel as if using no-name asian multimeters with "Class III"  and "China Export"  tags on overhead 415V lines. No thanks. Proper 5yo hardware, with RS232 console ports, SSH daemons and double PSUs, freely inherited from work, is much nicer to work with.

I'm using a full TP-Link GbE enterprise grade kit: two TL-SG3226, one TL-SG3226PE, one TL-AC100, three TL-AP1205GI-PoE and one TL-SG1005. I have a used cash register motherboard running Ubuntu Server working as my router.

The only SOHO grade gear is an Apple Time Capsule, as I need its built-in file server for backups.

We do a lot of video editing, at work. Lots of 100G links there, and lots of hard drives. Actually, I mostly work with building networks for HD real-time video. A different world.

Linus Media Group?

[mansaxel]

Using SOHO quality gear makes me feel as if using no-name asian multimeters with "Class III"  and "China Export"  tags on overhead 415V lines. No thanks. Proper 5yo hardware, with RS232 console ports, SSH daemons and double PSUs, freely inherited from work, is much nicer to work with.

I'm using a full TP-Link GbE enterprise grade kit: two TL-SG3226, one TL-SG3226PE, one TL-AC100, three TL-AP1205GI-PoE and one TL-SG1005. I have a used cash register motherboard running Ubuntu Server working as my router.

The only SOHO grade gear is an Apple Time Capsule, as I need its built-in file server for backups.

TP-link is SOHO! Yes, I've got a media converter from them. And, we've got them at work, too. They've got the cheapest SFP-equipped media converter around, and it works. But, I'd avoid them for configurable stuff. Because I can  .

We do a lot of video editing, at work. Lots of 100G links there, and lots of hard drives. Actually, I mostly work with building networks for HD real-time video. A different world.

Linus Media Group?

No, I'm part of the network team at Sweden's public service television company.

[gorge441]

Bought some vegetables... Nothing else.

[Addicted2AnalogTek]

Loaded up on groceries to last for the next 3 weeks.

Also bought:

-Deoxit combo kit to complement the D5 spray
-P6015 HV probe
-7119 tube and shield for my 067-0532-00 project
-Some backlight strips and remote for a Vizio d43n-e1

Other recent purchases include:
-HP 6209B 0-320V 0-100mA power supply for repair
-HP 6515A 0-1600V 5mA power supply for repair
-A bunch of reed switches to experiment with for 067-0532-00 project
-Last but not least, a GenRad W20HMT3A Variac for $45 shipped, fully functional with broken/missing plastic gauge covers

[djos]

I just bought a new Mac Mini (i5 HexaCore, 16GB Ram, 10 GigE Nic, 512 GB SSD) and for various vintage Computer restoration projects, about 300 Capacitors in various pack sizes (mostly Wurth or Panasonic).

[olkipukki]

SuperMicro Dual AMD EPYC (1st generation) 1U server for $500 (no CPUs, no Memory, no Disks) 

[McBryce]

A DS218+ plus some WD Harddrives to put into it. Up to now I have been sharing files via Win10 from an external USB drive, but due to unreliability and the fact that it stops working every time Win10 updates anything I've finally decided to get a NAS.

McBryce.

[rsjsouza]

A DS218+ plus some WD Harddrives to put into it. Up to now I have been sharing files via Win10 from an external USB drive, but due to unreliability and the fact that it stops working every time Win10 updates anything I've finally decided to get a NAS.

Congratulations! Years ago I got a four-drive NAS (mine is from Netgear) due to the same reason; I have been very happy with the purchase and never looked back. It's been ticking with four 3TB WD Green HDDs for five years now without a glitch.

[Cubdriver]

A NAS box is on my list of things to get, but I have not yet done so.  Perhaps this will help to prod me to start looking again.

-Pat

[McBryce]

A DS218+ plus some WD Harddrives to put into it. Up to now I have been sharing files via Win10 from an external USB drive, but due to unreliability and the fact that it stops working every time Win10 updates anything I've finally decided to get a NAS.

Congratulations! Years ago I got a four-drive NAS (mine is from Netgear) due to the same reason; I have been very happy with the purchase and never looked back. It's been ticking with four 3TB WD Green HDDs for five years now without a glitch.

