Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cerebus]

My take on a "lane departure" warning involves switching a spark plug lead to the butt of the driver's seat.

Ah, another advocate of placing a rusty six inch spike in the centre of the steering wheel as a visible encouragement to the driver to drive safely. 

[med6753]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

My take on a "lane departure" warning involves switching a spark plug lead to the butt of the driver's seat.

An old hot rodder's trick for dealing with a tailgater (following too close). Spark plug installed in the tail pipe and wired to a switch on the dash. Pull the manual choke to load up the engine with gas. Flip the switch. Enormous flame out the tail pipe. 

[TERRA Operative]

Well, that was not too hard so far, especially with all the transistors socketed.

Looks like the 7704A blew two transistors in the CRT intensity circuit (Q4163 and Q4175), part number 151-0223-00 for both, apparently they are 2N4275 parts.
Now to see if I have any, or find a substitute. Any ideas?

[med6753]

Well, that was not too hard so far, especially with all the transistors socketed.

Looks like the 7704A blew two transistors in the CRT intensity circuit (Q4163 and Q4175), part number 151-0223-00 for both, apparently they are 2N4275 parts.
Now to see if I have any, or find a substitute. Any ideas?

NTE123A direct cross. But Amazon is out of stock. NTEPartsDirect has them but doesn't ship to Japan. Have you looked at Ebay for exact replacement?

If you can't get a replacement let me know and I'll buy here and ship to you.

 

Edit......I just checked Ebay and there's many sources but I dunno if they ship to Japan. And most are in plastic cases. I'll bet yours are metal cans which really shouldn't make a difference.

[Specmaster]

Personally, I leave all of my driving aids switched ON, but still drive like I always used, in other words, as if the aids were not fitted.

I'm pretty sure that in the unlikely event of you having an accident and the insurance company later discovered that your safety devices were deactivated, they would walk away from any claim you made and cite that you were inviting trouble by switching them OFF, and saying that you violated their rules by overriding the cars safety devices.

To which hypothetical argument the counter would be "There's a button there, provided by the manufacturer, that turns it off, argue with them, not me, or have clear wording in the policy that tells me clearly in advance that you don't cover vehicles fitted with that button which you knew was there and which I revealed to you by providing the make and model of the vehicle in my application".

The phrase "safety devices" contains an assumption that DSC (or whatever) is a safety device rather than what it actually is, which is a device that lets a driver push further into the vehicle's region of marginal control rather than staying outside of it. Which is "safer": driving a vehicle on the safe side of its region of marginal stability, or pushing into it and relying on a computer to stop it from falling out the other side. If you've got a vehicle with DSC and it activates, you've gone too far; if you don't learn from the feedback you get if you're in marginal control without DSC you're encouraged to unconsciously dip into that zone when you should only ever make that decision consciously when circumstances permit you to do so safely.

These devices are not there to make you a better driver, nor are they there to take over your driving ability, they are merely there to assist you should the unthinkable happen that you did make a mistake and push the car beyond its safe limits.

The whole point here is that if it's beyond the safe limits then it's beyond the safe limits. DSC (or whatever) won't save you from that, it will just delay the point at which you become aware you're near the limits. Having progressive feedback that you're getting into the region near the limits is good, discovering them suddenly because some electronics have been compensating for them until they are precipitously revealed is not.

You and I are both experienced drivers and I think that you will also agree that todays cars are so different to the cars we learnt to drive in and over the years the dynamics and performance of cars has got so much better. I learned to drive in a Ford 100E Prefect, 26Kw, 72nm torque, 3 speed, RWD and 0-60mph 28 secs, compare that to my current car Skoda Superb Hatchback 130Kw, 360nm torque, 6 speed, FWD and 0-60 is 8.2secs so it is so much easier today to push a car to its absolute limits with hardly any effort at all. Add in that the cars we learnt in had skinny cross-ply tyres that would lose grip if you cornered too quickly. Todays cars have huge footprints by comparison, ride on steel reinforced radials that grip like sh1t on a blanket right upto the point that let go completely.

Modern safety aids are normally designed to cut in before the tyres reach the point of having no grip, otherwise, they will have zero grip to be exploited by the system before you endup in a ditch or wrapped around some tree etc.

