Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[BU508A]

Should we mention the saltwater crocodiles....?

Ok, wrong continet but besides that ... 

What the actual fuck...?

Is this some alien mind-game turn on that old "the dog and the butterfly" meme...?

mnem
*toddles off to count his scales, just on GP...*

It's a song for children. Some years ago, it was a big hit here in Germany (don't ask!) but first it was aired at "Die Sendung mit der Maus", I think.

Sometimes people are really strange ...

[Saskia]

People are always strange and unpredictable. Test equipment is not. Which is why we prefer interacting with test equipment.

[bd139]

Don’t even go there. I just spent an hour debugging an issue with that D755 

Fortunately an open capacitor. Vertical and HV recapped and working now.

Next steps are find some suitable Cinch connectors and build an extender for it so I can actually cal it.

[mansaxel]

Also, I accepted delivery of a bunch of Nexus 9K switches, 100G and 10/25G models. For the lab. And we decided to go forth with the purchase of perhaps 70 switches for the production network.

That probably means you have an exciting future ahead of you re-discovering bugs in ACI. 

The ACI bug discovery department is two desks to the left, and yes, they've got their hands full. This is going to be a NXOS media network (multi-Gbit multicast RTP, yay! ) build. Another kind of bug, more traditional, more sorcery.

[salvagedcircuitry]

Goodnight my sweet DSO80K. Repairs will be made in haste. You will awaken anew to conquer the day. 

[tggzzz]

Okay... I think I've narrowed it down to 3 choices:

Mint: Mostly nostalgia; I used Ubuntu last time I dove in and Mint's Cinnamon desktop is supposed to be better polished with more maintenance automation for those not interested in constantly futzing around under the hood.

Elementary: Okay, still Ubuntu, but as it's going on a Mac, why not go for a sympathetic feel for my cheese grater? Also supposed to be highly likely to install with everything working from precomplied iso.

GhostBSD: It looks like the most noob-friendly BSD version with a polished desktop, and again... I'm coming at this as if I were a noob. As it's been over a decade since my last dalliance, I pretty much am. 

Opinions? 

mnem
 

If you like simplicity, speed, low resource consumption, consider Xfce in the form of Xubuntu. Choose the xfce 12 theme and it like good old WinXP, not his flattie crap.

I presume you could use Xfce in Mint; changing the window manager from cinnamon shouldn't be a problem.

[mnementh]

Goodnight my sweet DSO80K. Repairs will be made in haste. You will awaken anew to conquer the day. 

   

I had a brain hemorrhage just looking at the tidiness of that workspace.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

All cleaned up. The only part I can't do is pull the bottom plate to inspect/clean. No way can I jackass this scope around in my current condition. I also want to perform a total re-cap but that's not in the cards either. Perhaps not for several months.

So in the meantime I'm going to build up a power cord and then do some resistance checks in the PSU. If everything seems OK give full beans power and stand back. Based upon results take it from there.

The seller was not to forthcoming about where the scope came from, does it power up, and if so does it have a trace. But once I looked it over and saw that it was in good shape and complete it really didn't matter. And the bargain $75 USD was just the icing on the cake. I've always wanted a Type 547.

The first Tektronix scope I ever saw and used was one of these Type 547's in college electronics lab in 1971. Exactly 50 years later I have one in my lab. To me this is my Holy Grail. If I never buy another piece of TE I'll be a happy boy. You know that won't happen. 

It looks fab, med. nice work.

Those choobs are entirely too shiny tho... may have them rebel on you after removing the protective coating of dust they've enjoyed for decades... 

mnem
I'm with bd, BTW. It needs a twin brother. 

And a ground floor flat, what that, yours fell through so it's now a ground floor flat with a very high ceiling 

[mnementh]

Got a nice beginner's "opamp hands on learning course", a HP6824 Power-Supply/Amplifier für 100 Euro.

Manual and even more apllication note 82 might be quite educating for me as a beginner.
https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/an/pdf/an_82.pdf

After some IPA cleaning of the sticky surfaces, It's in preety good shape and seems to be fully functioning.