I went for 2x 4TB WD Blue. The "bang for buck" or price per kB seems to be best at 4TB at the moment and I also have no idea how I could need more than 8TB.

McBryce.

[kripton2035]

guys, don't forget to backup your NAS ... 8Tb on a ds218 ... if one drive fails, the whole data is lost. 5 years of hard drive working, it's the average lifespan. if your NAS has built-in test for the drives, use it once a week or once a month. with 4 disks you can have a raid 5 installed so one drive failing is recoverable. but beware. I've seen many customers lost so many datas ...

[Kilrah]

Yup. For me every new main storage drive bought gets accompanied by 2 more as backups.

And those are offline backups, RAID does NOT count as a backup.

[Cubdriver]

guys, don't forget to backup your NAS ... 8Tb on a ds218 ... if one drive fails, the whole data is lost. 5 years of hard drive working, it's the average lifespan. if your NAS has built-in test for the drives, use it once a week or once a month. with 4 disks you can have a raid 5 installed so one drive failing is recoverable. but beware. I've seen many customers lost so many datas ...

I figure I'll get a 4 disk unit and run RAID.

-Pat

[trophosphere]

A Saleae Logic Pro 8 as I will be moving to a different city soon and will be staying with extended family until the house that I bought gets built. The rest of my test equipment will be in storage until then.  Working on reading through "Computer Organization and Design" by Patterson and Hennessy in the meantime and need to put theory into practice.

[rdl]

For a new NAS, at least give FreeNAS with ZFS a look. I use it with mirrored disks, simple and easy. It doesn't require much in the way of hardware for a basic set up (cheap) and is not difficult to use, even for beginners. If you need to complicate your life, it does offer Raid-Z in various types and can scale up to just about any level of complexity you want.

[mansaxel]

For a new NAS, at least give FreeNAS with ZFS a look. I use it with mirrored disks, simple and easy. It doesn't require much in the way of hardware for a basic set up (cheap) and is not difficult to use, even for beginners. If you need to complicate your life, it does offer Raid-Z in various types and can scale up to just about any level of complexity you want.

ZFS is the best file system yet invented. Full stop. Nothing else comes close. I have yet to lose a single file that could be attributed to ZFS malfunction, and I've been running ZFS on things as crazy as 32-bit FreeBSD. (The machine crashed repeatedly, but the files were saved.)

With 2 drives, you run mirroring (zmirror in ZFS). With 3 drives, you run RAID-5 (raidz1/raidz), and with 4 drives or more, you run RAID6, (raidz2).  It is, given the size of present drives, probably not recommendable to run a RAID5 system today. The rate of failure per stored byte is at a level that with our present drive capacity, the likelyhood of encountering several failures in parallel (before you've hot-swapped a new drive in and it's been resilvered, i.e. taken its share of the load) is so high that double redundancy is required. ZDNet still has a good article on it, old but relevant.  ZFS' integrated data protection measures help, but disk is cheap. Think before you take the plunge.  And cry less.

[McBryce]

guys, don't forget to backup your NAS ... 8Tb on a ds218 ... if one drive fails, the whole data is lost. 5 years of hard drive working, it's the average lifespan. if your NAS has built-in test for the drives, use it once a week or once a month. with 4 disks you can have a raid 5 installed so one drive failing is recoverable. but beware. I've seen many customers lost so many datas ...

Everything on the NAS will be backed up on External USB Harddrives that aren't connected to anything.

McBryce.

[beanflying]

guys, don't forget to backup your NAS ... 8Tb on a ds218 ... if one drive fails, the whole data is lost. 5 years of hard drive working, it's the average lifespan. if your NAS has built-in test for the drives, use it once a week or once a month. with 4 disks you can have a raid 5 installed so one drive failing is recoverable. but beware. I've seen many customers lost so many datas ...

Everything on the NAS will be backed up on External USB Harddrives that aren't connected to anything.

McBryce.

The 218j I got in the middle of last year has been doing it's thing well sharing and backing up file sharing was a large part of my initial treason too. 2x4tB Seagates fitted and backed up to an external HDD monthly. I like the Black on yours better than my shiny white one