Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

Appears to be a match. He's never posted in this thread to my knowledge but it he knows everything about us. Guess we have a fan base or stalkers.....take your pick. 

[beanflying]

Call sign is definitely UK!
@beanflying - thanks for the heads up re the 5000 series hp freq gen and counter - they are coming my way - I have a 5302 and two of the dmms. I see one is missing the rear foot (as usual) and will print another thanks to you and the 3d bits posts!

I was wondering who snaffled it  Until I get through some of the repair list of gear I am trying to be good - maybe 

[tggzzz]

Appears to be a match. He's never posted in this thread to my knowledge but it he knows everything about us. Guess we have a fan base or stalkers.....take your pick. 

From October 2018
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg1921241/#msg1921241

[med6753]

Appears to be a match. He's never posted in this thread to my knowledge but it he knows everything about us. Guess we have a fan base or stalkers.....take your pick. 

From October 2018
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg1921241/#msg1921241

You're right.....I missed that one.

[nixiefreqq]

This was posted in the Tek Facebook group. Who is this? It HAS to be someone in here. At least with the accent narrow it down to a Brit.

Fess up!! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL1N0_vJZTo&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3_jSdLqBhTfCAnlLyb3cNYG_keI4BC9A_PNoLZxpDViFHFtkP9J4_fZKQ

ok, i confess.

it is me.

recognized myself by the two hp 5327 nixie counters in the background.

wait a second......i don't own a rush t shirt (or any tek equipment).  maybe it IS someone else?

[med6753]

And being from Philly I highly doubt you speak with a British accent. 

[nixiefreqq]

And being from Philly I highly doubt you speak with a British accent. 

well ok.  but swmbo does call me "mark".  (although the eyetalian side of the family insisted "marco" go on my birthing cert)

edit  and swmbo does have a brit birth certificate....and spent her early years in some quant village built on a swamp.....i think she called it london.

[xrunner]

Nearly all the 3DP problems I read about are because someone has been meddling for no good reason.

Well yea, but you'll become so much more familiar with it when you fuck it up. 

[BU508A]

This was posted in the Tek Facebook group. Who is this? It HAS to be someone in here. At least with the accent narrow it down to a Brit.

Fess up!! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL1N0_vJZTo&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3_jSdLqBhTfCAnlLyb3cNYG_keI4BC9A_PNoLZxpDViFHFtkP9J4_fZKQ

ok, i confess.

it is me.

Disbelive. I think I've spotted somewhere in the background a HP calculator. 

recognized myself by the two hp 5327 nixie counters in the background.

wait a second......i don't own a rush t shirt (or any tek equipment).  maybe it IS someone else?

I'm tending to this theory, yes. 

[grizewald]

The 7061 has arrived!

nice.
the inguard board is not shielded?

The entire case is effectively a shield (it has some kind of magic brown coating on the inside). The only other shield is to keep the clock circuit from spraying RF all over the inside of the meter.

[nixiefreqq]

This was posted in the Tek Facebook group. Who is this? It HAS to be someone in here. At least with the accent narrow it down to a Brit.

Fess up!! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL1N0_vJZTo&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3_jSdLqBhTfCAnlLyb3cNYG_keI4BC9A_PNoLZxpDViFHFtkP9J4_fZKQ

ok, i confess.

it is me.

Disbelive. I think I've spotted somewhere in the background a HP calculator. 

recognized myself by the two hp 5327 nixie counters in the background.

wait a second......i don't own a rush t shirt (or any tek equipment).  maybe it IS someone else?

I'm tending to this theory, yes. 

went back and looked at the video very carefully.  (you owe me 5 minutes of my life back).  did not see any rpn devices polluting the TE landscape. (maybe your eyes are better than mine?)

but that cat looks an awful lot like the one sitting on my windowsill. 

