Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

Best answer to SLA charging is RTFDS 

[med6753]

Now that is a right proper jammy git if I have ever seen one.  I never get that lucky.

I won't consider myself lucky until I have it in my hot little hands. 

[med6753]

Best answer to SLA charging is RTFDS 

?Que?

[Cerebus]

Read The Friendly Data Sheet. (But in my experience they can be hard to come by for things like car batteries, even from companies that ought to know better).

[bd139]

One reason I tend to buy Exide/Yuasa ones. Always a datasheet!

[Specmaster]

Rant mode on.....I thought we had a Gentleman's agreement to keep political posts out of this thread. I seem to recall asking an innocent question once of the UK folks of their opinion of Boris and I got a quick and terse reply of “Don't go there”. OK, fine. The last few days I've been reading diatribes on here about the London terrorist shooting and whether it was justified or not. Isn't that a “Don't go there” or is that for some reason acceptable? I think not. So is political in or out? And I really don't think you'd much like to hear the opinion of a right to bear and does own a gun Yankee.  Rant mode off.   

I remember that but, I thought that it was ultimately decided that as long as it didn't go on and on and become a sort of verbal warfare it was OK, or as mnem defined it, it was considered to be the sort of chatter that normally take place at the water cooler, and besides that we are pretty good at self policing these things now. And of course, this one incident, was for us Brits, at least, a bit different to what we are accustomed to, unlike state side where guns are common place, here they are quite rare and even rarer for the police to unleash one in this fashion.

Nice Hakko by the way, but with the sheer size of that beast, I'll gladly stick with my small but powerful T12, more in keeping with my bench size, not everyone can have a humongous one like yours, I know that I'm more than a little bit jelly 

[bd139]

TBH I actually looked at the smaller one of them, the FX-951 and the damn thing cost £100 more than my metcal!

[Specmaster]

@bd139, you still have that Metcal? or has that also been sacrificed at the eBay alter after the transceiver?

[med6753]

Read The Friendly Data Sheet. (But in my experience they can be hard to come by for things like car batteries, even from companies that ought to know better).

Knowing this group, and myself, I doubt the "F" stands for "Friendly" 

[SeanB]

car battery charging 

I have limited the Rohde+Schwarz to 20A so it will not boil the test cables.

I have to admit to abusing by HP 6002A in the same fashion.

My battery chargers are in the garage. The favourite is an old GE unit my father got in the 1950's, and which I upgraded to a slightly more modern spec by removing the smellenium rectifier bridge before it went all skunky on me, though I do still have a few around NOS. added in some rudimentary charge control using a SCR and also reverse battery connection protection.

The other is a little different, it is a simple rectifier diode in a stud package, with an ammeter on the output that reads up to 50A, and an old 40A Fuchs thermal circuit breaker in series with it. Use with an old oil cooled arc welder. or with the slightly lighter air cooled one I use more, and it will charge a battery up from stone dead to start in around 3 minutes, or around 5 resets of the thermal breaker if you do not wind the current all the way down on the welder. Leave it on for more than 10 minutes and you boil the battery.

[Cerebus]

One reason I tend to buy Exide/Yuasa ones. Always a datasheet!

Oddly enough it was the inability to find a proper datasheet for the Yuasa battery that currently resides in my car (and the identical old one I just retired from service) that prompted that remark.

[mnementh]

Well, no... my point in THIS post was that rather than destroying the thing, you should turn it into a victory by retrofitting one of those inexpensive LED rings and designing a nice quiet linear supply to power it.

mnem
*tzzzt*

my good man, i didn’t destroy it, i disassembled it. you, of all people, should recognize the difference. 

* worsthorse wanders off to find the coffee.

Well, disassembling it and scattering its parts to the 4 corners of the earth house like the remains of The Blood Queen is not exactly the same thing. 

Once you've finished with your current obsession (or at least grown so annoyed with it you hide it away in a closet in defense of your own sanity) I suggest you reassemble it and retrofit an LED ring to it.