[Cerebus]

To veer back in the direction of electronics, while not entirely abandoning cars:

I'm planning to add a dashcam to the BMW. In particular I want one with 'parking mode' and that pretty much necessitates hardwiring the dashcam to the car's electrics so that it gets the 'ACC' signal to loosely tell it when the car's being driven or parked and stop me from having to ever manually intervene. That necessitated a hunt for where in the electrical system to pick up the appropriate wires.

Part of the journey to find that information was what led me to trip over the Engineer crimp pliers, one poster doing something similar to me had bought a pair to crimp the contacts BMW use in their power distribution system.

Which leads me to BMW fuse boxes. They have a really neat and tidy system of wiring up fuse boxes that I haven't seen done before. If you know how BMW do this you can stop reading now.

BMW's fuse boxes use the, now ubiquitous, 'continental' blade fuses. On one side of the fuse the blade goes into a permanent two bladed receptacle in the fuse box where it picks up power. On the other blade of the fuse it goes to a two bladed crimp contact that takes the power off to the device/system being fed. The device side contacts are held in plug bodies not dissimilar to Molex type plugs, one plug to [typically] eight fuses, which come into the back of the fusebox. So to add a circuit you simply pick a spare unoccupied fuse slot that is already fed with the kind of power you need (switched with ignition, unswitched and so on). Then you crimp a double bladed contact to your new circuit and push it into the appropriate empty hole in the plug and the job's done.

Pictures from a scrapie on ebay.

Front of fusebox:



Back of fusebox with some plugs in place.



Very neat, I like it.

By dint of good luck BWM supply their own aftermarket dashcam, which I won't be getting as it's ~£500 fitted for something that's on a par with £100-£150 dashcams from other suppliers. BUT, there are fitting instructions available from BMW that even call out the correct spare fuse slots that you should use to supply switched and unswitched power to the dashcam. Nice.

[McBryce]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

[med6753]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

[AVGresponding]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

It's not confusing at all; nearside is the passenger or kerb side, regardless of whether you're in a LHD car driving on the right side of the road, or in a RHD car driving on the left side of the road. The same logic applies to the offside or driver's side.

Quite a few other countries drive on the sensible side of the road, not just the UK and Republic of Ireland.

[Cerebus]

Add in that the cars we learnt in had skinny cross-ply tyres that would lose grip if you cornered too quickly.

Speak for yourself grandad!    The only time I've driven a car with crossply tyres was literally sitting on my dad's knee.

Modern safety aids are normally designed to cut in before the tyres reach the point of having no grip, otherwise, they will have zero grip to be exploited by the system before you endup in a ditch or wrapped around some tree etc.

The difference between driver and electronics is that the driver can notice a pattern of loss of grip, like the slippery summer roads I mentioned earlier, and compensate in the medium term. Even if the electronics have a notion of maximum available grip that they can guarantee to stay within they are not going to predict that kind of road surface and alway stay within the actual available grip. The best they can do is to notice that a wheel is slipping now and take action, a good driver will notice that the wheels have slipped a little several times on the current journey and compensate in advance, provided that they haven't been deprived of the feedback that allows them to take that decision.

That belief that electronics will do better than a good driver is the kind of thinking driving the car crashes (pun fully intentional) that we are seeing with the wholesale and wrong-minded general adoption of 'AI' at the moment.

[Specmaster]

By dint of good luck BWM supply their own aftermarket dashcam, which I won't be getting as it's ~£500 fitted for something that's on a par with £100-£150 dashcams from other suppliers. BUT, there are fitting instructions available from BMW that even call out the correct spare fuse slots that you should use to supply switched and unswitched power to the dashcam. Nice.

Perhaps its worth pointing out that you need to make sure that the dashcam actually supports the dual feed, most that I have seen don't, and operate solely on a 2 core cable, which might explain why the BMW camera is so much more expensive because it  is configured to accept a permanent feed that is switched by the car being hit hard enough for a vibration switch to activate the camera when in the parked mode and when it receives a start signal from the ignition switch on its switched feed line, switches the dashcam into being fully awake and recording as long as the start signal is present.