AND spotted some naked nixies in the "parts" slide.   maybe it is me?  (not sure myself at this point.  that video is an awful lot like looking in a mirror)

[grizewald]

At least you know your Weston cell and voltmeter have drifted the same amount.  Very nice!

Weston cells only drift when they are used up or damaged. Otherwise, the output voltage is always exactly what you expect once you compensate for temperature. That's what makes it such a useful reference, even today.

The fact that any noise on the cell's output is far below my ability to measure it makes it doubly useful. Instead of wondering if the meter is stable when watching a 10V reference bounce around +/- 20μV, you connect the Weston cell and as long as the temperature remains stable, a good meter just shows the same voltage, without any variation.

[WastelandTek]

jeeez, that Shahriar has some luck 'eh?

shit never works out like that for me....

[Mr. Scram]

Yeah, the market moved on; they left PRUSA behind because they wanted stuff that just plain works. The consensus in the PRUSA forums is that they're better... elsewhere, not so much. Until you get into the bespoke-built stuff PRUSA does for commercial and university clients, there are a dozen China-direct DESIGNERS AND MANUFACTURERS who simply are ahead of PRUSA's game. And THEY are the ones who are designing and manufacturing FOR THE AVERAGE USER; PRUSA is still designing for uni.

Just go out there and lurk in the CREALITY or GEEETECH or TEVO forums for a while. You'll see that all of them are PRODUCING gear that is generations ahead of what PRUSA is making for the home market.  PRUSA still makes core load-bearing components via 3DP, because reasons.  They would still be flogging the fucking RAMPS controller if it weren't for the Chinese manufacturers adapting the design properly for mass-production. 

mnem
Alternately, no.

What's on the Creality forums that isn't on their website? It's the same cost optimised models which are great for home gamers. A few corners cut and economy of scale mean a quarter of the price. Bang for buck the Chinese models are hard to beat. Diminishing returns mean the cheaper option is fine for many people.

[Mr. Scram]

Weston cells only drift when they are used up or damaged. Otherwise, the output voltage is always exactly what you expect once you compensate for temperature. That's what makes it such a useful reference, even today.

The fact that any noise on the cell's output is far below my ability to measure it makes it doubly useful. Instead of wondering if the meter is stable when watching a 10V reference bounce around +/- 20μV, you connect the Weston cell and as long as the temperature remains stable, a good meter just shows the same voltage, without any variation.

I was joking a bit, although one problem with Weston cells nowadays seems to be that there's often been someone who used a multimeter with a regular input impedence and there's no real way of knowing that. As the cells age the chances of encountering penisfingers creep towards 1.

[bd139]

On Prusa vs Crealty. This is how it works in my head

[Mr. Scram]

On Prusa vs Crealty. This is how it works in my head

The thing about the Creality price point is that it's in reach of the average fuckwit and cheap enough for an impulse buy. That has both its good and bad sides.

[bd139]

The thing about the Creality price point is that it's in reach of the average fuckwit and cheap enough for an impulse buy. That has both its good and bad sides.

Yeah and there lots of average fuckwits out there. I keep getting asked about mine from people who see it and instantly want one. These are the sort of people who fuck up the simplest Ikea furniture and can't even manage their Apple account on their phone. What do you say to them? 

[BU508A]

The thing about the Creality price point is that it's in reach of the average fuckwit and cheap enough for an impulse buy. That has both its good and bad sides.

Yeah and there lots of average fuckwits out there. I keep getting asked about mine from people who see it and instantly want one. These are the sort of people who fuck up the simplest Ikea furniture and can't even manage their Apple account on their phone. What do you say to them? 

"Shut up, sit down and watch Coronation Street?" 

[Mr. Scram]

Yeah and there lots of average fuckwits out there. I keep getting asked about mine from people who see it and instantly want one. These are the sort of people who fuck up the simplest Ikea furniture and can't even manage their Apple account on their phone. What do you say to them? 

I'd say that even penisfingers can manage, so go ahead and don't be afraid to ask him about issues.