In the meantime, you may want to go shopping on AliEx & eBay for "White LED Ring"; they make them in lots of sizes up to about 120mm or so for car "angel eyes" (these are a crap shoot; some are scary bright and some are crap) and effect lighting for photography (these are designed for illumination and are my first choice if I can find the size I need) in the US$3-8 range; as I said, a pittance.

Anything larger than that tends to quickly get expensive, but they also make rings EXPLICITLY to replace the old Circline fluorescents (search Circline LED or T9 LED) for two or three pittances; typically in the US$15-20 range. Those will usually come with a bezel of some sort as well and you can be sure they're going to have nice bright LEDs as they're designed for illumination, but will also come with a pretty noisy PWM converter. You'll need to make a nice quiet linear supply with a resistor ballast to power those.

Alternately, most of these smaller illumination-purpose rings will provide great light... I've seen 100mm 12W rings for like $5-8. But you have to be willing to cut them into thirds or quarters with a hacksaw and make short jumpers for a few traces to connect them so they fit the right size circle.

I've done a number of these; once you get it done and see the much better illumination you get, the result is quite gratifying. If you go look at what a properly engineered LED illuminated magnifier from a decent name like Dazor costs (two of which I've owned in fluorescent versions... they really ARE 10x better than the Chinese cheapies), you'll feel MUCH better about the expenditure of time vs money.

Alas, all mine are packed away in a trailer in BuffaloNY. 

As for your project, my fear was mostly that recovering the odd bits you might have felt were no longer important, like the lens mounting hardware and such... would make the project no longer feasible. And depending on her mood, prizing the lens away from Amy could become a quest in its own right.

mnem

[Cerebus]

Use with an old oil cooled arc welder. or with the slightly lighter air cooled one I use more, and it will charge a battery up from stone dead to start in around 3 minutes, or around 5 resets of the thermal breaker if you do not wind the current all the way down on the welder. Leave it on for more than 10 minutes and you boil the battery.

Proof, as if we needed it, that you are indeed a South African Bloke, in all his glory. 

[med6753]

Nice Hakko by the way, but with the sheer size of that beast, I'll gladly stick with my small but powerful T12, more in keeping with my bench size, not everyone can have a humongous one like yours, I know that I'm more than a little bit jelly 

The Hakko will fit quite nicely in the slot currently occupied by the station in the rear of this photo.

[mnementh]

The other post was just me picking on Spec.

mnem
*tzzzt*

Thats OK cos my shoulders are broad, like yours 

My turn now  that light ring is kind of er interesting  but there is a slight problem, the actual ring (as far as I can see) is not sold separately, so it does mean replacing the entire fitting, not that it is expensive. I might actually get one of those myself, it might be less top heavy than mine, which has the SMPS also in the head adding to the weight. 

See my post above @worsthorse re: retrofitting LEDs into these things. 

The main reason I'm getting one of these is I don't have ANYTHING right now AND they're crazy cheap. And maybe a bit of "I wanna see just how bad it is at that price" and make a report on eevBlog sometime around Christmas or the New Year.  I fully expect to eventually have to make a linear supply for at least one of the LED channels so I don't have the same noise issues he was talking about when trying to do sensitive measurements.

mnem
 

[worsthorse]

Well, no... my point in THIS post was that rather than destroying the thing, you should turn it into a victory by retrofitting one of those inexpensive LED rings and designing a nice quiet linear supply to power it.

mnem
*tzzzt*

my good man, i didn’t destroy it, i disassembled it. you, of all people, should recognize the difference. 

* worsthorse wanders off to find the coffee.

Well, disassembling it and scattering its parts to the 4 corners of the earth house like the remains of The Blood Queen is not exactly the same thing. 

Once you've finished with your current obsession (or at least grown so annoyed with it you hide it away in a closet in defense of your own sanity) I suggest you reassemble it and retrofit an LED ring to it.

