Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[xrunner]

65 DVM, VOM, AC Voltmeters, Ammeters, 28 Signal Generators/Synthesizers, 33 Function/Pulse Generators, 10 Logic Analyzers,
13 Oscilloscopes, 23 Receivers/Spectrum Analyzers/Network Analyzers, 14 Power Supplies, 22 Counters, 30 Component Testers.
19 Modulation/Audio/Transmission Analyzers, 13 Calibrators, 5 Tape Recorders and Associated Testers, 25 Tek 7000-Series Plug-Ins,
25 Uncategorized, 2 Time Domain Reflectometers, ...

6,395 front panel knobs, buttons, switches, 2,038 front panel LEDs, 756 BNC jacks, 873 digits of numerical LED/LCD display,
409 binding posts & banana plugs/jacks, 219 incandescent & neon light bulbs, 76 analog meters, 29 CRTs, ...

Do I qualify?  (http://emperoroftestequipment.weebly.com).

[mtdoc]

14 Power Supplies

What? Only 14 power supplies. Even I have more than that. What's wrong with you man?

Slacker..

[MarkL]

Ok, I've been in denial for a long time, but now I have to confess I have TEA.  It's unmistakable after reading others' stories here.

A few weeks ago I bought an Agilent 16702B logic analyzer with 2 x 16751A time/state analyzer cards and a 16720A pattern generator card.  I've been wanting one for years, but unable to come up with any kind of justification for work or hobby.  It's just not needed for anything I do with embedded systems.

I finally couldn't resist the latest glut showing up on ebay for decent prices.  After a few replacement cables and buying minor missing parts, everything worked great.

But then I had a new problem: It's a five slot chassis.  There were two empty slots.

A pair of 16534A 500MHz scope cards would fill those slots very nicely.  Then I could have four correlated analog channels.  Perfect.

So, back to ebay to buy two scope cards.  Little did I know, these particular cards go bad if you look at them in the wrong way.  Six cards later, I finally received *one* working card.  Only one seller wanted the broken card back so that left me with a pile of four free, but broken cards.

Surely I could get at least one more working by combining them?  There's no service manual or schematic, but after a few evenings I managed to troubleshoot and successfully repair one.  I had my two working scope cards.

In the troubleshooting process, I spent significant time to figure out the card internals.  Could the others could be saved too?  A few more evenings and I had two more repaired for a total of four working scope cards (the fifth still has trigger issues).

Now I had a new, new problem:  Too many cards and nowhere to put them.

But wait!  An expansion chassis is available.  And they're dirt cheap ($40) because nobody wants them.

A 16701B expansion chassis and cable is now on the way.

I have a feeling it's not over.  There will be empty slots again.  This is the largest piece of test equipment I've ever purchased by both dimension and weight.  I'm concerned that I'm liking this old equipment too much.

My self-diagnosis:

  ESD - Empty Slot Disorder
  SMD - Slot Mismatch Disorder

I'm sure there something in there too about never wanting to throw anything out, even if it's broken.  And then it becomes a time sink.  Beyond economic repair?  What's that.

[mmagin]

Do I qualify?  (http://emperoroftestequipment.weebly.com).

I'm pretty sure your page is actually responsible for some of the purchases I've made.


In related news, because the HP 3460A DMM isn't especially easy to find, and I'm not sure I really need the project anyway, I've purchased a nice clean original copy of the full manual for my reading enjoyment.

[bitseeker]

My self-diagnosis:

  ESD - Empty Slot Disorder
  SMD - Slot Mismatch Disorder

I'm sure there something in there too about never wanting to throw anything out, even if it's broken.  And then it becomes a time sink.  Beyond economic repair?  What's that.

Yep, you've definitely been bit by the bug. Welcome aboard. It sounds like you've been having quite the adventure with that HP gear. I can see how that'd become quite the rabbit hole. But to put together a four (or more) channel scope with logic analyzer in the process? That's pretty compelling!

Added your new terms to the glossary.

[SeanB]

How about VMD Version Match Disorder, when you want all the cards in the slots to be the same firmware and revisions, irrespective of whether it really affects how the unit actually operates, and thus you now need extra frames to house the now mismatched card and housings.

[TiN]

65 DVM,
Do I qualify?  (http://emperoroftestequipment.weebly.com).

Not a single 3458A? Nope, not qualified, sorry. 