Now I have to look for the missing top cover screw. Seems to be some kind of US self tapping screw. Same for a missing screw on the side.

There should not be any self tapping crap for the covers of old HP TEA, the screws for the top & bottom covers are usually No. 6-32 UNC countersunk screws (or flat head screws if your in the US).

David

I suspect the only experience he's had with 6-32 screws is the kind that go on a ATX power supply.

mnem
 

[srb1954]

Come to sunny Australia, we are having a little problem with a few spiders in a few areas 😂
Fortunately NIMBY 😁

Whoooa, I thought this might be fake. Only to find out, it's apparently NOT... 

Stay safe "Down Under"!
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-australians-deadly-spider-plague.html

You really need to start worrying when the Spiders Eat the Crickets who in turn are eaten by the Lizards and because of the flooding the Bull Sharks eat the Lizards .... 

Should we mention the saltwater crocodiles....?

I was going to but it might have worried the rest of them

I'll stay here with the beavers and moose, thank you 

You forget to mention the bears!

[xrunner]

Now I have to look for the missing top cover screw. Seems to be some kind of US self tapping screw. Same for a missing screw on the side.

It's going to be a screw with a Pozidriv head that hp used on those covers, but it's not self-tapping. You really need a Pozidriv driver head if you want to do it right, but yea you might resort to Phillips head I realize ... 

[Cubdriver]

Now I have to look for the missing top cover screw. Seems to be some kind of US self tapping screw. Same for a missing screw on the side.

It's going to be a screw with a Pozidriv head that hp used on those covers, but it's not self-tapping. You really need a Pozidriv driver head if you want to do it right, but yea you might resort to Phillips head I realize ... 

It's quite the challenge to find Pozidriv machine screws in other than metric threads.  Evilbay seems to be about the only source unless you want to buy a box of like ten gazillion of them for a couple of hundred bucks.  That said, 6-32 is the thread size used in most of the older equipment.

-Pat

<edit to add - I wish they were more available - I mush prefer them to self-camming Phillips screws.>

[25 CPS]

OS/2 Warp ..... geez, what a throw back.  It's been 25 years since anyone has even uttered that phrase within my hearing.

Tell me about it.  I found myself bringing it up back in December when I was trying to explain to some kids what the world was like in 1995 to give some context to something that happened then that we were talking about.

Although bd thinks OS/2 Warp sucks I liked it. Had a PS/2 MOD 80 with a 486 processor and it was practically crash proof. And it had the decent Win3.1 Emulator. Yes, took nearly 3-4 minutes to cold boot but once booted had good performance.

Of course the IBM Microchannel was a PITA because IBM was being a real arse hole about licensing it so it took a lot of searching to find an external CD drive or even a sound card.   

One of my friends and I went through pain and suffering getting a Pentium 90 clone to dual boot OS/2, it was a 3.x version that came out before Warp 4, and MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11.  Maybe my recollection's wrong but I thought that OS/2 actually contained a full version of Windows and that the red version came with it and the blue version you supplied your own copy or vice versa?

...back in the last days of diverse platforms before the desktop computer industry settled down to being a choice between Windows and Macs and a sprinkling of *nix systems.

[beanflying]

Now I have to look for the missing top cover screw. Seems to be some kind of US self tapping screw. Same for a missing screw on the side.

It's going to be a screw with a Pozidriv head that hp used on those covers, but it's not self-tapping. You really need a Pozidriv driver head if you want to do it right, but yea you might resort to Phillips head I realize ... 

It's quite the challenge to find Pozidriv machine screws in other than metric threads.  Evilbay seems to be about the only source unless you want to buy a box of like ten gazillion of them for a couple of hundred bucks.  That said, 6-32 is the thread size used in most of the older equipment.

