Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

I’ve seen worse. Average Heathkit stored in a shed for 20 years 

[PA0PBZ]

That looks as if it has been pulled out of a river somewhere judging by the amount of rust on it, geez.

Before even considering that I'd like to see some pictures of the inside.

[Robert763]

This is a current model of IR missile warning system test set
https://www.textronsystems.com/sites/default/files/_documents/Baringa%20IR%20Datasheet_0.pdf

The form factor would imply the big end on the one you bought is the power connector, and the small is the business end.

The heavy duty screw in plug is presumably to ruggedise the output optics against adverse conditions and penis fingered service personnel.

Someone trying to pretend to be a traffic cop then and wanting something to resemble a laser speed gun in order to slow traffic in their village down 

Nah,
I've got the correct tool for that job 

[Robert763]

Last night had the need to use my microscope while working on my AD584-M and I discovered that the lens has contamination all over it but access to the lens is not possible it seems. I completely dismantled the microscope, screen, PCB and all the focusing system, only to discover the lens is glued inside the body with no access to the lens from within the main body. The only access is via the small hole which is 3 mm dia and the actual lens is 15 mm further behind that.

I can only assume that I must have been scrubbing a board with a toothbrush and IPA while observing the cleaning via the screen and some dirty IPA splashed up through the hole onto the lens. Has anyone ever managed to clean the lens on a similar microscope successfully?

I was thinking about carefully enlarging the hole enough to get some form of cleaning cloth onto the lens or would that destroy the scope by allowing too much light in?

If it is critical you could just stick a new diaphram on after the cleaning.

[bd139]

Actual TE related post for once.

Did the quarterly battery check on my two Flukes. I check for leaks and for degradation of batteries thus saving me having to clean shit up down the line. All good 

[factory]

UK guys, attention please:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DATRON-1271-WAVETEK-SELFCAL-DIGITAL-MULTIMETER-Operational-needs-refurbished/293991122672

That looks as if it has been pulled out of a river somewhere judging by the amount of rust on it, geez.

No that hasn't been pulled out of a river, this has. 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133657116954

David

[mnementh]

pssssst... Brumby...   BOOTY-FAB!

mnem
 

Your wish is my command. 

I take no prisoners. 

I'm not sure which picture makes my stomach churn the most.

McBryce.

(Image deliberately removed from quote. Having it once in the thread is already one time too many)

Finished dinner and still have a few hours to get the horrors of the 'fan' photo out of my mind 

It's going to take more than that....

.... and I'm fresh out of brain bleach.

Please do us all a favour and keep that scarecrow in prison at your place and never release her 

mnem
ka-chinnnng!!!

[Specmaster]

Actual TE related post for once.

Did the quarterly battery check on my two Flukes. I check for leaks and for degradation of batteries thus saving me having to clean shit up down the line. All good 

I did all my meters the other day as well, no problems, I took the batteries out of ones that I seldom use, like my Proster etc.

[bd139]

Good idea on removing the batteries. To be honest I haven't used these for about 3-4 months now annoyingly other than to check a couple of kids toys out. Been too busy sorting shit out. That has passed now so I'm getting back into it 

[iainwhite]

OS/390, a former friend of mine used to run it on a P/390 card ...

I ran a few small mainframes in my time. 
One was an R/390, which was an IBM Risc 6000 Unix machine running a P/390 card with all the peripherals emulated in the Unix system.  It was a handy development machine which supported about 10 users.
I also ran a Multiprise 3000 which was a similar architecture but the emulation was handled by an IBM OS/2 single board computer.  That machine supported about 40 developers.  It also had loop-attached SCSI disks in a RAID5 array which gave pretty good i/o performance. 

[Specmaster]

Just had confirmation that my magnifier desk lamp that I order this morning has already been dispatched, Bang em good are banging em out really rapid. Looking forward to getting it TBH and hoping that the lamp end is really lightweight as that is the main problem with my old one, it is so heavy that it keeps moving into positions that I don't want it to I still like the one from Amazon but that is really to small for serious work and requires constant manipulation if inspecting a device for issues.

[med6753]

You inspired me to do a quick check of mine. The 8021B has an Energizer in it and it's OK. The 87 I converted to Lithium a few years ago and that's no worries.

The 3456A is already at the Kingston Hub. It's too bad UPS doesn't deliver on Saturday or Sunday.

Not sure if I'll be on Discord later. Did not sleep well last night and just woke up after napping a few hours. I feel like someone hit me in head with a shovel.     