I can personally recommend a dash cam to everyone, they are great devices and twice have proven to my insurance company that the accidents were not my fault. They can also be used to get out of certain instances of speeding etc as they can show, for instance, that the speeding was done by the dealer's mechanic on a road test etc.

[m k]

Electrophoresis, you say...?

   ...the only fun I was able to have was torturing a lead in my pencil and a little tingle across a fingertip.

mnem
 

It's 200W max.
It also has a timer so remembering is not so essential.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/hoefer-scientific-instruments-ps500xt-500v-variable-dc-power-supply-_serviced_/

Here last minute offers to London started from 26€.
(possibly with self pedaled propels)
Since transport seems to be always an issue maybe I'll start traveling with empty and hard core luggage.

BTW,
I'll take back that earlier voltage reference drift.
It doesn't drift, it's just ambient temperature dependent, maybe 0,05mV/3C around 20C.

Seems a bit expensive; mine was a lot cheaper though icr the exact price

https://www.troostwijkauctions.com/uk/electrophoresis-power-supply/03-40901-34448-8035255/
This?

[Specmaster]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

As does Japan, Australia and New Zealand along with many other countries.

[med6753]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

As does Japan, Australia and New Zealand along with many other countries.

Yea, so? Doesn't make it "right". 

[Cerebus]

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

Wrong, right hand drive, which as the word 'right' implies, is the correct side. It's not just the British and Irish, it's also the Japanese, who made both of your cars, who must have felt pain to produce wrong hand drive cars so that you could buy them. 

[m k]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

We use the-one-who-scares.
Though shotgun is much better.

One other thing,
@med, still without 516?

[med6753]

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

Wrong, right hand drive, which as the word 'right' implies, is the correct side. It's not just the British and Irish, it's also the Japanese, who made both of your cars, who must have felt pain to produce wrong hand drive cars so that you could buy them. 

I defer my response to above. 

[Specmaster]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

As does Japan, Australia and New Zealand along with many other countries.

Yea, so? Doesn't make it "right". 

Shame on you then with your Irish ancestry, its the Americans who are on the wrong side, you know that really don't you, deep down. 

[med6753]

Activation of a car's advanced safety systems should never just rely on a warning light in the instrument cluster, it should also be accompanied by at least an audio alert to make it unmissable to the driver that their style of driving is forcing one or more of the cars safety features to be activated.

Edit:
My car has both light and audio alerts for such events, I remember sitting in a side road, waiting to join a major road by turning left. That turn was also going uphill, and on this occasion it had been raining. As I stepped on the throttle to slot into a gap in the fast moving traffic, because of the cars' attitude, the wet road, the throttle being applied and the cars weight transferred to the offside, it caused the nearside front wheel to spin (FWD) and the traction control kicked in, alerting me via audio bonging and a flashing light.

Just a note because we have lots of non-native English speakers here: "Nearside" is a UK term for the passenger side of the vehicle (ie: the the side nearest the pavement) and "Farside" or "Offside" for right. I don't think this term is used anywhere else in the world and definitely not used in foreign languages, so I thought it's worth mentioning.

McBryce.

And doubly confusing because you Brits and Irish drive on the wrong side of the road. 

As does Japan, Australia and New Zealand along with many other countries.

Yea, so? Doesn't make it "right". 

Shame on you then with your Irish ancestry, its the Americans who are on the wrong side, you know that really don't you, deep down. 

Hey, the only reason the Irish drive on the wrong side of the road is because they were occupied for 700 years by you-know-who. 

[Cerebus]

By dint of good luck BWM supply their own aftermarket dashcam, which I won't be getting as it's ~£500 fitted for something that's on a par with £100-£150 dashcams from other suppliers. BUT, there are fitting instructions available from BMW that even call out the correct spare fuse slots that you should use to supply switched and unswitched power to the dashcam. Nice.

Perhaps its worth pointing out that you need to make sure that the dashcam actually supports the dual feed, most that I have seen don't, and operate solely on a 2 core cable, which might explain why the BMW camera is so much more expensive because it  is configured to accept a permanent feed that is switched by the car being hit hard enough for a vibration switch to activate the camera when in the parked mode and when it receives a start signal from the ignition switch on its switched feed line, switches the dashcam into being fully awake and recording as long as the start signal is present.