-Pat

<edit to add - I wish they were more available - I mush prefer them to self-camming Phillips screws.>

Prices seem to have doubled since I brought a pack of 50 a couple of years back on evilbay. Paid about $0.10 AUD each now over double and yes 6-32 are right for most of the older HP gear covers but then for some extra buggery they seem to have gone to 'some' metric fasteners too in parts of the chassis

[Cerebus]

If I appear to have been uncharacteristically quiet the past few days, blame KiCad. I have decided, whether foolishly or not is yet to become clear, to give KiCad another try now that version 6 is around the corner. That's necessitated quite a bit of "heads down" time.

So, I've been giving the 5.99 nightlies a try.

Lordy it's a mixed bag. Still has wildly inconsistent tabbing orders, still doesn't select the contents when you tab to a field to edit it, still some places you can paste into a field and others you can't, some places it finally uses native UI elements to select files, others it still uses some clumbsy home-spun file selector. Basically all sorts of niggling usability issues that seem to be the bête noire of KiCad.

But, much has improved - I found 4.0 unusable, 5.0 et seq usable if you didn't mind tearing your hair out every half hour, so far 5.99 has had me tut-tutting but the only thing that has really annoyed me is that it regularly ignores the pan speed setting I've given it and shoots of into hyper-space if I dare to try and push a trace off the edge of the current window. Trace 'magnetism' is still very iffy and requires a steady hand to get traces where you want them rather than twisted around half the components on the board like the result of a wire wrap tool gone mad.

Still it's getting much better and if you're like me and have consigned the earlier versions to the nether hell where they belong it might be time to take another look.

Just for the hell of it, here's the board I've been building up over the past few days. I've been kind of designing the actual electronics on the fly. It's not (yet) an actual project but it's close to one, and some of the time has been usefully spent tracking down things like the right connector for an existing daughterboard, so if I scrap the board and start again with a fully designed project the work so far hasn't been a waste. A Stan Lee "no prize" to the first person to correctly divine what the board's nominally for (no, it's not hard to figure out but one crucial output circuit isn't yet on the board which would have really given the game away). The filename is no clue, I changed tack after starting my practice piece but kept the original filename.



And no board design is complete without mooning you with it:

[mnementh]

...Unfortunately, the list of supported GPUs is pretty short. And surprise, surprise, surprise... only GPUs flashed with a Mac-specific FW will have the preboot splash. 

I'm pretty sure, like all the nvidias of that age, is hit by bumpgate; maybe try an "oven reflow"?

Yeah, I actually had considered this; I've been eyeing my cheap hot-air rework station all morning over coffee. So far, the coffee has won out every time. 

   Of course, curiosity ultimately won out... as it always does with the ol' tinkerdwagon. Appropriate flux for the task has been ordered; and I'll have a chance to put my recent Panavise gift to work. 

You don't need any flux to do the rework; the problem is between the silicon and the organic support(intermediate PCB), not between the intermediate PCB and "main board(graphic card)". If you want to use the hot air gun, you will have to heat up the silicon chip, since the cracked bumps are below the chip, not between the supporting PCB and the graphic card himself. If you want detailed explanation, look up bumpgate on semiaccurate.

Thanks for the pointers. I had already done some research on this, including watching some videos of people who do it for a living, with the full automated preheater/reballing/hot air workstation, and the ones I'd seen up to that point evidently either didn't know better or were just doing both to make sure they didn't have to do it again.

I studied several different videos, and the takeaway was preheat, bring up to approx 260-300°C for 20-30sec, (depending on the video) then cool down to ~200°C-ish quickly, then the rest of the way over a period of several minutes to prevent thermal shock. I got my stuff together for a "shadetree mechanic" approximation of such a lab, and got to work.



Here I'm just starting to preheat; I brought temp up to ~110°C from the bottom with my cheap hot air gun...



Then applied heat with both while watching the themometer to bring it up to ~260 for 10 seconds, then 300° for another 10 seconds, then down to 260° for 10 seconds, then pulled the rework gun away till it dropped to ~200°C, then slowly pulled it away over the course of several minutes to ~100°C, then just the bottom gun til it dropped below 50°.