[Berni]

65 DVM,
Do I qualify?  (http://emperoroftestequipment.weebly.com).

Not a single 3458A? Nope, not qualified, sorry. 

Issue with that one is that it needs a rather deep wallet.

[wn1fju]

From TiN:  "Not a single 3458A? Nope, not qualified, sorry."

It's not so much the initial expense of a 3458A.  I would then feel too guilty not to keep it in pristine condition, which probably means
yearly calibrations at Keysight for something like a thousand dollars plus per pop.  I'm just not at the level of a full volt-nut yet!

Thanks for all that commented on my web page.  Hopefully there are a few repair notes that might benefit others.

[TiN]

a thousand dollars plus per pop.

2600 to be precise There is easier way with 3458 though, you can just buy 10V standard (better more than three) and 10 kOhm resistance standard (again, more than three, to be sure) and use those to self-calibrate 3458A, even every month if you want to. Easy! Oh, but you need to send standards for calibration too.... ehh...

[Cubdriver]

I've been very fortunate in that regard - all the carriers at my previous job and the current one, both when we had an office and now that I'm working out of the house have all been excellent in that regard.  (It probably doesn't hurt that I try to run out and meet them when I hear the truck pull up, and either save them the walk with smaller stuff or help them carry the boat anchors to the door.)

Welp.  Sure as hell I jinxed myself with that statement.  The HP3591A Selective Voltmeter was 'delivered' By FedEx Home yesterday.  I was at the museum and got a call from a friend who happened to be driving by my house and saw a white van backing up my driveway; he asked if I was expecting a delivery.  I replied that yes, there was something potentially coming, and at that point he noted that whoever had gotten out was wearing a FedEx uniform, so we figured all was well.  I got home a few hours later, and...  Nothing...  Looked online, and the 40+ lb box had, according to their records, been left at my front door at about the time he called.  Went around the house a few times with a flashlight.  Nada.  Called him, and he said it looked like the driver had an envelope in her hand, and certainly not a forty pound box with a piece of rack mount gear in it.   

Called FedEx.  It had been shipped by their 'Home' delivery service, and of course after 7PM on a Saturday night, they were shut down for the day.  The customer service person confirmed that the package had allegedly been delivered to the door at the stated time.  She'd enter a tracking request, but I wouldn't hear anything until Tuesday, as apparently FedEx Home doesn't work on Sunday or Monday.   

Fast forward to about twenty minutes ago, I hear a knock on my door.  A neighbor from about a mile away is there to let me know that a 'computer' (it's packed in an HP PC box) with my name on it was delivered to her house yesterday.  It's too heavy for her to move, but would I like to follow her and retrieve it?  Just got back with it.  Neither of us can figure out how she wound up with it - her house number is different, and she lives on a completely different street.     Apparently I've gotten my first idiot delivery driver.  Fingers crossed it will be my last.  I'm glad I have good neighbors!

-Pat

[orin]

a thousand dollars plus per pop.

2600 to be precise There is easier way with 3458 though, you can just buy 10V standard (better more than three) and 10 kOhm resistance standard (again, more than three, to be sure) and use those to self-calibrate 3458A, even every month if you want to. Easy! Oh, but you need to send standards for calibration too.... ehh...

What kind of dollars?

2600 sounds like the old per incident repair price which is now US$2851.  The standards lab calibration is $1712.

The repair agreement is actually quite reasonable at $192 (per year I suppose), but you'd have to get it calibrated or prove to them some other way that it is in fact working properly before they'd sell the agreement.

[Brumby]

Ok, I've been in denial for a long time, but now I have to confess I have TEA.  It's unmistakable after reading others' stories here.

......

But then I had a new problem: It's a five slot chassis.  There were two empty slots.

.....

A few more evenings and I had two more repaired for a total of four working scope cards (the fifth still has trigger issues).

Now I had a new, new problem:  Too many cards and nowhere to put them.

But wait!  An expansion chassis is available.  And they're dirt cheap ($40) because nobody wants them.

A 16701B expansion chassis and cable is now on the way.

I have a feeling it's not over.  There will be empty slots again.  This is the largest piece of test equipment I've ever purchased by both dimension and weight.  I'm concerned that I'm liking this old equipment too much.