It's the other way around, because I've been looking at dashcams that have three wire power feeds that I was looking at how to fit one on  the BMW. The third wire is not an impact sensor feed, it's just the normal ACC wire that would switch on, say, a radio while it takes a +12V on another wire to keep it alive. Dashcams repurpose this to differentiate the car being in 'ignition on' and 'ignition off' and so switching into 'surveillance mode' when parked.

The BMW camera is so much more expensive not because it has any advanced features but because it has a BMW logo on it.

[factory]

A very quick post, that will be lost amongst all this car crap. 

Tek 422 with AC/DC power option is now working again. 




You may now resume the usual motor vehicle related nonsense.

David

[Cerebus]

I defer my response to above. 

Oh dear, have the colonies run out of sisal or hemp? I can send you a reel if you're desperate. 

[TERRA Operative]

Well, that was not too hard so far, especially with all the transistors socketed.

Looks like the 7704A blew two transistors in the CRT intensity circuit (Q4163 and Q4175), part number 151-0223-00 for both, apparently they are 2N4275 parts.
Now to see if I have any, or find a substitute. Any ideas?

NTE123A direct cross. But Amazon is out of stock. NTEPartsDirect has them but doesn't ship to Japan. Have you looked at Ebay for exact replacement?

If you can't get a replacement let me know and I'll buy here and ship to you.

 

Edit......I just checked Ebay and there's many sources but I dunno if they ship to Japan. And most are in plastic cases. I'll bet yours are metal cans which really shouldn't make a difference.

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll see what I can get shipped to Japan before I bother you with errands.

All these transistors in my unit are plastic, it's a 3xxxxx serial number, so maybe a later one. But in practice, metal or plastic is fine, as long as it works. 

[ch_scr]

Well, that was not too hard so far, especially with all the transistors socketed.

Looks like the 7704A blew two transistors in the CRT intensity circuit (Q4163 and Q4175), part number 151-0223-00 for both, apparently they are 2N4275 parts.
Now to see if I have any, or find a substitute. Any ideas?

NTE123A direct cross. But Amazon is out of stock. NTEPartsDirect has them but doesn't ship to Japan. Have you looked at Ebay for exact replacement?

If you can't get a replacement let me know and I'll buy here and ship to you.

 

Edit......I just checked Ebay and there's many sources but I dunno if they ship to Japan. And most are in plastic cases. I'll bet yours are metal cans which really shouldn't make a difference.

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll see what I can get shipped to Japan before I bother you with errands.

All these transistors in my unit are plastic, it's a 3xxxxx serial number, so maybe a later one. But in practice, metal or plastic is fine, as long as it works. 

This historic reference gives "TIS47, 2N4265-4418, SK3039" on page 59. Not sure thats a help 

[BU508A]

Well, that was not too hard so far, especially with all the transistors socketed.

Looks like the 7704A blew two transistors in the CRT intensity circuit (Q4163 and Q4175), part number 151-0223-00 for both, apparently they are 2N4275 parts.
Now to see if I have any, or find a substitute. Any ideas?

NTE123A direct cross. But Amazon is out of stock. NTEPartsDirect has them but doesn't ship to Japan. Have you looked at Ebay for exact replacement?

If you can't get a replacement let me know and I'll buy here and ship to you.

 

Edit......I just checked Ebay and there's many sources but I dunno if they ship to Japan. And most are in plastic cases. I'll bet yours are metal cans which really shouldn't make a difference.

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll see what I can get shipped to Japan before I bother you with errands.

All these transistors in my unit are plastic, it's a 3xxxxx serial number, so maybe a later one. But in practice, metal or plastic is fine, as long as it works. 

Have you checked this website?
https://alltransistors.com/transistor.php?transistor=4051

This is their suggestion for replacing the 2N4275. No idea, how accurate it is.
https://alltransistors.com/crsearch.php?mat=Si&struct=NPN&pc=0.28&ucb=40&uce=15&ueb=4&ic=0.1&tj=125&ft=400&cc=4&hfe=30&caps=TO106