Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mansaxel]

To accompany I'll have to buy that MMA welder I've been ignoring my desires for.

Go on, go full TIG. You know you want to. 

And if I get a DC one, can I weld Aluminium then? 

Yes, being friends with a dragon is playing with fire!

[Cerebus]

@Cerebus, in the missing page you mentioned that your Kodi box was not used for any hooky channels only legal ones etc, care to expand on that a bit? As far as I was aware all the channels on it were hooky because I first came across it when 2 work colleagues were talking about the films and programmes that they were watching for free. Obviously, being a cheap skate, something for free got my interest and when I looked around I noticed that many sellers at the time were selling as a means of watching cable TV without paying and also a way of streaming from a NAS or plug in hard drive etc.

No, mine talks to a four tuner off-air receiver (HDHomeRun CONNECT QUATRO) that sits on the network in the box room attached to an aerial distribution amplifier. I also have the open-source tvheadend running on it as a simultaneous multi-channel PVR, also slurping in its stuff from the HDHomeRun. Plus there are even legit channel packages you can subscribe to, like the BFI (British Film Institute for all you furriners), plus the usual things like YouTube, Vimeo et al.

Some, but not many, of the UK on-line catchup services are available as Kodi plugins nowadays. The latter tend not to be as slick as the official smart TV apps but get the job done. BBC iPlayer is there but frankly the other UK ones aren't ready for prime-time yet. There's even a plug in to get Dave's eevblog videos.

[nixiefreqq]

is it safe?

[mansaxel]

I make my living from Freeview TV. So, there.

"Free-to-air" is not free. It does get paid for.

Recently, we've been moved from a license tied to ownership of receiver into "everyone has a computer or phone now, so we'll tax'em all." scheme that technically is not a tax but gets deducted the same way. But, yes, money arrives. And promptly leaves to pay for my toys.

That is not what I was talking aboot when I pissed all over "commercial broadcast"; I specifically defined it as western-style TV, in which the commercials are the primary payload, with any actual "content" being something of a tertiary priority, probably worse.

And there hardly is any other kind than that in Northern America, I take. How is CBC?

[Cerebus]

To accompany I'll have to buy that MMA welder I've been ignoring my desires for.

Go on, go full TIG. You know you want to. 

And if I get a DC one, can I weld Aluminium then? 

Yes, being friends with a dragon is playing with fire!

Now Måns, what did your mummy tell you about not poking wild animals with sticks? 

[mnementh]

To accompany I'll have to buy that MMA welder I've been ignoring my desires for.

Go on, go full TIG. You know you want to. 

And if I get a DC one, can I weld Aluminium then? 

Yes, being friends with a dragon is playing with fire!

mnem

[Cerebus]

is it safe?

Are we looking at freelance dentistry here?

[nixiefreqq]

is it safe?

Are we looking at freelance dentistry here?

Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

[mnementh]

...That is not what I was talking aboot when I pissed all over "commercial broadcast"; I specifically defined it as western-style TV, in which the commercials are the primary payload, with any actual "content" being something of a tertiary priority, probably worse.

And there hardly is any other kind than that in Northern America, I take. How is CBC?

You know, that's a damn good question...  Seems a shame I've been here a year and a half and have not looked into it. 

I've avoided looking into what comes over broadcast out of a lifetime of frustration with it, but I assume they must have some online streaming service of some sort.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

is it safe?

Are we looking at freelance dentistry here?

Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

   https://xkcd.com/749/

mnem
 

[mnementh]

      ^{https://xkcd.com/914/}

mnem
a bored dwagon's paws are the Devil's playthings...

[mansaxel]

KODI goes back a long ways; its roots come from a LINUX port to turn the original XBOX into a set-top-box media player.

mnem
 

I've desperately tried to become friends with a bunch of those media server apps. And I've failed. They're so dumbed-down that it's impossible to run them if you actually have a bit of understandnig how things work, and more so if your network is not very basic.

For starters, they all run some kind of auto-discovery mechanism, and their devloper has put all his money on it, so there's no override. Consequently, routing is out. I'd like my servers to be on one network, my trusted clients on one, and TV's and similar untrusted crap on a third. No can do. One RFC 1918 network, probably only /24 or classful, that's what the app wants. And woe the person who actually has IPv6 or Heaven forbid, public IP addresses. That is not done.

Then, I've dared to organise my media into directories, by genre and series, et c. And no, the player server does not have write permissions there. Come to think of it, neither has local uid 0. Nor anyone else, without proper authentication. Hell, the files aren't even local to the application server. They just look like that.

I gave up. I just play movies from VLC to the Chromecast, because my computer can read those files just fine.

Edit: spelink

[tautech]

To accompany I'll have to buy that MMA welder I've been ignoring my desires for.

Go on, go full TIG. You know you want to. 

And if I get a DC one, can I weld Aluminum then?

Yep however you need either a spool handpiece or a pull handpiece to drag the Ali wire down the TIG liner.
Most alloy boats are welded with TIG.

[mnementh]

This pleases me.

mnem
Ω

[mnementh]

To accompany I'll have to buy that MMA welder I've been ignoring my desires for.

Go on, go full TIG. You know you want to. 

And if I get a DC one, can I weld Aluminum then?

Yep however you need either a spool handpiece or a pull handpiece to drag the Ali wire down the TIG liner. Most alloy boats are welded with TIG.

Tweco makes a nice MIG spoolgun. I've used a couple. I like how well-regulated their speed control is and the the granularity provided.

mnem
tzzzzzt.

[factory]

The small Bulgin mains connectors are still made in two versions with cord grips, still doesn't stop idiots selling the type you can unscrew with no tools for mains use. 
Had to make up another lead to go with some more Racal TE I bought this year.




