Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[BU508A]

Here! Here! Don't get me started on both of those... we use Mentor Graphics CAD tools and IBM Rational CC, CQ, and all the new ones from IBM too!!!  To make things even worse our stuff is all multisited as well.  A lot of the new more "devops" stuff seems pretty good ie. gitlab, jira, confluence, mattermost, jenkins, etc.  We support them all.

Sincere condolences.

Mounty

Edit:

Is there such a thing as a "hobbyist license" for Altium Designer?

[mnementh]

Go study MSDS and toxicity lab tests and tell me how frequently any chemical needs be tested to be sure it meets its spec, NDA requirement and user safety.
Here, very few years while it's still available for sale.

Now, no substance is safe if used outside it's label recommendations and that's what its guidance is for...to protect us from ourselves.

You might appear to have a different spin on toxicities and in many cases you'd be right as many chemicals that were once used freely and in some cases leglistrated to be used are now banned as science has proven them to be dangerous to human health. Those that have stood the test of time like Glyphosate since the '80's are a shit load less toxic than some would have us believe.

My problem is NOT ignorance; rather the fact of knowing entirely too much about these processes. There are so many chemical products that have been introduced in the past several decades that went and continue to go entirely un-evaluated by any scientific body aside from the corporate labs themselves, which in most cases are not only left to their own devices regarding what they can create, but are thereafter allowed to self-certify all or part of the "safety studies" that are "required" (supposedly required; but always fungible if there's enough money to the right people) by our regulating agencies. To say that any chemical approved since Reagan is KNOWN SAFE is just burying one's head in the sand.

I have a much more cynical view of anything involved with the existing Corporatocracy. They've spent lots of money buying politicians to make SURE real scientific study is NOT done, and that what HAS BEEN DONE can be argued as invalid. OVER AND OVER. The glyphosate family are chemicals known to have impact on fetal brain development, and the question is not IF but HOW MUCH. Those decisions are being argued NOT by scientists (whose flat answer is the same as mine: ZERO) but by politicians and lawyers in the pay of the people who make these poisons and who use them as leverage to take over the food supplies of entire nations.

So NO... I don't believe they are safe in ANY AMOUNT, and certainly NOT NECESSARY IN ANY WAY for the majority of use cases; most such applications are because they're doing with poison what once was done by mechanical cultivation, so purely unnecessary. The remaining use cases are ENTIRELY COSMETIC in nature, so for sure not necessary.

And the real problem here is that with individual studies of dozens of common chemicals being deliberately hamstrung by politics, the really important studies re: interaction of all these common chemicals TOGETHER hasn't even gotten to the "scribbles on a napkin stage". 

mnem
Don't trust them an inch a micron.

[nfmax]

I hadn't realised TEA was Tree Eradicators Anonymous...

[BU508A]

I hadn't realised TEA was Tree Eradicators Anonymous...

Well, in this respect we are very flexible. 

[bd139]

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.

I take it you have never tried any of the Mental Mentor Graphics CAD tools. Or any of the IBM Rational products, which tend to be the most fragile way of solving your problems.

Here! Here! Don't get me started on both of those... we use Mentor Graphics CAD tools and IBM Rational CC, CQ, and all the new ones from IBM too!!!  To make things even worse our stuff is all multisited as well.  A lot of the new more "devops" stuff seems pretty good ie. gitlab, jira, confluence, mattermost, jenkins, etc.  We support them all.

Best Regards,

Bill

LMAO there is a human on the planet that likes Jenkins, devourer of inodes, scourge of incremental backups and a lesson to us all, on the grade of the nazi party, on how to fuck up concurrency and plug-in management.

The last company I worked for had a Jenkins instance called Manuel, after the waiter/butler in fawlty towers. This was because he was a useless idiot

I’m not going to dignify any Atlassian products with an answer. Their not ironic slogan for years being “because you’ve got issues”

Devops. Writing a book on that at the moment believe it or not. Actually it’s more of an explanation of how the software industry got where it did today and how to fix it. Fads be fads. Best thing about devops is the free training and sandwiches

Edit: watch out for ninjas when you’re doing devops. They’re everywhere. Our resident devops ninja lurks in my garden waiting to slit his opponent’s throat. However every time I trash his plans with a well placed edge case. He limps off into the darkness shaking his little ninja fist at the sky shouting “damn you monolithic process”

Edit 2: if anyone wants to real an “excellent” book, grab a copy of “the Phoenix project”. It’s kind of like Mein Kampf for software folk. A terribly misguided insane rambling about how to make the world a better place.

