Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

Yeah I sold the one that came with my 3700X for £25 the other day. Don't need it as it has that Be Quiet lump on it.

Yup... Now you know why it sold so quick. Unused Wraith cooler alone still in the plastic brings $30-50 any day of the week, depending on if LED or not. I could still sell the one from my 1055T for $25-30, as it's the same AMD part # as the one from the FX-8XXX series.

I kept mine so I could put the old beast up on the shelf "complete" when I upgraded; that box packed all over effing Tejas with me for a decade; damn if I'm letting any part of it go now. 

mnem
 

[Mr. Scram]

LMAO at this one. Idiots on ebay. This is not my auction:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283906779480

Check the sale price 

It'll be interesting to check the feedback a week or so from now.

[bd139]

Yeah will do that 

Yeah I sold the one that came with my 3700X for £25 the other day. Don't need it as it has that Be Quiet lump on it.

Yup... Now you know why it sold so quick. Unused Wraith cooler alone still in the plastic brings $30-50 any day of the week, depending on if LED or not. I could still sell the one from my 1055T for $25-30, as it's the same AMD part # as the one from the FX-8XXX series.

I kept mine so I could put the old beast up on the shelf "complete" when I upgraded; that box packed all over effing Tejas with me for a decade; damn if I'm letting any part of it go now. 

mnem
 

Yeah this was a clown cooler this one. 25 was about average here. Mostly concerned with getting rid of it quick before I catch some RGB. Doesn't go well with the bat-PC image

[Saskia]

Just accepted a trade of a 3600x with an MSI x570-a pro plus 100€ for an i5 9600k in a z390:aorus pro.  The ryzen blows the Intel out of the water, but the MSI board sucks.

[Kosmic]

Just accepted a trade of a 3600x with an MSI x570-a pro plus 100€ for an i5 9600k in a z390:aorus pro.  The ryzen blows the Intel out of the water, but the MSI board sucks.

Hey, just ordered one of those today. I decided it was time to upgrade the workshop PC. I got a Intel i5-9600K, Noctua cooler, mini-ITX GIGABYTE H310N Motherboard, PCIe M.2 Harddrive and 16gig RAM.

I have really low confidence in the ability of your typical programmer to parallelise their application. So, single thread performance of the 9600K is going to be useful

[SoundTech-LG]

GreyWoolfe, HP 54201, Before the invention of the wheel...  but hey, at least they were giving out schematics in 1986, and for the power supply as well.
No leaky filter caps on those??? The later 545xxx leaked all over, sometimes even wicked up, soaked, and shorted the transformers out, and the -12V adj. pot.
Maybe the last scope with included schematics? https://literature.cdn.keysight.com/litweb/pdf/54201-90902.pdf?id=803171

[0culus]

Got me a nice goodie box from Sphere today.

* Replacement nixies for my other 3440A voltmeter
* A foot of 2N2222As on tape for dirt cheap...very handy to have around. (not pictured)
* 10 more very hard to find HP pushbutton feet....not cheap at all. 
* Some oddball tubes for my collection
* Some extra nuvistors for the Tek 184
* Last, but not least, a really neat circular slide rule that has a Smith chart rule on the back side.

First picture is left at full resolution so nixiefreqq gets a real eyeful. 

[mansaxel]

A few technological points have changed significantly:

• an even smaller proportion of developers understand the implications of hard realtime, and what is necessary to ensure it

The only thing you can't change is time, and, derived from that via speed of light, the delays from operating equipment at distance. The fact that the rest is (theoretically) up for grabs by means of technological development probably makes people gloss over the little time bump..

Faster on an average does not mean faster when I need it

[ArthurDent]

 I’m sure a lot of us own the handy power meter called ‘Kill A Watt’ and think it’s a great fairly new idea-but it isn’t. I have one of the earlier designs I bought on eBay.

 If you’re familiar with the early electrification of houses in the U.S., they used open wiring (knob and tube) within walls and would have the 2 wires run across the ceiling with a drop for light bulbs. In an old wiring book that I have they described how to wire an entire house with 2-3 drops for lights for about $30.

 Soon people wanted more than just lights and electric toasters with open wire coils wound on mica sheets and other devices came along. These devices had a connector similar to the screw in lamp base to screw into the drop used for the bulb and you’d unscrew the bulb and screw in the ‘plug’ for the toaster. It was called a plug because it was similar to a drain plug used with pipes in plumbing.  Later when they switched to the 2 prong connector the name plug stuck and is still used today.   

 Anyway, here is an early version of a Kill A Watt from 1901 made by the General Electric Co.. I’ve taken the cover off so you can see the innards which are quite simple. It is basically an A.C. ammeter in series with one line and knowing what your mains voltage was you could read the wattage, up to 125 watts. You would screw the input ‘plug’ end of the tester into a lamp socket then ‘plug’ the load into the socket on the other end of the tester.  Because the lamp sockets were hanging from the ceiling the input end of the tester would be pointing up and the meter scale was oriented to read correctly with the tester in that position.

 Obviously with the wattage required by the appliances we have today any tester that is limited to 125 watts isn’t too practical but I just love collecting these odd pieces of test equipment.