My self-diagnosis:

  ESD - Empty Slot Disorder
  SMD - Slot Mismatch Disorder

I'm sure there something in there too about never wanting to throw anything out, even if it's broken.  And then it becomes a time sink.  Beyond economic repair?  What's that.

There is a danger you may step further into the darkness.  You may find yourself embraced by the EMI syndrome.

EMI syndrome: Equipment Matching Impulse.  This includes ESD and SMD, but covers a much wider and varied range.  As well as these disorders, EMI also includes the desire to acquire equipment from a particular manufacturer and, in extreme cases, a particular range of equipment in order to get a matching 'set'.  Further, EMI encompasses the expansion of the definition of 'slot' to include any space that is vacant on the test bench - or that may become vacant through reorganisation - especially when matching physical dimensions (in particular, width) is a driving consideration.

EMI has the undesirable side-effect of not only interfering with other TEA conditions, but with any other activities.  Once it has been established, efforts to eradicate EMI are difficult and often fail.  The best hope is to find a balance where normal operation is possible and EMI is at acceptable levels.

[xrunner]

EMI syndrome: Equipment Matching Impulse.  This includes ESD and SMD, but covers a much wider and varied range.  As well as these disorders, EMI also includes the desire to acquire equipment from a particular manufacturer and, in extreme cases, a particular range of equipment in order to get a matching 'set'.  Further, EMI encompasses the expansion of the definition of 'slot' to include any space that is vacant on the test bench - or that may become vacant through reorganisation - especially when matching physical dimensions (in particular, width) is a driving consideration.

EMI has the undesirable side-effect of not only interfering with other TEA conditions, but with any other activities.  Once it has been established, efforts to eradicate EMI are difficult and often fail.  The best hope is to find a balance where normal operation is possible and EMI is at acceptable levels.

So many aspects to this disorder - and people think we can just walk away from it!

I hope someday it gets the attention from professionals it deserves - for the sake of all of us! 

[Brumby]

Indeed.

A common step that people try is the rack mount path.  This does help with the broader issues of EMI to some degree, but with an increased sensitivity to ESD.  Some people try to address this by adding ventilation spaces in the rack and rationalise their necessity, however this often fails as an interesting piece of equipment that will fit the space becomes available at an attractive price.  Subsequent purchases of fans (in bulk, of course) address the ventilation issue - and the leftover fans short-circuit future arguments about 'ventilation' spaces.

It's a vicious circle.

[Housedad]

I learned my lesson about rack mount itis.  I had that fever back in the late 70's.   There was a electronics junkyard in Philly that I frequented and I got a couple of racks and I ended up with so many boat anchors that it turned into a monster tank sitting in my room.   NO!! Never again!!

I loved that junkyard.  I would play with core memories,  monster size wire wrap boards and IC's to beat the band.   They were cheap as dirt back then.  I remember equipment the size of dumpsters that were so complex with tubes and components it would make you cry.  Those were some kind of radar units from right after WWII.  One time they got a Cray water tank Super computer in there and I would sit on one of the cushions and raid the guts out of the areas under the cushions next to me.   If I only realized before I started ripping it apart what that thing would someday be worth for historians.  Ah,  well.

[bitseeker]

Added EMI and VMD to the glossary. Also introduced DPI as a related condition of EMI.

DPI: Dimensional Perfection Impulse - The need to have all equipment possess or occupy the same vertical or horizontal dimension when stacking, arranging on shelves, or in racks.

[Cubdriver]

Racks are out in the garage.  Need wheels, and will likely need to be shortened to fit in the basement.  Then I can start filling them.  Yike!

-Pat

[bitseeker]

Glad your latest boat anchor was located, Pat. A friend of mine had a similar experience with a carrier, but I don't recall which one it was. I've had a package go to a neighboring zip code by the USPS (it even appeared that way on tracking) despite the sender confirming the address they shipped it to was correct.

[Cubdriver]

Thanks.  Yeah, me too.  Of course the thing that was killing me is that I'd just commented on how good my local carriers are.     I hoped that it would eventually turn up (it's rather big to just disappear), but at the same rate, it's not something I've seen many of on the 'bay, so one never knows.  It's now here and in the 'evaluate and repair' queue.  I plugged it in and briefly turned it on; it did not emit eau-de-Allen-Bradley, so I'll take that as a good sign.

