Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

post(wo)man dropped off a TinyVNA V2 today. At least it seems to be one.

Hmm.

[Saskia]

Lumberjack meal today.

Salmon. And buttered scones for tea.

[bd139]

Almost forgot......

One broken one working... just in today

I had a PM 2522. Watch out when you open it. It's a shit to open and all the plastic clear separators in it break off in transit.

[xrunner]

the PM2527 is hugh, did not expect that

Yea it's big, but that's what we like because it can support a high stack of gear on top of it. 

[beanflying]

I was looking into the Creality CR10-MAX, so I could print a bezel in one go. Has a self leveling bed, improved heating bed etc. Oddly enough, it does not list ABS as possible materials. So now, I'm not sure what to do...

The CR-10 range will do ABS but you will want an enclosure for it which speeds the bed warm up with the larger footprint and preferably vent it to the outside or don't stay in the shed with it doing ABS.

[PA0PBZ]

the PM2527 is hugh, did not expect that

Yea it's big, but that's what we like because it can support a high stack of gear on top of it. 

 

[Ero-Shan]

Guess I should be happy we don't have something like that in Germany. At least I'm not aware of it.

https://www.vebeg.de/web/de/start/index.htm

Somehow I knew this was coming ...

There isn't much TE, and no trace of of any price. No minimum bid, nothing. Or have I gone blind?

Still happy. 

[tonyalbus]

is it christmas today?? again the maildude/-ette

it even has an OCXO i do not need or have order that, i can take it out, save some power and put it in one of my frequency counter that has not have an ext ref.

Now i have my 1Mhz for the marconi ;-)

They could have used some more soldering...

[PA0PBZ]

The soldering of the lower BNC row is a bit disappointing. 

[McBryce]

Guess I should be happy we don't have something like that in Germany. At least I'm not aware of it.

https://www.vebeg.de/web/de/start/index.htm

Somehow I knew this was coming ...

There isn't much TE, and no trace of of any price. No minimum bid, nothing. Or have I gone blind?

Still happy. 

It seems to be a blind-bid system. Put in your bid and wait until the end date to see if you were the highest bidder.

McBryce.

[mnementh]

the MS8910 is really cheap (25$) and easy to find. It's mostly a capacitor and ohm meter put together.

The MS8911 on the other hand is a real LCR meter with 4 test frequencies (up to 10Khz). It's harder to find since it look like Mastech is the OEM of other brands and probably have trade agreement with their clients. Like the Global Specialities LCR-58, exactly the same product for more than twice the price (105$ on digikey).

I was watching a video of the ST-5 and MS8911. Seriously I don't see a lot a difference in speed and resolution. Both take around 2sec to take a measurement. Anyway, will see when I receive mine.

Why you long-distance-enabling little sonuva-so-and-so!!! You made me go searching back through almost a YEAR of posts to find this pic...      and damn if you weren't right; mine IS a MS8910. 

So of course, now there's a MS8911 on its way to me via slow boat from China. 

I paid a few dollars more going with this vendor, (~US$47) but he has a lot of sales of this item and very good feedback with a couple years history: eBay auction: #283341251476

mnem

[mnementh]

Do you deal with them directly or through fleabay?  Not having dealt with them before, I went through fleaBay and made an offer which was instantly rejected.  My offer was a bit on the low side.  I assume a seller can set a reserve price in fleabay for that sort of thing?  Probably I will sit back and wait for a better deal to come along...

Via Ebay mostly since they don't post their new stuff elsewhere. They asked me if I wanted to do the tour of their warehouse at some point and just said no since I was buying too much already and was trying to limit my TEA consumption 

Oh, you pooor suffering bastard. Ya coulda braved it to see if they had any cheap-cheap project scopes for a fellow TEA-dwagon, ya know... 

mnem
 

[mnementh]

The hammer analogy is a bad one (ie. apples and onions comparison), also need to differentiate ratio between design issue or maintenance fail thats caused the non-combat losses.

Why? Both essentially designed to pound something flat or try to reduce it to its component parts i.e. Widlarize. I don't really see the need to go any deeper than "This is a very expensive way to destroy things, and it gets itself destroyed while in the toolbag more often than it manages to destroy something else when deployed".

The original point was "104 kills, 0 combat losses". The counterpoint was 175 non-combat loses. With any other tool people wouldn't say "it's very good at it's job" they'd say "It's junk, it breaks itself more often than it breaks the things it is designed to break". Just because it's a war plane people glamorize it, when viewed as a system or a tool to do a specific job (deny the enemy use of the airspace) it fails expensively more often than it (expensively) finally does its job. From a utilitarian point of view it is an expensive failure; that it is perhaps the best in its class over its whole 44 year history just means that the other tools in this task space are even junkier.

That's right, C... every tool's a hammer. 

Now take a moment to compare those figures against the non-combat flight hours on those airframes. THAT is where they earn their keep; being PREPARED and keeping 3 generations of pilots prepared to destroy the enemy is just as important as DOING it.

The fact you don't acknowledge the true purpose of these aircraft isn't THEIR shortcoming; it's yours, old friend.