 

[bd139]

Just had confirmation that my magnifier desk lamp that I order this morning has already been dispatched, Bang em good are banging em out really rapid. Looking forward to getting it TBH and hoping that the lamp end is really lightweight as that is the main problem with my old one, it is so heavy that it keeps moving into positions that I don't want it to I still like the one from Amazon but that is really to small for serious work and requires constant manipulation if inspecting a device for issues.

Let me know how your banggood stuff goes. I'm tempted on a couple of things but I'm slightly scared of getting screwed for customs fees at the moment.

You inspired me to do a quick check of mine. The 8021B has an Energizer in it and it's OK. The 87 I converted to Lithium a few years ago and that's no worries.

The 3456A is already at the Kingston Hub. It's too bad UPS doesn't deliver on Saturday or Sunday.

Not sure if I'll be on Discord later. Did not sleep well last night and just woke up after napping a few hours. I feel like someone hit me in head with a shovel.   

Good to know. Nothing worse than leaks.

As for Discord, will be there. I'm fucking wired on caffeine today 

[med6753]

OS/390, a former friend of mine used to run it on a P/390 card ...

I ran a few small mainframes in my time. 
One was an R/390, which was an IBM Risc 6000 Unix machine running a P/390 card with all the peripherals emulated in the Unix system.  It was a handy development machine which supported about 10 users.
I also ran a Multiprise 3000 which was a similar architecture but the emulation was handled by an IBM OS/2 single board computer.  That machine supported about 40 developers.  It also had loop-attached SCSI disks in a RAID5 array which gave pretty good i/o performance.

Where in Itty Bitty Morons did you work? My 36 year career spanned Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and East Fishkill.

[Saskia]

back in my Blue days I had the pleasure to fool around with RS6ks while doing kernel debugging and HACMP /PSSP support in their Mayence support center.

*sigh*
those were good days, I really miss them. Even the pay was decent, I never earned as much as in my years with IBM.

nicest little computer I was working with (in 2001/2002) was a completely underpowered SP2 with 80 nodes, 1024 CPUs and 1 TB memory, the former #10 of the top 500 list. I wrote the disaster recovery program reinstalling all the nodes from scratch and rebuilding the machine. I had a time limit of 4 hours, did it in 3 and 52 minutes.

[med6753]

Just had confirmation that my magnifier desk lamp that I order this morning has already been dispatched, Bang em good are banging em out really rapid. Looking forward to getting it TBH and hoping that the lamp end is really lightweight as that is the main problem with my old one, it is so heavy that it keeps moving into positions that I don't want it to I still like the one from Amazon but that is really to small for serious work and requires constant manipulation if inspecting a device for issues.

Let me know how your banggood stuff goes. I'm tempted on a couple of things but I'm slightly scared of getting screwed for customs fees at the moment.

You inspired me to do a quick check of mine. The 8021B has an Energizer in it and it's OK. The 87 I converted to Lithium a few years ago and that's no worries.

The 3456A is already at the Kingston Hub. It's too bad UPS doesn't deliver on Saturday or Sunday.

Not sure if I'll be on Discord later. Did not sleep well last night and just woke up after napping a few hours. I feel like someone hit me in head with a shovel.   

Good to know. Nothing worse than leaks.

As for Discord, will be there. I'm fucking wired on caffeine today 

As of this moment the caffeine is not working. 

[Saskia]

OS/390, a former friend of mine used to run it on a P/390 card ...

I ran a few small mainframes in my time. 
One was an R/390, which was an IBM Risc 6000 Unix machine running a P/390 card with all the peripherals emulated in the Unix system.  It was a handy development machine which supported about 10 users.
I also ran a Multiprise 3000 which was a similar architecture but the emulation was handled by an IBM OS/2 single board computer.  That machine supported about 40 developers.  It also had loop-attached SCSI disks in a RAID5 array which gave pretty good i/o performance.

Where in Itty Bitty Morons did you work? My 36 year career spanned Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and East Fishkill.

We reported to Austin for Kernel work and to Poughkeepsie for HACMP / PSSP work. Did write a couple of APARs myself ...

[Specmaster]

@bd139, will do, but I'm not expecting any problems with the Banggood order as it is being shipped from their UK warehouse so I'm hoping that the VAT and import duty won't apply to it. Apart from that, isn't the rule that items under £135 are supposed to be exempt from extra duty and VAT following Brexit?

Discord, I'm hoping to be there, if I can keep myself awake as I'm not sleeping to good at the present either following my flu jab a couple of weeks ago, my arm and shoulder towards the end of the day start getting a bit painful. Then, bugger me when I had my COVID-19 jab yesterday if they didn't do it in the same arm, and today it has made itself known to me already. Both of those jabs have to given in the muscle, but I've never experienced anything like this before.

