Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

It got so bad I nearly bought Eagle. Then I realised Autodesk own them now so I crawled back to my position of taking it from the open source delegate minor devil rather than satan himself.

Jep. I've bought Eagle Version 7.5 right before it was sold to Autodesk. One of the biggest disadvanteges of the Eagle license
I have is its limitations to boards of a size of 160mm x 100mm. I planned to upgrade to a license without any
size limits but then I learned the pricing model of Autodesk. Do not have to mention that this is in my eyes a complete ... fraud? ... scam?
Wrote a comment in ther forum, that I was going to upgrade my Eagle license but not to such conditions. Since then
I'm working with my old license and are awaiting the day when I have to switch to KiCAD but I fear the learning curve.

Bloody thieves and highwaymans at Autodesk.   

Honestly Kicad is not that bad and not that difficult a learning curve. The trouble I suffer with it is far less than other products so I shouldn't complain.

Back in the distant past I did and integration with HP CoCreate work manager and ME10 (aka Creo now). That was literally like dipping your balls in acid and then salt in quick succession all day. The thing was backed with Oracle on an HP N-class. The whole platform was one of HP's lesser known disasters.

As for AutoDesk licensing, it's a rip off. They knew they could milk their existing customers successfully even if it made the new ones bugger off and still make more money so they took that option.

[Specmaster]

sooooo.... i have four 5.5 digit DMMs, including a Fluke 8840A, on my bench. given the limits of my volt nuttery, i am happy that they all measure the voltage of a DMMCheck within 0.004 volts but...

they are kinda, i dunno, drifty, fluctuating, each and every one of them, in the least significant digits. and the changes are fast (every update when on internal trigger) and seemingly random (doesn't seem to be consistent in amount or direction). they don't settle down if I let them warm up. i guess it is a noise issue (WAG). i haven't done a lot of interwebbing to see if there is a reason or a fix and figured i'd ask the collective brain trust here for some guidance before i crack the cases open.

edit: to be clear, i see these fluctuations with the leads shorted, too, though the delta is a lot smaller. it is worse on the fluke than the HP meters. so it seems to be more than just the random nano current across a large resistance...

Could be external noise, e.g. spikes.

Could be internal noise, e.g. caps or the voltage reference or dirt/deposits.

My Solartron 7081 recommends that after being left in storage it is wrapped in a blanket, turned on, and left for a day. The internal temperature rises to ~40C. Mine improved significantly after that process.

Like wise both my 5.5 digit DMM's, Siglent SDM 3055 and Fluke 8810A, need minimum 12 hours power on after a cold start before achieving best accuracy and stability.

I've always accepted that the more digits you have on a meter, the more the least significant ones will change and this is to my mind, to be expected as external circumstances will begin play a part. Lets examine if you will a set of scales, as the scales or transducers get more sensitive to measure minute weights, the more external events like breeze, vibration temperature etc will cause them to fluctuate their readings so shouldn't similar forces play a part when it comes DMM's?

You can get some very cheap 3.5 digit meters that will agree 100% with say a Fluke 3.5 digit meter but as you get into the world of 4.5 and higher digit meters, the cheaper brands drop off rather quickly because they are far more complex to design and make to be reliable and this can demonstrated with my own set of meters, I can put a shorting plug between common and the V and  and the last digit on all but the 3.5 meters will change over time and I only go upto 6.5 digits so if your talking about 8.5 digit meters then this level of accuracy is a magnitude more difficult to obtain and to be honest, I'd be perfectly happy if I had such a meter for the last 2 digits to change.   

[bd139]

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

[mnementh]

Considering your known history with explosives and incendiary devices... Define "discretely".   

mnem
 

[bd139]

Specification: doesn't lead back to me 

[Specmaster]

I think that with a tree that overhangs, you are free to cut off the offending branches but you have to hand over those cut off branches back to the tree's owner. In this case I suspect the tree belongs to the council so got luck getting them in your C4 for dropping off at the their offices But seriously that is the law as I have been given to understand.

[Specmaster]

Specification: doesn't lead back to me 

Thats makes both mnems ideas useless as your reputation goes before you on both of those counts.