[worsthorse]

Now I just need to get a hold of some floppies and a USB drive

Having a computer that runs windows 3.1 is handy, too. 

Seriously, take care when buying a USB floppy drives. Most of them don't work worth a damn. There's one brand that does and it took me a while to find one. Let me know if you want me to dig up the model.  Also, you will want to format the floppies in your TE floppy drive. They are unlikely to work otherwise.

If it's not too much trouble that'd be fantastic. I was looking at Amazon for floppy drives and there are quite a few. I have one I can borrow from my work, but ideally I'd like to have my own personal.

Now to just wait for my TLA714 to show up tomorrow also...I apparently got bit by the boat anchor bug.

I will dig it out today and PM you, no problem at all.

[mnementh]

Got a new PC @ work. IT dept. did a quite good job in terms of annoyance: This is a compile run (Makefile etc.) ran on the new PC (Core i5-8500, 8GB, SSD, Win10):
cygwin> time make
...
real    12m42.805s
user    1m33.628s
sys     3m45.193s

The very same job on the old one (Core i7-3770, 8GB, HDD, Win7):
cygwin> time make
...
real    6m58.280s
user    1m13.999s
sys     1m59.115s

Yes, I know, cygwin is known to be slower than native, just for comparison the same job natively (Core i5-6500T, 8GB, SSD, Debian)
> time make
...
real    1m50.209s
user    5m50.816s
sys     0m40.377s
>

No, I didn't swap any of these results. Native debian beats cygwin - that's what one would expect anyway (factor 3 to 6, WTF?), but 7yr old machine beats 1/2yr old machine by nearly a factor of two, even though the new machine has a SSD and the old one doesn't?

My first guess would be they imaged the HDD instead of doing a clean install; this means all the TRIM/AHCI/NVMe goodness is not working as it should. Also, if you're doing anything creative, 16GB should be your minimum. If it's an imaged build it's very possible they left the BIOS untouched; this would mean probably XMP is not optimized, possibly not even enabled. Or maybe just plain cheap, slow RAM that doesn't take advantage of the i5-8500's much greater memory BW. Also, if they're running APU graphics vs GPU can really affect creative/encoding performance.

I may be totally wrong; I'm a lot better at optimizing AMD than Intel. But those are the common bollocks pitfalls I'd be looking for myself, anyways.

Appears to be a match. He's never posted in this thread to my knowledge but it he knows everything about us. Guess we have a fan base or stalkers.....take your pick. 

Yup... several of us old farts welcomed him a while back. That's okay med... I promise I will still stalk ONLY YOU. 

The thing about the Creality price point is that it's in reach of the average fuckwit and cheap enough for an impulse buy. That has both its good and bad sides.

Yeah and there lots of average fuckwits out there. I keep getting asked about mine from people who see it and instantly want one. These are the sort of people who fuck up the simplest Ikea furniture and can't even manage their Apple account on their phone. What do you say to them? 

You say  "It's fucking awesome; you really should buy one... or two." Then you direct them to the printer on banggood using your affiliate link.

mnem

[tggzzz]

At least you know your Weston cell and voltmeter have drifted the same amount.  Very nice!

Weston cells only drift when they are used up or damaged. Otherwise, the output voltage is always exactly what you expect once you compensate for temperature. That's what makes it such a useful reference, even today.

The fact that any noise on the cell's output is far below my ability to measure it makes it doubly useful. Instead of wondering if the meter is stable when watching a 10V reference bounce around +/- 20μV, you connect the Weston cell and as long as the temperature remains stable, a good meter just shows the same voltage, without any variation.

Saturated Weston cells drift with temperature and are relatively fragile, but can have a very long life.

Unsaturated Weston cells are more stable with temperature and are less fragile, so they were often used inside equipment. But they had a finite lifetime, and I believe you are unlikely to find a working one nowadays.