I'm currently battling with a 3450B that, among other issues, will not manually change range.  I discovered tonight while working on it that the particular board I was troubleshooting is NOT the same in the 'A' and 'B' models.  I believe that they may be functionally the same, and one version substituted for the other, but this one uses different ICs with different pin outs.  They LOOK nearly identical; the layout is at least superficially the same, but the numbers are different.  I have both 'A' and 'B' manuals, and have had one open to layout drawings to find things in the meter, and was flipping though the other to look at the schematics.  Of course I was looking at the schematics in the WRONG one and trying to figure out why voltages and signals weren't where they were supposed to be.      I finally got curious and looked more closely.  D'oh!!   

Perhaps I'll make some progress tomorrow night, now that I'm looking at the correct circuit.   

-Pat

[Berni]

Indeed.

A common step that people try is the rack mount path.  This does help with the broader issues of EMI to some degree, but with an increased sensitivity to ESD.  Some people try to address this by adding ventilation spaces in the rack and rationalise their necessity, however this often fails as an interesting piece of equipment that will fit the space becomes available at an attractive price.  Subsequent purchases of fans (in bulk, of course) address the ventilation issue - and the leftover fans short-circuit future arguments about 'ventilation' spaces.

It's a vicious circle.

Don't word the Empty Slot Disorder quickly takes care of itself as soon after equipment arrives to fill it.

The problem becomes when the rack is full and the fedex truck comes around again. Then you start looking for the smallest and ligtest piece of equipment in the rack to move away on to a shelf so that the boatanchor that came in the mail has a place to go.

Hopefully that smaller piece of equipment was occupying some of the lower spots of the rack because lifting a 25kg piece of boatanchor above your head while trying to wrestle it in to the rack is quite the work. So don't tell me TEA is not healthy, it gives you plenty of exercise carrying the boatanchors, more exercise to lift them in to racks. Also as bonus exercise some equipment has components on both top and bottom side so when you are fixing it you get to constantly flip the heavy bastard around and on its sides.

Luckily i don't have enough room in the lab to put in another 42U rack.

[Cubdriver]

Luckily i don't have enough room in the lab to put in another 42U rack.

That's not lucky, that's terrible!    

You need more lab space!!

-Pat

[SingedFingers]

Racks is the end.

Back in the late 1990s I used to acquire (steal) all the old Sun microsystems kit that had been chucked in skips by local businesses where I worked. By the end of 1999 I had a fully stacked 8 CPU 1000E with two disk arrays running Solaris 2.6 all in a 42U rack with a UPS and racked network kit. This ended up a rather noisy and large workstation and public free shell server for the best part of 6 months.

Then in the same week, it got hacked (causing all the fans to spin up constantly) and the electricity bill arrived...  - cost £740 ($1000-ish at the time) to keep it running for the 6 months

Was on Yahoo auctions by the end of the week. It took me 2 years to get rid of the damn thing and the rack. The rack no one wanted. I was living on the first floor of a flat at the time and no one wanted to dismantle it and carry it down again...

[Berni]

Luckily i don't have enough room in the lab to put in another 42U rack.

That's not lucky, that's terrible!    

You need more lab space!!

-Pat

I moved in to a bigger lab 3 years ago!

Racks is the end.

Back in the late 1990s I used to acquire (steal) all the old Sun microsystems kit that had been chucked in skips by local businesses where I worked. By the end of 1999 I had a fully stacked 8 CPU 1000E with two disk arrays running Solaris 2.6 all in a 42U rack with a UPS and racked network kit. This ended up a rather noisy and large workstation and public free shell server for the best part of 6 months.

Then in the same week, it got hacked (causing all the fans to spin up constantly) and the electricity bill arrived...  - cost £740 ($1000-ish at the time) to keep it running for the 6 months

Was on Yahoo auctions by the end of the week. It took me 2 years to get rid of the damn thing and the rack. The rack no one wanted. I was living on the first floor of a flat at the time and no one wanted to dismantle it and carry it down again...

Sounds like a fun adventure anyway. And now you know how to configure obsolete servers.

You would have probably needed this guy back then: https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1/videos
He would happily carry off the huge pile of servers for you. That youtube channel of his sure proves that TEA also exists in a IT variant. At least our test gear does not take as much electricity to run.

[Cubdriver]

Would that be ITEA (or perhaps iTea if you collect Apple stuff)?

-Pat