[mnementh]

Hmmmm...  locally, how well-known is the aforementioned history? 

mnem

[bd139]

@specmaster: Yeah that's what I was told. The ground is cracked badly around it and I got a tree surgeon to have a look at it but he said if he cut all the branches over my side of the property then the tree would go over and land in the road so he couldn't do it. He said my option was to murder it and then phone the council and tell them it was dead as they'd have to take it down then. I asked him how and he refused to answer 

@mnem: I smoke bombed the garden out once playing with a 2Kg sugar and potassium nitrate rocket motor so quite well known 

[mnementh]

mnem
I'm working on it:

[tautech]

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

Drill a few tiny holes in the trunk and apply undiluted glyphosate with a syringe.

[Specmaster]

Perhaps some drunken idiot or a boy racer might oblige you by crashing their car into it 

[bd139]

Perhaps some drunken idiot or a boy racer might oblige you by crashing their car into it 

Yeah ironically the dude who hit my fence a while back missed the tree by about 6 feet 

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

Drill a few tiny holes in the trunk and apply undiluted glyphosate with a syringe.

SOLD. 

[tautech]

Perhaps some drunken idiot or a boy racer might oblige you by crashing their car into it 

It doesn't take a big tree to have cars and their passengers come off very second best.

[tautech]

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

Drill a few tiny holes in the trunk and apply undiluted glyphosate with a syringe.

SOLD. 

Don't spill any or you'll give the game away. 

[mnementh]

Drill a few tiny holes in the trunk and apply undiluted glyphosate with a syringe.

I was trying to think of something less likely to cause bd MORE brain damage and cover both backyards and the street/compost pile/workers with poison-laden sawdust as the tree cut up and processed in a chipper... 

mnem

[tautech]

Drill a few tiny holes in the trunk and apply undiluted glyphosate with a syringe.

I was trying to think of something less likely to cause bd MORE brain damage and cover both backyards and the street/compost pile/workers with poison-laden sawdust as the tree cut up and processed in a chipper...

mnem

LD50 is less than common salt.

[mnementh]

LD50 is less than common salt.

Ummm... I know what these terms all mean, but strung together this way they don't exactly form a complete sentence. 

mnem
 

[BU508A]

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

Copper Ions are mabye helpful, because copper is a poison to most plants. That's why you can see on some roofs
copper tapes which prevent the dosh growing.

Blue vitriol is perhaps a good choice.

But it should be clear, that using such stuff is not good for the enviroment.

Another technique is: cutting the tree bark around except for one little stay. The tree will starve to death then.

HTH

Edit: found an article on Wikipedia which describes better what I mean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdling

[tautech]

Random question here out of the blue an definitely off topic but this is the sort of obscure knowledge people on here know.

How can I kill a large tree discretely?  Local council won't deal with an overhanging tree so I'm going to plan B which is to murder the fucking thing myself.

Copper Ions are mabye helpful, because copper is a poison to most plants. That's why you can see on some roofs
copper tapes which prevent the dosh growing.

Blue vitriol is perhaps a good choice.

But it should be clear, that using such stuff is not good for the enviroment.

Another technique is: cutting the tree bark around except for one little stay. The tree will starve to death then.

HTH

Ring baking, nope too visible.
Copper Sulphate into the root system, yep but it might take a bit to properly poison the ground in order to kill the tree.

[Zucca]

Specification: doesn't lead back to me 

Once you kill it, it will not disappear.
Do you want it gone or dead?

[Brumby]

As I read it: Gone.

Dead is just a step along the way.   

[tautech]

Dead becomes a public nuisance and injury risk....then the council will remove it.
Dead = Gone.

[mnementh]

LD50 is less than common salt.

Ummm... I know what these terms all mean, but strung together this way they don't exactly form a complete sentence. 

mnem
 

If your saying that median lethal dose for a tree is less hazardous to humans than table salt, remember the vectors here:

1) A human being handling undiluted glyphosate to fill and administer with a syringe.

2) Sawdust containing unknown concentrations of said once-undiluted glyphosate (Which I would expect to still be high around the base of the tree where it would be administered, where a lot of cutting/stump grinding would occur) that will come in direct contact with sweaty human skin, eyeballs, and ingested through mucous membranes, throat, throat and stomach. As those who produce such poisons have spent so much money PREVENTING meaningful studies into the actual damage these potent neurotoxins do to the human body, my personal "safe exposure level" is fucking ZERO. 

mnem

[BU508A]

Ring baking, nope too visible.
Copper Sulphate into the root system, yep but it might take a bit to properly poison the ground in order to kill the tree.

True. But taking some time is perhaps a good thing. Imho it makes it a bit harder to find out the responsible person.