Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

Looking nice & tidy there, med.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Even worse than than SS are the anodised aluminium cap-head screws. Designed for cosmetic applications but nothing to stop people replacing a HT cap-head with cheese

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/M6-x-20-mm-Bolts-Aluminium-Red-Anodised-Bolts-25mm-Red-Screws-M6-Cap-Head-Bolt/172427228357

I have shedloads of those in m2-m4 for my quadcopters.    Love 'em, but they are high turnover.

Titanium, surprisingly, doesn't last a lot longer IRL as far as the sockets stripping out. Threads do hold up a lot better tho.

mnem
 

[mansaxel]

Since it seems to be "peeve-day" let me bring up another one.

Bad machine translations.

Both Mouser and Farnell have them, and while their range of products is sufficiently narrow and allows for better training, it still is bad enough. (Amazon tries to do this as well, and let me state as a fact, that when you try to sell a photo wallpaper of a rapeseed field, it will translate insanely badly if you let a machine do it. It comes out as "A big picture of a rape committed in a field" or something like that.)

Farnell translates "triaxial cable" into the equivalent of "Three-axle cable". 

[Cerebus]

Having rebuilt more than a few such beasts... Your "properly-passivated" screws are usually as soft as case-hardened cheese. And on rice-rockets, also JIS. And a complete dicksore to get out without stripping after they've had a couple decades to trade ions with the surrounding aluminum.

There are always tradeoffs; I prefer to reassemble with  a good hard hex-head (SS or otherwise) equivalent after spending hours with hammer & impact driver and/or EZ-outs getting the fucking thing apart. I might be the poor bastard who has to take it apart next.

mnem
 

Now why am I not surprised that you have your own take on that. Thanks very much, but I'll follow conventional wisdom and keep SS fasteners out of aluminium crankcase castings, and stick to using good quality passivated plain steel and a good gob of the right lube.

[Cerebus]

Since it seems to be "peeve-day" let me bring up another one.

Bad machine translations.

Are there any other kind? Machine translation is fine to get the jist of something you can't read, but to treat it as a finished product to put in front of customers is a variant of original sin.

[AVGresponding]

Have you never seen "three-axle cable" before?

[mnementh]

Having rebuilt more than a few such beasts... Your "properly-passivated" screws are usually as soft as case-hardened cheese. And on rice-rockets, also JIS. And a complete dicksore to get out without stripping after they've had a couple decades to trade ions with the surrounding aluminum.

There are always tradeoffs; I prefer to reassemble with  a good hard hex-head (SS or otherwise) equivalent after spending hours with hammer & impact driver and/or EZ-outs getting the fucking thing apart. I might be the poor bastard who has to take it apart next.

mnem
 

Now why am I not surprised that you have your own take on that. Thanks very much, but I'll follow conventional wisdom and keep SS fasteners out of aluminium crankcase castings, and stick to using good quality passivated plain steel and a good gob of the right lube.

Mayhaps the difference is that in racing applications, the engines are torn down and rebuilt often enough it doesn't matter. Also, I've long been a true believer in tiny torque wrenches (and medium-sized ones, and big ones) and never-sieze.

I rarely used SS except on parts that got taken off and put back on constantly; so crankcase bolts, no. But good grade 5-8 hex-head steel, yes. And definitely on things like brakes and clutch covers; the sockets on the hex-heads just plain last longer with repeated on/off cycles.

mnem

[mnementh]

Since it seems to be "peeve-day" let me bring up another one.

Bad machine translations.

Are there any other kind? Machine translation is fine to get the jist of something you can't read, but to treat it as a finished product to put in front of customers is a variant of original sin.

I dunno if that's better or worse than our near-daily misadventures with cheap electronics that have manuals written in Chinglish.

mnem
That is, when they do have a manual... 

[Cerebus]

Since it seems to be "peeve-day" let me bring up another one.

Bad machine translations.

Are there any other kind? Machine translation is fine to get the jist of something you can't read, but to treat it as a finished product to put in front of customers is a variant of original sin.

I dunno if that's better or worse than our near-daily misadventures with cheap electronics that have manuals written in Chinglish.

mnem
That is, when they do have a manual... 

The difference is that quite a lot of those look like they've been through machine translation twice, with an intermediate step of "My cousin speaks English, let him translate it for you, very cheap".

[mansaxel]

Have you never seen "three-axle cable" before?

 

Although, that looks to be fiber conduit, and not cable, so no, still haven't seen any..   

[med6753]

"Honey, I shrunk the Capacitors" 

All mounted. Left to do: reassemble PSU. Install in scope. Then smoke test.

See you all on Discord later.

[bd139]

Looks like it needs viagra now

[tonyalbus]

Just playing a bit with my Microscope and an ADF4351 

[mnementh]

Since it seems to be "peeve-day" let me bring up another one. Bad machine translations.