In the meantime, you may want to go shopping on AliEx & eBay for "White LED Ring"; they make them in lots of sizes up to about 120mm or so for car "angel eyes" (these are a crap shoot; some are scary bright and some are crap) and effect lighting for photography (these are designed for illumination and are my first choice if I can find the size I need) in the US$3-8 range; as I said, a pittance.

Anything larger than that tends to quickly get expensive, but they also make rings EXPLICITLY to replace the old Circline fluorescents (search Circline LED or T9 LED) for two or three pittances; typically in the US$15-20 range. Those will usually come with a bezel of some sort as well and you can be sure they're going to have nice bright LEDs as they're designed for illumination, but will also come with a pretty noisy PWM converter. You'll need to make a nice quiet linear supply with a resistor ballast to power those.

Alternately, most of these smaller illumination-purpose rings will provide great light... I've seen 100mm 12W rings for like $5-8. But you have to be willing to cut them into thirds or quarters with a hacksaw and make short jumpers for a few traces to connect them so they fit the right size circle.

I've done a number of these; once you get it done and see the much better illumination you get, the result is quite gratifying. If you go look at what a properly engineered LED illuminated magnifier from a decent name like Dazor costs (two of which I've owned in fluorescent versions... they really ARE 10x better than the Chinese cheapies), you'll feel MUCH better about the expenditure of time vs money.

Alas, all mine are packed away in a trailer in BuffaloNY. 

As for your project, my fear was mostly that recovering the odd bits you might have felt were no longer important, like the lens mounting hardware and such... would make the project no longer feasible. And depending on her mood, prizing the lens away from Amy could become a quest in its own right.

mnem

* worsthorse wanders in, sips coffee, and ponders his response.

pluueeeeeze!  i never throw the odd bits away. that's why i have hummus containers filled with small metal bits of uncertain origin (after I have removed the hummus, of course) stacked everywhere around here. the real question is whether i will be able to find these particular bits when i get around to building an LED version of this lamp, which is my plan (so thank you for the T9 pointer, very helpful), although my list of projects is long and this one is not at the top since I have a halogen light with a linear supply handy and working.

for a while, whenever i took something apart (and i am always taking things apart. i am, unfortunately much better at disassembly than reassembly, which has been an issue for at least fifty-ish years.) i was filling small plastic bags with the bits, blue taping the bags to whatever big hunks were left over, and putting it in the, um, project bin. inevitably the bags for three or four or ten such packages would get damaged during the storage process and I would open some crate and find a bunch of random parts in the bottom.

anyway, i never did like the maginifying lens and it isn't necessary to rebuilding the light into a usable form, which is good because i know better than to try to reclaim any hardware/software/bucket/tool/etc that amy has labeled ikebana only   

[tggzzz]

Read The Friendly Data Sheet. (But in my experience they can be hard to come by for things like car batteries, even from companies that ought to know better).

Knowing this group, and myself, I doubt the "F" stands for "Friendly" 

Correct. It does, of course, stand for "Fine".

[tautech]

The Hakko will fit quite nicely in the slot currently occupied by the station in the rear of this photo.

Did you test it for cord around the handle wrap ? 

[Martin.M]

car battery charging succhessful.
What`s the next, again oscillator day?

[med6753]

It has started, right on time. 

[med6753]

The Hakko will fit quite nicely in the slot currently occupied by the station in the rear of this photo.

Did you test it for cord around the handle wrap ? 

TBD. 

[Martin.M]

do you know the PTE company?

[Martin.M]

Mr. Hewlett + Mr. Packard starts in the hp garage,
Dr. Rohde + Dr. Schwarz starts here:



   oscillators day: SRV

[xrunner]

Big Iron from Dr. Rohde & Dr. Schwarz, proceed to take a glowy shot of the inside ... 

[worsthorse]

Inspired by @mnen's encouraging words, today's project is a new LED light for my bench.  Rooting around in the furnace room/inventory cage, I found an LED light that is perfect for this project. I can't believe I forgot I had one already.  A little work fastening the light to the cover and here's the finished product, ready to re-install on the arm:



Sure am glad I saved all those parts.