[iainwhite]

Where in Itty Bitty Morons did you work? My 36 year career spanned Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and East Fishkill.

I was never on the IBM payroll, but I did work closely with them, firstly at IBM South Bank in London, and later at IBM Southbury in Connecticut.   I visited Poughkeepsie a couple times.
My company had a partnership with IBM, which allowed us to lease Development machines from them.  One clause in the agreement was "No production workloads".   

[Saskia]

Neither was I, I was just a contractor with a company that got bought out by Sybase which then contracted me out to IBM. Which was fine, I was very well respected by my colleagues in Mayence, and I utterly miss the time.

They also paid me by the "industrial minute"; back in those days 1.25€ per minute was quite a lot of moolah.

[med6753]

Where in Itty Bitty Morons did you work? My 36 year career spanned Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and East Fishkill.

I was never on the IBM payroll, but I did work closely with them, firstly at IBM South Bank in London, and later at IBM Southbury in Connecticut.   I visited Poughkeepsie a couple times.
My company had a partnership with IBM, which allowed us to lease Development machines from them.  One clause in the agreement was "No production workloads".   

Well, have you ever seen the inside of a development machine? I did, once. Back in S/370 days. I had to help debug one in a lab. It was almost unrecognizable on the inside compared to a production machine. 

[mnementh]

@mnementh I have just pulled the trigger on the same bench magnifier that you got from Bang em good, mine was £20.72 and is going to be shipped from a UK warehouse so should be here in a few days time. Just found the identical unit on Amazon for £33

Those AD584-M voltage reference units, it seems that nobody claims to have any with the calibration stickers giving the actual readings given on testing, any more. Found one on eBay but decided not to buy it because they are using the identical photos to the one on Amazon FFS.

I think you'll be very pleased with that lamp, as long as you rewire it per the suggestions in my hack/mod article on the thing.

If EMI/PWM noise will be an issue, I'd suggest doing away with the controller altogether and build a simple linear reg/ballast resistor arrangement; the controller is pretty noisy, and the LED ring is like a fucking directional antenna for it. You'll wanna shoot for 6-6.5W per LED ring. There's one blue-white and one pink-white channel; individually they'll happily run at ~8.5W per, but the ring gets pretty warm driving both channels that hard.

This calc makes it dead easy: https://ohmslawcalculator.com/led-resistor-calculator


Same experience here on those AD584-M voltage reference units. I mean... how many man-hours does actually testing those things eat up...? And then some vendors started just making color photocopies of a dozen or so labels and slapping them on at random. They got found out by people buying multiple orders and getting the same exact label on 3 or 4 units. Once that became common knowledge the damage was done; I guess there was no value for the few who were legit testing every unit, as eventually they all got painted with the same brush.

Remember too that these were all made with "recycled" AD584s... while that does make them pre-aged which is a good thing, it still means you have to take the time to validate the damned thing yourself against a known-calibrated meter of sufficient res to your application.

If it were me, I'd probably rebuild the one you already have; if the AD584 survived, that spec sheet is likely accurate as any you'll buy short of a DMMCheck.

mnem
*tzzzzt*

[mnementh]

Let me know how your banggood stuff goes. I'm tempted on a couple of things but I'm slightly scared of getting screwed for customs fees at the moment.

As for Discord, will be there. I'm fucking wired on caffeine today 

Yeah, my Adafruit order of tiny SAMD21 dev boards came yesterday; $48 duty on a $105 order(with $22 DHL handling hand-job fees); of course, they calculated duty including the shipping which they are not supposed to do.   

But I'm not gonna sweat it... it's the education I'm paying for, and their instructional vids are literally "Programming for Dummies" right up to 2nd-year collegiate level. I see the cash outlay as "coursework & materials"; I'd rather give a few $$ to them than fuxxor myself with more college loans.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Neither was I, I was just a contractor with a company that got bought out by Sybase which then contracted me out to IBM. Which was fine, I was very well respected by my colleagues in Mayence, and I utterly miss the time.

They also paid me by the "industrial minute"; back in those days 1.25€ per minute was quite a lot of moolah.

That today is still quite a lot of moolah as well, I'd be happy to earn that much a minute, thats at todays exchange rate £65.78 an hour.

[AVGresponding]

That looks as if it has been pulled out of a river somewhere judging by the amount of rust on it, geez.

Mad Scientist: "Igor, did you damp-proof the dungeon like I told you to?"

Igor: "ummmm... yeth mathter?"