And remember; unlike a hammer, if the operator drops one of THOSE on the ground it's done for.

mnem

[mnementh]

Finally I got my new toy.

Nice one. I'll get this one in August / September, I hope.

Creality CR-6 SE Leveling-free DIY 3D Printer Kit @ Kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1001939425/creality-cr-6-se-leveling-free-diy-3d-printer-kit/

Yup. Currently at $4.13M pledged of 100K; I think they met their stretch goals. 

I got in on the first "normal people" round... I think the deep discount rounds were only those people who waited up all night watching Kickstarter like a hawk. I got there when they said in my eMail that it would go up and the $265 bracket was all gone; by the time I finished fighting my way through KickStarter's new security bullshit (I've been a member for years; didn't help me) the $299 bracket was gone.

We'll see what arrives; I'm pretty stoked. 

mnem
 

[bd139]

I'll grab one once it's being palmed off on their UK ebay store on a sale day 

[mnementh]

Finally I got my new toy.

very nice bro!
i see you have your octoPi on standby already

Not in standby already working with, I just need a case and a Camera to have the full setup.

3D printing is  really interesting  topic and I alway wanted to give it a try .
Currently I'm fighting  with with the setup/calibration of the printer which are more complicated as expected.

Leveling the bat is a chellence, but once done its okey, i use glass/mirror as a base, it sticks very good, no glu needed.
i advice you to print an heattower, to find teh best temprature for your fillemend, i found i needed toprint a lot higher then on the spool was mentioned.
on my youtube channel i have some links about this tower...i made prob. all your mistakes too ;-)

Tony

Leveling is a nightmare. Even is the printer is equipped with a sensor, the compensation is not working well or the resolution of the step motors is not high enough.

I will have to do the leveling with a dial gauge ( like I'm doing it with my milling machine) to get better results. Doing it with a filling gauge is just suboptimal.

Ummm... no; leveling is EASY. This isn't rocket surgery; it's just squirting melted plastic onto a plate. 

If you can't get consistent leveling, it's likely something is loose in the assembly; either chassis members not tight or rollers not tight.

Even if it was already built when you got it (arguably, ESPECIALLY so), you'll need to go over it AS IF IT WERE A NEW BUILD. Check that the chassis is all tight, square and level, then disconnect belts and leadscrews and make sure the rollers are all tight but don't bind. While the CR10S Pro is a Dual-Z design, the leadscrews are NOT synchronized; this means that the gantry rollers are ALMOST as as critical as a single-Z design.

In any case, all rollers need to be double-checked; this is like 3DP-101 type stuff.  And don't forget to check Y-axis runout/parallelism; the dual rails make the bed much more stable, but they add one more thing to make sure is true and square vs single-rail designs.

I almost guarantee that if you do these things FIRST, leveling will be dead-simple, just as it was on my CR10-clone Tornado.

Good building!

I was looking into the Creality CR10-MAX, so I could print a bezel in one go. Has a self leveling bed, improved heating bed etc. Oddly enough, it does not list ABS as possible materials. So now, I'm not sure what to do...

You just need to put in a ducted box and maybe upgrade the extruder, that's all. There's lots of tutorials on upgrading the CR10 for ABS. Or shell out for the bigger CR10S Pro that comes with all the goodies.

mnem
*3DP-ily*

[mnementh]

I'll grab one once it's being palmed off on their UK ebay store on a sale day 

Yeah, good luck with that. I expect the CR-6 will suffer the same "CR10/E3 Phenomenon" as previous CReality releases; where for months after the initial release the only people who will have them are the glommers and gougers who bought dozens the instant they came out and are the REASON the printers sold out.

CReality has no reason to sell it for a penny less... we KS backers have already paid for the next year's production.

But hey... it's nice to hope!

mnem
*currently procrastinating against another deep-dive into Marlin firmware*

[AVGresponding]

The hammer analogy is a bad one (ie. apples and onions comparison), also need to differentiate ratio between design issue or maintenance fail thats caused the non-combat losses.

Why? Both essentially designed to pound something flat or try to reduce it to its component parts i.e. Widlarize. I don't really see the need to go any deeper than "This is a very expensive way to destroy things, and it gets itself destroyed while in the toolbag more often than it manages to destroy something else when deployed".

The original point was "104 kills, 0 combat losses". The counterpoint was 175 non-combat loses. With any other tool people wouldn't say "it's very good at it's job" they'd say "It's junk, it breaks itself more often than it breaks the things it is designed to break". Just because it's a war plane people glamorize it, when viewed as a system or a tool to do a specific job (deny the enemy use of the airspace) it fails expensively more often than it (expensively) finally does its job. From a utilitarian point of view it is an expensive failure; that it is perhaps the best in its class over its whole 44 year history just means that the other tools in this task space are even junkier.

As always with statistics, context is everything.

My quite well informed guess is that the number of combat hours dwindles into insignificance compared to the number of training/testing/ferrying hours.

[Ero-Shan]

Guess I should be happy we don't have something like that in Germany. At least I'm not aware of it.

https://www.vebeg.de/web/de/start/index.htm

Somehow I knew this was coming ...