[med6753]

The next project. This represents all the can electrolytic capacitors in the 535A. Looks overwhelming at first pass but I'm going to do it in stages. Intention is the simply bypass the original cans and leave them in place. And use terminal strips to mount new capacitors under the chassis. But in at least 2 areas that won't be possible and the cans will have to be removed and the new capacitors installed top side.

So all I have to do now is get the courage to start. Moving the monster around to get to the capacitors is a royal PITA. But if I want longevity in the old beast it has to be done.

     

[bd139]

Got a new PC @ work. IT dept. did a quite good job in terms of annoyance: This is a compile run (Makefile etc.) ran on the new PC (Core i5-8500, 8GB, SSD, Win10):
cygwin> time make
...
real    12m42.805s
user    1m33.628s
sys     3m45.193s

The very same job on the old one (Core i7-3770, 8GB, HDD, Win7):
cygwin> time make
...
real    6m58.280s
user    1m13.999s
sys     1m59.115s

Yes, I know, cygwin is known to be slower than native, just for comparison the same job natively (Core i5-6500T, 8GB, SSD, Debian)
> time make
...
real    1m50.209s
user    5m50.816s
sys     0m40.377s
>

No, I didn't swap any of these results. Native debian beats cygwin - that's what one would expect anyway (factor 3 to 6, WTF?), but 7yr old machine beats 1/2yr old machine by nearly a factor of two, even though the new machine has a SSD and the old one doesn't?

My first guess would be they imaged the HDD instead of doing a clean install; this means all the TRIM/AHCI/NVMe goodness is not working as it should. Also, if you're doing anything creative, 16GB should be your minimum. If it's an imaged build it's very possible they left the BIOS untouched; this would mean probably XMP is not optimized, possibly not even enabled. Or maybe just plain cheap, slow RAM that doesn't take advantage of the i5-8500's much greater memory BW. Also, if they're running APU graphics vs GPU can really affect creative/encoding performance.

I may be totally wrong; I'm a lot better at optimizing AMD than Intel. But those are the common bollocks pitfalls I'd be looking for myself, anyways.

This is probably due to the NTFS backing of Cygwin on windows more than anything. NTFS stores all tiny little files inside the MFT which is write blocked. So every time you write a pissy little file out (compiling and VCS stuff does this lots!) it has to lock the MFT, extend and then write the file, then unlock it. This causes MFT contention which reduces the effective IOPS to the disk to virtually nothing even if the thing is fast. In fact mechanical disks can suck less because the kernel has time to order the writes while it's waiting for the disk to go round!

If you want to compile stuff on Windows, do it in a VM with ext4. When you create the VM allocate the entire disk up front so it's one file on NTFS. Do the development work inside the VM!

As an example of the performance difference you can get out of this, check out of an extremely LARGE SVN repo:

NTFS direct = 24 minutes
ext4 in VM = 54 seconds.

You can use fsutil to speed this up a bit ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/fsutil )

> fsutil behavior set mftzone 4    (uses 800 megs for MFT allocation speeding up fragmented writes)
> fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1   (halves fragmented writes)

Yes that's how fucking awful NTFS is as a filesystem. It needs to BURN. That and the Zw API call latency are the number 1 reasons windows is so fucking shit for server and development applications.

This shit costs serious amounts of money but no one is aware of it or the consequences and no one at MSFT gives a shit either. It's also why WSL1 is so fucking slow for reference and quite frankly a joke of a tool.

The thing about the Creality price point is that it's in reach of the average fuckwit and cheap enough for an impulse buy. That has both its good and bad sides.

Yeah and there lots of average fuckwits out there. I keep getting asked about mine from people who see it and instantly want one. These are the sort of people who fuck up the simplest Ikea furniture and can't even manage their Apple account on their phone. What do you say to them? 

You say  "It's fucking awesome; you really should buy one... or two." Then you direct them to the printer on banggood using your affiliate link.

I like your style