Are there any other kind? Machine translation is fine to get the jist of something you can't read, but to treat it as a finished product to put in front of customers is a variant of original sin.

I dunno if that's better or worse than our near-daily misadventures with cheap electronics that have manuals written in Chinglish.

mnem
That is, when they do have a manual... 

The difference is that quite a lot of those look like they've been through machine translation twice, with an intermediate step of "My cousin speaks English, let him translate it for you, very cheap".

Attached below is the only manual available for a mini touchscreen control panel I bought off Amazon yesterday out of curiosity (and to fill out a minimum order); it literally poses more questions than it answers... 

Worst case, if I can't figure out how to make it talk to my 3DP I can send it back and keep the rubber duckie. At least that doesn't need a FW update to work.

mnem
 

[tautech]

Looking nice & tidy there, med.

mnem
 

Except the double up. 
 

[tautech]

Mayhaps the difference is that in racing applications, the engines are torn down and rebuilt often enough it doesn't matter. Also, I've long been a true believer in tiny torque wrenches (and medium-sized ones, and big ones) and never-sieze.

Copper or nickel based ?

[AVGresponding]

Mayhaps the difference is that in racing applications, the engines are torn down and rebuilt often enough it doesn't matter. Also, I've long been a true believer in tiny torque wrenches (and medium-sized ones, and big ones) and never-sieze.

Copper or nickel based ?

Ugh neither, ceramic of course!

No-one in Discord yet, I may go back to my freshly arrived Bluray box set of Game of Thrones...   

[med6753]

Looking nice & tidy there, med.

mnem
 

Except the double up. 
 

Had no choice with that double. For some strange reason could not find an 18000uf/15V at a reasonable price. So I paralleled two 10000uf/16V.

[mnementh]

Exigencies of time/space/budget. Yup. 

mnem
*toddles off to raise some hell in Discord*

[mnementh]

Mayhaps the difference is that in racing applications, the engines are torn down and rebuilt often enough it doesn't matter. Also, I've long been a true believer in tiny torque wrenches (and medium-sized ones, and big ones) and never-sieze.

Copper or nickel based ?

Ugh neither, ceramic of course!

No-one in Discord yet, I may go back to my freshly arrived Bluray box set of Game of Thrones...   

Well, back then it was copper. Works nicely on brake-part sliders too.

mnem
*poot!*

[tautech]

Mayhaps the difference is that in racing applications, the engines are torn down and rebuilt often enough it doesn't matter. Also, I've long been a true believer in tiny torque wrenches (and medium-sized ones, and big ones) and never-sieze.

Copper or nickel based ?

Ugh neither, ceramic of course!

No-one in Discord yet, I may go back to my freshly arrived Bluray box set of Game of Thrones...   

Well, back then it was copper. Works nicely on brake-part sliders too.

mnem
*poot!*

And now ?
And why ? 

[AVGresponding]

Because the ceramic based stuff never forms electrolytic cells, unlike the copper, nickel, or silver based stuff.

[Saskia]

re machine translations: there is a lot of effort involved in creating a suitable translation model.
And this effort does not come for free.
Also, there are 3 major classes of MT: rule based, statistical, plus neural. They all have their advantages and disadvantages.

My guess is that neither Farnell nor Mouser put a lot of effort into creating the proper custom dictionaries which are a prereq to proper training. Also they would need a lot of so called in-domain data to translate their catalogs appropriately. In-domain meaning: in the language domain, e.g. electronics, electrical engineering, ....
A lot means: if you have a proper general purpose model, you will need to inject your training data and train it for several generations. Training data needs to be at least 100 000 aligned segments (a segment is a phrase at minimum, better yet a whole sentence, and it needs to be aligned (i.e. word mapped to word or expression).
100k segments are the minimum, we recommend 1 M and above. To give you an example: for English to French we have a segment pool of about 275 M segments, pull a random 10 M and create the general purpose corpus. Train it for at least 6 generations, injecting fresh segments.
You would repeat this for specialized language models, and you may want to book your GPU cluster for the next couple of weeks.

Actually I am looking forward to Ampere, to boost it a bit, and I am also looking at CNN on Alveo for this specific topic.


Point is: we currently spend a nice sum plus 2 System Engineers on our machine translation system. We are doing a large five figure amount of translations a day, and we are receiving good feedback. Up to the point where a country directory picks up the phone and calls me directly if it is not running. And we are asking for more support in the form of computer linguists to help us with adaptations.

I doubt that Mouser and Farnell are this committed.

If they are and this is the outcome, they need to start over.

[McBryce]

Ready to mount on the circuit board.

It's like a capacitors version of the War of the Worlds movie. 

McBryce.

[SilverSolder]

Those adapters are really cool...