After that, I whipped the card together real quick & tried it on the UBCD... it powered up as usual, but after a second or so, the fan went from full speed down to approx 10%, and for the first time I could actually hear the Mac boot chime with this card!  w00t!  It took 30 seconds or so to boot, as this was off a IDE DVDRW drive; but we did get all the way there.



Heartened by this, I popped the disc out ( I finally know what the Mac weenies in Dominion chat meant when they chanted "Six over, three down!!!" from time to time... that's the number of holes under the optical drive to find the right spot to poke the eject button...  ) and slid drive sled #1 into its slot.

Hall-leh-fukkin'-lu-jeh!!! Signs of life!!! I see a rotten apple on the screen! I let it run for aboot a minute, but progress was quite slow, and I was afraid to let it go any longer until I'd properly serviced the heat-sink, etc. as it was just on there with 4 screws.

We'll see how that service goes... I have a .iso for Mint with Cinnamon and Xfce DE, as well as GhostBSD with MATE DE. If the Mac boot disk or the GT8800 don't wanna play nice, I have them on standby.

mnem
 

[cyclin_al]

OS/2 Warp ..... geez, what a throw back.  It's been 25 years since anyone has even uttered that phrase within my hearing.

Nothing wrong with that... (runs fine in virtualbox)

Oh wow!  System clock ... saw that on my screen for quite a few years.  Almost forgot about it.
I wonder if I still have the disks for the Watcom C++ compiler?

[beanflying]

Now I am sort of back on my feet several hours gentle bench rubbish dump cleanup needs to commence to find a proper home for the new toy. Also sometime I must try some of that new fangled Lead free stuff someday but today nothing but the good stuff for first fumes  

First impressions wow so quick to heat up and tiny bench footprint compared to my current pair. Also required in short order will be a 3D printed tip holder because leaving them dumped in the bucket like that is a really crappy look for the level of Pesos spent

[Kosmic]

Why you should not buy those cheap Triax connector knockoffs.

First:



They break easily. I barely put some pressure on the leg and it just broke off 

Secondly:



This is really a deal breaker. I found the problem when the connector was actually installed and was wondering why nothing was working. Eventually did open the enclosure and realized that all the wires inside were twisted. So if you turn the cable outside, the 2 center conductors are also turning at the same time !!! 

So I had to bite the bullet and ordered 2 good quality connectors made by Cinch. 20$ each 

[mansaxel]

<edit to add - I wish they were more available - I mush prefer them to self-camming Phillips screws.>

The Pozidriv is a much better tool-fastener interface than the Philips. It has been easily surpassed by the Torx, though.

[Zoli]

...Unfortunately, the list of supported GPUs is pretty short. And surprise, surprise, surprise... only GPUs flashed with a Mac-specific FW will have the preboot splash. 

I'm pretty sure, like all the nvidias of that age, is hit by bumpgate; maybe try an "oven reflow"?

Yeah, I actually had considered this; I've been eyeing my cheap hot-air rework station all morning over coffee. So far, the coffee has won out every time. 

   Of course, curiosity ultimately won out... as it always does with the ol' tinkerdwagon. Appropriate flux for the task has been ordered; and I'll have a chance to put my recent Panavise gift to work. 

You don't need any flux to do the rework; the problem is between the silicon and the organic support(intermediate PCB), not between the intermediate PCB and "main board(graphic card)". If you want to use the hot air gun, you will have to heat up the silicon chip, since the cracked bumps are below the chip, not between the supporting PCB and the graphic card himself. If you want detailed explanation, look up bumpgate on semiaccurate.

Thanks for the pointers. I had already done some research on this, including watching some videos of people who do it for a living, with the full automated preheater/reballing/hot air workstation, and the ones I'd seen up to that point evidently either didn't know better or were just doing both to make sure they didn't have to do it again.