There isn't much TE, and no trace of of any price. No minimum bid, nothing. Or have I gone blind?

Still happy. 

It seems to be a blind-bid system. Put in your bid and wait until the end date to see if you were the highest bidder.

McBryce.

Yep. If you win, you likely have to pay whatever you offered, not just a bit over the runner-up. And if they deem it unsatisfactory, they may decline to sell it. All in favor of the seller.
Though they do have a list of the winning bids for the last 14 days. (Very rarely there's something below a hundred bucks.)

Anyway, pick up only is a known showstopper for me.

[mnementh]

I was looking into the Creality CR10-MAX, so I could print a bezel in one go. Has a self leveling bed, improved heating bed etc. Oddly enough, it does not list ABS as possible materials. So now, I'm not sure what to do...

I have the CR10S Pro (the max is the same printer just bigger) with all the last improvement including self-leveling bed, which is not completely automated.
You need to do the leveling manually  anyway and better it is better is the result. The self leveling is just a way to do minimum compensation. ABS is definitively supported.

Well, sortof. If you're not going to print directly on glass (or Ultrabase) which generally ensures you have an absolutely flat & true bed surface, you need to do mesh leveling; which compensates for hills and vales in the print surface by moving the Z-axis as it prints. This is especially important with any of the plastic-coated beds, which can be pretty wavy.

You should get into that later in the assembly/calibration process. But you STILL should make sure everything is square & true FIRST.

mnem
 

[AVGresponding]

I hate all of you!

I can't afford a 3DP right now.   

[Cerebus]

The fact you don't acknowledge the true purpose of these aircraft isn't THEIR shortcoming; it's yours, old friend.

Their ultimate purpose is "air superiority", their immediate purpose is to destroy or disable other aircraft and to survive combat with other aircraft (and make the military-industrial complex rich as a side effect). Possibly I'm wrong but that's what I thought they were supposed to be for. Being prepared to be used, as you keep stressing as if it's something special, is a necessary precondition for any tool. That that preparation is the cause of most breakages is surely a hint that there's a question to be asked about the suitability of the chosen tool for the task.

If your chosen tool for achieving a stated purpose gets broken more times that it gets used effectively "in anger" (in this case both metaphorically and literally) then perhaps you've chosen the wrong tool and need to go back to the drawing board. That's still the case if the times that tool gets broken are during necessary training with that tool and maintenance of that tool - that's obviously the case of what happens with war planes.

In any everyday field of endeavour you'd think yourself crazy for having a tool that was so expensive, got trashed so often relative to the number of times it gets used and worked - even if it is very effective when it does get put to use. You would ask yourself "Surely there's a better way of doing this?". You'd look for a new way of achieving the same end goal. Not a different model of that particular tool, but a completely different tool. (I've kept the hammer analogy up because "When all you've got is a hammer..." and "If that doesn't work, get a bigger hammer").

I think the problem that you're personally having difficulty grasping this is the basic "choose a appropriate tool that works and keeps working" thing. I can quite understand why after all that buying 3D printers and then immediately having to fix them. 

And remember; unlike a hammer, if the operator drops one of THOSE on the ground it's done for.

You drop my hammer on the floor and you'd wish you simply had to use an ejector seat and face a board of enquiry.

Really, this has dragged on way too long for a throwaway remark. My point was the contrast with more normal situations and choices of tool to handle them. That that point keeps being missed either means that I'm a terrible communicator, or that the classic blind-spot of "that's the way we've always done it" is obscuring the view of my point.

[mnementh]

No, the point is you just won't admit that the ultimate purpose of these craft... that AIR SUPERIORITY... is a lot more complex than that of a hammer. This is a tool which REQUIRES training and maintenance of its USER; part of the aircraft's job is to DO THAT. And like it or not, now that these "fighter-type" aircraft have been invented, THERE IS NO OTHER TOOL that can provide this at ANY PRICE. At least, until we invent region-sized force-field projectors like in Star Wars.

A hammer requires little to no training; just hand one to a chimpanzee and s/he'll get it working correctly in no time. 

And YES; that is an expensive proposition. But protecting the PEOPLE who pay for these aircraft requires it; any government which decides it is not worth it will soon find itself at the mercy of some tinpot dictator with a few third-hand bombers or warships. Just look at the Middle East for pretty much continuous historical examples thereof.

You may not LIKE the definition of "air superiority" (as a dragon, I find the whole concept amusing to say the least); but like it or not, it IS part of the world in which we live.

mnem

[mnementh]

I hate all of you!   I can't afford a 3DP right now.   

Neither can I.       https://www.amazon.ca/Mayflash-F300-Arcade-Joystick-SWITCH/dp/B019MFPLC0/

I have ~$400 and dwagon man-weeks of fettling tied up in mine; I'm right now approximately day 5 of a project that will essentially let me build one of these from scratch.

And (unlike bean) this is probably my most adventurous and USEFUL project so far. 

mnem
*fettle-fettle*

[med6753]

If the F-15 is the POS that's being implied here then the Russian MIG's must REALLY be an absolute POS because the F-15's are damn good at knocking them out of the sky.