[mnementh]

Actually it’s more of an explanation of how the software industry got where it did today and how to fix it...

"Lift off and nuke it all from orbit... it's the only way to be sure..." 

mnem
"Past is prologue..."

[bd139]

That’s actually not far off my current line of thinking. We’re still in the infancy of the industry really. Basically it started off pretty good when the field was engineering and academic. However it has regressed into Victorian England as far as methodology goes where we’re experimenting every few years. Alas that was when trains fell off collapsing bridges, things exploded, people were mauled and mutilated in their thousands and safety was mostly loosely ridiculed due to survivor bias. We’ll get back to 2019 in about 40 years.

Frank Herbert had it right in Dune.

[mnementh]

      

I see the current landscape of what we call "Software" being much more of a post-apocalyptic nightmare (the apocalypse roughly coinciding with Eternal September when anybody with any actual technical knowledge of ANYTHING lost their last refuge from the marching morons) somewhere between Mad Max and Brazil. When programmers started getting their marching orders from Stef Murky and his ilk, was the beginning of the end. Since then, anyone with any actual Kung-Fu has been beaten insensate by the emergent "sell the user as content" paradigm to such point that Stef Murphy IS the Dev, and the coders are just there to pry the cars back onto the tracks every 3rd iteration. 

There... how close did I guess?

mnem

[med6753]

Fed Ex finally showed up at 1530 today with my latest parts order. So I did the Heath OL-1 B+ upgrade today and I'll do the Heath V-7A restore tomorrow.

Here's the upgrade. An additional 10uf/450V capacitor plus a 47uh choke on the dedicated B+ line to the Vertical pre-amp. The pre-amp was picking up 120Hz ripple and sending it down the chain which in turn showed up on the CRT. This upgrade has fixed the issue. I'm finally satisfied with the quality of the trace on this old girl. Plus as a bonus without the ripple on the trace the sync is sharper than ever and almost acts like a trigger which is pretty impressive. No more constant fiddling with the Sync Amplitude control. No stock OL-1 ever worked this good. 

And I thank bd139 for suggesting the Bourne's chokes.   

[bd139]

@mnem: nailed it 

@med: looking good  . I want one now 

Just fixed those two GDOs and they're working properly now. Cal is "reasonable" as that's all that is possible with a GDO. The Heathkit tube ones are much much better bits of gear. In fact I've got to comment Heathkit on their tube gear as it's pretty damn good.

[xrunner]

Here's the little microscope base extension I made today on the 3D printer. It makes the base a little bigger for the ADMS301. Could be made any size. File attached.

[med6753]

Just fixed those two GDOs and they're working properly now. Cal is "reasonable" as that's all that is possible with a GDO. The Heathkit tube ones are much much better bits of gear. In fact I've got to comment Heathkit on their tube gear as it's pretty damn good.

That really depends. The OL-1 was obviously designed/sold as entry level as was plainly shown in my restoration. I have experience with 5 inch Heath scopes of the same era and they are decent design.

The S-3 Electronic Switch is so-so. The AG-9A Audio Generator is a nice piece. And as we all know Heath VTVM's are damn good.   

[Specmaster]

Fed Ex finally showed up at 1530 today with my latest parts order. So I did the Heath OL-1 B+ upgrade today and I'll do the Heath V-7A restore tomorrow.

Here's the upgrade. An additional 10uf/450V capacitor plus a 47uh choke on the dedicated B+ line to the Vertical pre-amp. The pre-amp was picking up 120Hz ripple and sending it down the chain which in turn showed up on the CRT. This upgrade has fixed the issue. I'm finally satisfied with the quality of the trace on this old girl. Plus as a bonus without the ripple on the trace the sync is sharper than ever and almost acts like a trigger which is pretty impressive. No more constant fiddling with the Sync Amplitude control. No stock OL-1 ever worked this good. 

And I thank bd139 for suggesting the Bourne's chokes.   

That trace is just perfect now, well done, another scope joins the ranks.

Sent from my POT-LX1 using Tapatalk

[bd139]

Did some forward engineering work this evening. After the transformer decided to give out on one and the arrival of the 5334B, the Racal 9915's I have were pillaged for the OCXO which left both without a timebase. I built a crappy crystal oscillator for the working one but this was drifty as hell. Decided to increase my number of working counters to 3 from 2. China delivered today, finally, another NV47 OCXO that worked. Therefore I decided to install it.