I studied several different videos, and the takeaway was preheat, bring up to approx 260-300°C for 20-30sec, (depending on the video) then cool down to ~200°C-ish quickly, then the rest of the way over a period of several minutes to prevent thermal shock. I got my stuff together for a "shadetree mechanic" approximation of such a lab, and got to work.



Here I'm just starting to preheat; I brought temp up to ~110°C from the bottom with my cheap hot air gun...



Then applied heat with both while watching the themometer to bring it up to ~260 for 10 seconds, then 300° for another 10 seconds, then down to 260° for 10 seconds, then pulled the rework gun away till it dropped to ~200°C, then slowly pulled it away over the course of several minutes to ~100°C, then just the bottom gun til it dropped below 50°.



After that, I whipped the card together real quick & tried it on the UBCD... it powered up as usual, but after a second or so, the fan went from full speed down to approx 10%, and for the first time I could actually hear the Mac boot chime with this card!  w00t!  It took 30 seconds or so to boot, as this was off a IDE DVDRW drive; but we did get all the way there.



Heartened by this, I popped the disc out ( I finally know what the Mac weenies in Dominion chat meant when they chanted "Six over, three down!!!" from time to time... that's the number of holes under the optical drive to find the right spot to poke the eject button...  ) and slid drive sled #1 into its slot.

Hall-leh-fukkin'-lu-jeh!!! Signs of life!!! I see a rotten apple on the screen! I let it run for aboot a minute, but progress was quite slow, and I was afraid to let it go any longer until I'd properly serviced the heat-sink, etc. as it was just on there with 4 screws.

We'll see how that service goes... I have a .iso for Mint with Cinnamon and Xfce DE, as well as GhostBSD with MATE DE. If the Mac boot disk or the GT8800 don't wanna play nice, I have them on standby.

mnem
 

Congratulation, you've done a dam(pun intended) good job; now you have a good Mac video card, which I would recommend to use it only when needed. And for future references: the reflowing can be re-done a few times, if needed

[bd139]

If I appear to have been uncharacteristically quiet the past few days, blame KiCad. I have decided, whether foolishly or not is yet to become clear, to give KiCad another try now that version 6 is around the corner. That's necessitated quite a bit of "heads down" time.

So, I've been giving the 5.99 nightlies a try.

Lordy it's a mixed bag. Still has wildly inconsistent tabbing orders, still doesn't select the contents when you tab to a field to edit it, still some places you can paste into a field and others you can't, some places it finally uses native UI elements to select files, others it still uses some clumbsy home-spun file selector. Basically all sorts of niggling usability issues that seem to be the bête noire of KiCad.

But, much has improved - I found 4.0 unusable, 5.0 et seq usable if you didn't mind tearing your hair out every half hour, so far 5.99 has had me tut-tutting but the only thing that has really annoyed me is that it regularly ignores the pan speed setting I've given it and shoots of into hyper-space if I dare to try and push a trace off the edge of the current window. Trace 'magnetism' is still very iffy and requires a steady hand to get traces where you want them rather than twisted around half the components on the board like the result of a wire wrap tool gone mad.

Still it's getting much better and if you're like me and have consigned the earlier versions to the nether hell where they belong it might be time to take another look.

Just for the hell of it, here's the board I've been building up over the past few days. I've been kind of designing the actual electronics on the fly. It's not (yet) an actual project but it's close to one, and some of the time has been usefully spent tracking down things like the right connector for an existing daughterboard, so if I scrap the board and start again with a fully designed project the work so far hasn't been a waste. A Stan Lee "no prize" to the first person to correctly divine what the board's nominally for (no, it's not hard to figure out but one crucial output circuit isn't yet on the board which would have really given the game away). The filename is no clue, I changed tack after starting my practice piece but kept the original filename.



And no board design is complete without mooning you with it:

Looking interesting. The stinking big OCXO gives it away  .

I do have to say one thing about kicad and that is most of the problems you are seeing are endemic to the Mac version of it. There’s something about Qt and Cocoa which is just entirely fuckity wherever has been portrd. But I’m using 5.1.9, on windows, and it’s absolutely fine. I’m doing all the EDA stuff on windows due to the “principle of least buggery”.