[Saskia]

@Kosmic the H310 is about the worst Board you can get for a 9600k. Try to send it back for a Z390 Pro wifi or similar. You castrate the 9600k by using anything less than a z series chipset. Honestly, trust me on that

[Neomys Sapiens]

@Oculus: that slide rule is a really nice grab! What is 'Sphere'?

[AVGresponding]

Ebay won't refund for that these days.

Hence my inclusion of the word "attempt".   

[TorinoFermic]

Oh boy, I bought 2 bench meters :
A semi-broken Fluke 8502A and a working HP 3478A for total of 300 Canadian pesos
I hope I could gain troubleshooting skills with this fluke meter which got a "error 4" on this display.

[BU508A]

Got me a nice goodie box from Sphere today.

* Replacement nixies for my other 3440A voltmeter
* A foot of 2N2222As on tape for dirt cheap...very handy to have around. (not pictured)
* 10 more very hard to find HP pushbutton feet....not cheap at all. 
* Some oddball tubes for my collection
* Some extra nuvistors for the Tek 184
* Last, but not least, a really neat circular slide rule that has a Smith chart rule on the back side.

First picture is left at full resolution so nixiefreqq gets a real eyeful. 

Speaking of nixie tubes: spotted this in the German ads  "ebay Kleinanzeigen" (Burroughs type B-7971):

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/8x-vintage-giant-15-segment-burroughs-type-b-7971-nixie-tubes/1424860045-168-359



The price is a bit of a challenge, the seller is asking 1199.- Euros  for the complete set (8 tubes).

Edit: some additional information about this nice nixie tube (sorry, in German, but the pictures are quite nice):

http://www.jb-electronics.de/html/elektronik/nixies/n_b7971.htm

[tautech]

What is 'Sphere'?

Source for mainly Tek and HPAK bits:
https://www.sphere.bc.ca/

[tggzzz]

A few technological points have changed significantly:

• an even smaller proportion of developers understand the implications of hard realtime, and what is necessary to ensure it

The only thing you can't change is time, and, derived from that via speed of light, the delays from operating equipment at distance. The fact that the rest is (theoretically) up for grabs by means of technological development probably makes people gloss over the little time bump..

You can buy increased bandwidth; you can't buy reduced latency.

Actually, the last isn't quite true. The High Frequency Trading mob bought up the old microwave towers between Chicago and New York, to reduce their latency. That reduces the latency by about half, since the speed of light in a fibre is ~0.6c. They also laid their own transatlantic cable, for their exclusive use without contention and some signalling overheads.

They also encode the business trading rules in Verilog/VHDL, to run them in hardware.

Faster on an average does not mean faster when I need it

Caches and interrupts are bad news in hard realtime systems. Caches (of various kinds) are also bad if you are interested in not leaking magic numbers.

[beanflying]

Time to get back to some TEA or even making some sawdust for the rest of the week, Fusion and I have spent to much time together recently. Laser System Model is complete apart from maybe some tweakage. Feel free to peek and critique https://a360.co/2XZg1u0 and I will consider or ignore as appropriate 

[bd139]

That's pretty amazing actually. Nice work.

I really need to learn what the hell I'm doing some more in Fusion 

[McBryce]

Not really TEA, but I've just been given a Denon AVC X8500H to repair. It has the biggest transformer I have ever seen inside a commercial device.

McBryce.

(for info, the primary side of the PSU shorted for some reason, haven't found out why just yet).

 

[tonyalbus]

Not really TEA, but I've just been given a Denon AVC X8500H to repair. It has the biggest transformer I have ever seen inside a commercial device.

McBryce.

(for info, the primary side of the PSU shorted for some reason, haven't found out why just yet).

porn ;-)

[BU508A]

Not really TEA, but I've just been given a Denon AVC X8500H to repair. It has the biggest transformer I have ever seen inside a commercial device.

McBryce.

(for info, the primary side of the PSU shorted for some reason, haven't found out why just yet).

What I've never understood: in such high priced stuff, why don't they use toroidal transformers? Always wondered about that.

[bd139]

It's a good question. They are superior for such applications.

[beanflying]

Might be large for Audio but Twin overhead Beasties for brute force 

[Saskia]

Not really TEA, but I've just been given a Denon AVC X8500H to repair. It has the biggest transformer I have ever seen inside a commercial device.

McBryce.

(for info, the primary side of the PSU shorted for some reason, haven't found out why just yet).

What I've never understood: in such high priced stuff, why don't they use toroidal transformers? Always wondered about that.

Threshold and Nakamichi routinely used toroidal transformers in their HiFi designs.

[BU508A]

Not really TEA, but I've just been given a Denon AVC X8500H to repair. It has the biggest transformer I have ever seen inside a commercial device.

McBryce.

(for info, the primary side of the PSU shorted for some reason, haven't found out why just yet).

What I've never understood: in such high priced stuff, why don't they use toroidal transformers? Always wondered about that.

Threshold and Nakamichi routinely used toroidal transformers in their HiFi designs.

Yes. Some are doing this, lots of others not so. Revox, Rotel, Denon, Onkyo, ....