most amusing test equipment ever made

[sarepairman2]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Eberline-Alpha-6A-1-Air-Particulate-Monitor-256-Channel-Analyzer-Alarm-Bell-/

[Maxlor]

What's the amusing part? The red light? That's quite standard for anything used in an assembly line.

[sarepairman2]

i thought the red light is extremely amusing, especially if it goes off because someone farted

[N2IXK]

If somebody is farting alpha particles, they have bigger problems than the flatulence....

[sarepairman2]

i wonder if turning on a strobe light when there is a radio logical leak is an appropriate solution

[SeanB]

We use a Linx inkjet printer at work with the same red light. Flashes when it is stopped, or when you are doing an edit of the print, or when it has low solvent, ink or a fault. I never buy the ink for it, the solvent use is around 40 bottles per year though, the ink tank holding 1.5l of ink being enough to run it easily between services, when the tank is cleaned to get to the pickup and coarse filter in it. All internal piping for ink and the MEK solvent is PTFE, along with all the fittings and wetted parts of the valves and pump.

[sarepairman2]

that seems completely ridiculous.

why does a printer need to flash and annoy everyone if it jams?

i do enjoy the office commotion when the printer jams at my job. everyone makes a thing out of it for no good reason

[petieken]

The light is important when there is a lot of printing going on. At my work, there are several printers that print an average of 10K double sided pages per day each. So when the printer if out of paper or toner, or it jammed, it's easy to notice by the red light. Without the light, it might take an hour or so for someone to notice it stopped printing. One hour means a huge backlog.

[Richard Crowley]

that seems completely ridiculous.
why does a printer need to flash and annoy everyone if it jams?
i do enjoy the office commotion when the printer jams at my job. everyone makes a thing out of it for no good reason

You need to expand your view of the world. Printers are not just confined to offices.  As others have suggested, much/most equipment used in industrial production has warning lights like that to attract the attention of the support people, and to identify which equipment needs attention. There could be a dozen identical printers and you need something like that to signal WHICH printer is down.

Frequenty you will see multi-color lights which indicate equipment up/down, working/waiting, etc.

[Fungus]

If somebody is farting alpha particles, they have bigger problems than the flatulence....

And the red flashing light is totally needed by everybody else in the room. It should probably be bigger, in fact. And have a klaxon.

[jwm_]

Also, a clean room breach is something you definitely want a big, big siren for, no human will notice it and it can be devastating. A fab clean room can cost tens to hundreds of millions to restart production after even a small unscheduled delay. A whole batch of wafers ruined due to particulates can bankrupt a place.

There are certainly many places where that red siren is humorously inadequate and undersized  for what it is measuring.