Edit: I’ve looked at some of the UBlox modules recently and I reckon they are hand solderable as well. That brings the BOM cost and board size of such things down considerably. And yes I have the same thing planned

[bd139]

...Unfortunately, the list of supported GPUs is pretty short. And surprise, surprise, surprise... only GPUs flashed with a Mac-specific FW will have the preboot splash. 

I'm pretty sure, like all the nvidias of that age, is hit by bumpgate; maybe try an "oven reflow"?

Yeah, I actually had considered this; I've been eyeing my cheap hot-air rework station all morning over coffee. So far, the coffee has won out every time. 

   Of course, curiosity ultimately won out... as it always does with the ol' tinkerdwagon. Appropriate flux for the task has been ordered; and I'll have a chance to put my recent Panavise gift to work. 

You don't need any flux to do the rework; the problem is between the silicon and the organic support(intermediate PCB), not between the intermediate PCB and "main board(graphic card)". If you want to use the hot air gun, you will have to heat up the silicon chip, since the cracked bumps are below the chip, not between the supporting PCB and the graphic card himself. If you want detailed explanation, look up bumpgate on semiaccurate.

Thanks for the pointers. I had already done some research on this, including watching some videos of people who do it for a living, with the full automated preheater/reballing/hot air workstation, and the ones I'd seen up to that point evidently either didn't know better or were just doing both to make sure they didn't have to do it again.

I studied several different videos, and the takeaway was preheat, bring up to approx 260-300°C for 20-30sec, (depending on the video) then cool down to ~200°C-ish quickly, then the rest of the way over a period of several minutes to prevent thermal shock. I got my stuff together for a "shadetree mechanic" approximation of such a lab, and got to work.



Here I'm just starting to preheat; I brought temp up to ~110°C from the bottom with my cheap hot air gun...



Then applied heat with both while watching the themometer to bring it up to ~260 for 10 seconds, then 300° for another 10 seconds, then down to 260° for 10 seconds, then pulled the rework gun away till it dropped to ~200°C, then slowly pulled it away over the course of several minutes to ~100°C, then just the bottom gun til it dropped below 50°.



After that, I whipped the card together real quick & tried it on the UBCD... it powered up as usual, but after a second or so, the fan went from full speed down to approx 10%, and for the first time I could actually hear the Mac boot chime with this card!  w00t!  It took 30 seconds or so to boot, as this was off a IDE DVDRW drive; but we did get all the way there.



Heartened by this, I popped the disc out ( I finally know what the Mac weenies in Dominion chat meant when they chanted "Six over, three down!!!" from time to time... that's the number of holes under the optical drive to find the right spot to poke the eject button...  ) and slid drive sled #1 into its slot.

Hall-leh-fukkin'-lu-jeh!!! Signs of life!!! I see a rotten apple on the screen! I let it run for aboot a minute, but progress was quite slow, and I was afraid to let it go any longer until I'd properly serviced the heat-sink, etc. as it was just on there with 4 screws.

We'll see how that service goes... I have a .iso for Mint with Cinnamon and Xfce DE, as well as GhostBSD with MATE DE. If the Mac boot disk or the GT8800 don't wanna play nice, I have them on standby.

mnem
 

Impressive.

Next time I get an IT related problem I’m going to solve it with a flame thrower too 

[beanflying]

Mmm so I played with KiCad a while ago and it kind of sucked a few years ago and I have used Eagle in the past so randomly today I made quicky dive into the shallow end of the Gene pool and played with Fusion/Eagle. The Autorouter completely SUCKS btw. 

Yep I know a through hole single sided board and a 555 shows a complete lack of imagination but

So is it time before it is to late to run back to KiCad for another look ......

[bd139]

It’s quite capable. It’s not Altium but that’s probably a positive reference 

It’s considerably less nasty than Zukon or Eagle too. And the price is right. Can’t really moan.