When I pulled out the board I made for the last one I lost it. Doh. So I made a new board using my in development fast turnaround hand board method (I will post about this another day once I've perfected it). Takes 20 minutes from design to production, dirt cheap, no UV exposure required, no etch resist pen required and only basic household stuff everyone has lying around and can get easily. I think in all ancillary cost including FeCl it cost me about 10p to etch this board!

Board after etch. Smooth as anything. No nasty etch through like you get with etch resist pens.



Unlike the last version I decided to use a quality Bourns 3006P trimmer and top access as the trimmer on the rear of the last one was a pain in the arse to line up.



GPSDO attached, 0.1Hz resolution mode. All zeros = win



Going to bloody bed now as it's midnight!

[Specmaster]

The thing to remember with Heathkit is that they always tried to produce kits that could whenever possible, to produce kits that when assembled correctly, put in the constructors hands something that was as near to professional grade kit as was possible. But at times cost was a limiting factor so some compromises had to be accepted on occasions.

Sent from my POT-LX1 using Tapatalk

[mnementh]

@med - Well done! You turned that leaky bucket of electrons into something resembling a useful instrument; better than the tools that designed it! 
@bd - Looks like the "Sharpie on tape or laminating sheet & X-Acto knife" method. Have done more of those myself than I care to admit, & none of my electrons ever complained the new digs were ugly. 

mnem
*Hiding out from the rain & semi-liquid air*

[bd139]

@mnem - close with the tape. Top level. Kicad -> print drill sheet and stick on -> cut and drill board (aviation shears + dremel) -> clean -> tape -> sharpie for trace sketches -> xacto whats left quickly -> tear mask off -> etch. I went through 7 different tapes to find the best. Turns out basic 3M parcel tape was the winner.

As usual I came up with this independently and found someone else has already been doing it for years like that

Edit: btw I know about that burned to fuck resistor in the above picture. That "was" the series element in the NiCd charger in that counter. It's not connected to anything and is open circuit now anyway 

[bitseeker]

Here's the little microscope base extension I made today on the 3D printer. It makes the base a little bigger for the ADMS301. Could be made any size. File attached.

Very nice. I'm still awaiting the arrival of my microscope. Hopefully, within the next few days.

[xrunner]

Here's the little microscope base extension I made today on the 3D printer. It makes the base a little bigger for the ADMS301. Could be made any size. File attached.

Very nice. I'm still awaiting the arrival of my microscope. Hopefully, within the next few days.

Kewl. I'm sure you'll like it. 

[med6753]

The thing to remember with Heathkit is that they always tried to produce kits that could whenever possible, to produce kits that when assembled correctly, put in the constructors hands something that was as near to professional grade kit as was possible. But at times cost was a limiting factor so some compromises had to be accepted on occasions.

Sent from my POT-LX1 using Tapatalk

I think the OL-1 cost less than $30 USD in 1954 or so but in 2019 USD that's almost $285. 

[med6753]

My 485 parts mule has shipped and should be here tomorrow (Thursday). It shipped from NJ and it's already in Trenton. 

[med6753]

I happen to stumble upon this restoration of an OL-1 while trying to find how much it originally cost. His was just a restoration and no improvements/modifications. Check out the quality of his trace vs mine. Like night and day. 

https://lazyelectrons.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/heathkit-vintage-oscilloscopes-io-17-ol-1/

Edit...found the price. Yep, It was $29.50 USD. My Father had the O-10 which was $69.50. Big bucks back then.

https://m.eet.com/media/1196851/heathkit-ad_1955.pdf

[Brumby]

Am I in the right forum? I thought this was TEA, not tree assassination.     

If we analyzed the content of this thread over the last six months, would the non-TEA posts would make up a significant portion majority of the posts. 

I was a little disappointed that no EE based solutions were offered.

As a first thought ... how about an induction heating system to cook the cambium layer?  A sort of electromagnetic ring barking.

That would keep the subject on topic 

[worsthorse]

Am I in the right forum? I thought this was TEA, not tree assassination.     

If we analyzed the content of this thread over the last six months, would the non-TEA posts would make up a significant portion majority of the posts. 

I was a little disappointed that no EE based solutions were offered.

As a first thought ... how about an induction heating system to cook the cambium layer?  A sort of electromagnetic ring barking.

That would keep the subject on topic 

you could just surround it with a bunch of boat anchor test equipment and cook it to death while calibrating them.

[Brumby]

That's the spirit!