David

[med6753]

I guess I missed this morning's excitement with broken and duplicate threads and messed up post counts. Did we lose anything or was a restore a success? 

[Kosmic]

Anybody know what this is ? 



I was looking for one of those for a while but was not ready to pay a lot of money. Got this one for 20$US.

The seller was confused by the banana plug and thought someone had replaced the original BNC connector But no it's all original with all the accessories and in pristine condition.



It's a Coline M12DM4 RF probe. Was offered as an accessories by HP and Keithley for their multimeters. Transform any 10Mohm multimeter into a RF voltmeter. The probe contain a rectifier and convert 1Vrms to 1VDC. Goes from 100KHz to 750MHz and up to 50Vrms (47dBm) in amplitude.

If you plug it directly to a signal source make sure you use proper termination. Here I have a 50ohm termination in series with the probe.


Some tests:

10MHz, 10dBm (0.707Vrms)



50MHz, 10dBm (0.707Vrms)



700MHz, 10dBm (0.707Vrms)

[Specmaster]

@Cerebus, in the missing page you mentioned that your Kodi box was not used for any hooky channels only legal ones etc, care to expand on that a bit? As far as I was aware all the channels on it were hooky because I first came across it when 2 work colleagues were talking about the films and programmes that they were watching for free. Obviously, being a cheap skate, something for free got my interest and when I looked around I noticed that many sellers at the time were selling as a means of watching cable TV without paying and also a way of streaming from a NAS or plug in hard drive etc.

No, mine talks to a four tuner off-air receiver (HDHomeRun CONNECT QUATRO) that sits on the network in the box room attached to an aerial distribution amplifier. I also have the open-source tvheadend running on it as a simultaneous multi-channel PVR, also slurping in its stuff from the HDHomeRun. Plus there are even legit channel packages you can subscribe to, like the BFI (British Film Institute for all you furriners), plus the usual things like YouTube, Vimeo et al.

Some, but not many, of the UK on-line catchup services are available as Kodi plugins nowadays. The latter tend not to be as slick as the official smart TV apps but get the job done. BBC iPlayer is there but frankly the other UK ones aren't ready for prime-time yet. There's even a plug in to get Dave's eevblog videos.

I see, I used mine, when I had it to access film channels etc but was not impressed TBH, the quality was not there, and also I can already access media content already via my network storage drives and also Netflix, YouTube etc via and the web, so I'll leave the Kodi idea as a non-starter as I can't see its going to offer anything that I can't already do and as already explained SWMBO is not upto working the interface, so she requires simple items with dedicated pause, REC etc as can be found on Freeview recorders, Sky boxes along with Virgin Tivo boxes, anything else would just earn me lashings of tongue pie and have running up and down the stairs all the time attending to it for her.

[factory]

Had a bit of a disaster with the Philips PM6645 counter I acquired this week, accidentality shorted the supply for the NIT* to the display logic. 
Before this it was sort of functioning, but seemed to have a problem with the decimal point, a possible faulty NIT, the lamps for the gate & frequency range are mostly blown as well, the only working one "kHz" is very dim too.

Before pictures of an approx 1MHz signal from a hp function gen & the correct reading from the 5245L.



Now it seems to be stuck in a reset state displaying zeros, apart from one NIT that is stuck on two.
The display board contain some obsolete 74 series 74176 & 74196 as well as standard 7490 that I usually find in frequency counter circuits, hopefully those are OK as I haven't got those, I do have some 7475 & 7490 & the NIT driver IC.

*term used by Philips in the "digital instrument course part 2" pdf that can be found on the web.

David

[Cerebus]

KODI goes back a long ways; its roots come from a LINUX port to turn the original XBOX into a set-top-box media player.

mnem
 

I've desperately tried to become friends with a bunch of those media server apps. And I've failed. They're so dumbed-down that it's impossible to run them if you actually have a bit of understandnig how things work, and more so if your network is not very basic.

For starters, they all run some kind of auto-discovery mechanism, and their devloper has put all his money on it, so there's no override. Consequently, routing is out. I'd like my servers to be on one network, my trusted clients on one, and TV's and similar untrusted crap on a third. No can do. One RFC 1918 network, probably only /24 or classful, that's what the app wants. And woe the person who actually has IPv6 or Heaven forbid, public IP addresses. That is not done.

Then, I've dared to organise my media into directories, by genre and series, et c. And no, the player server does not have write permissions there. Come to think of it, neither has local uid 0. Nor anyone else, without proper authentication. Hell, the files aren't even local to the application server. They just look like that.

I gave up. I just play movies from VLC to the Chromecast, because my computer can read those files just fine.

Edit: spelink

Kodi's pretty vanilla in this respect. It runs on ordinary Linux (and other OSes) and doesn't use any "special sauce" that isn't standard. It'll use DLNA,  and multicast DNS for service discovery and, as well as a small handful of media oriented services like DLNA, is happy to access files on any network file system that you can access from Linux and has tools to access them easily from the '10 foot' UI. Public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses won't faze it any more than they'd faze the underlying OS.

As far as media organisation is concerned it's pretty trivial to bend Kodi to your will, its highly configurable in that regard, but the out-of-the-box naming and file layout scheme is quite reasonable already.

I've tired to use several of the other offerings, Plex etc. and found them wanting like you have. I settled on Kodi precisely because it isn't a pain in the backside and would deal with media I already had on servers and was trivial to hook up to my chosen off-air source.

[bitseeker]

I guess I missed this morning's excitement with broken and duplicate threads and messed up post counts. Did we lose anything or was a restore a success? 

Yeah, I'm late to the party as well. Apparently, the forum was restored from last night's backup. Dave created a thread at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/news/news-forum-reverted-to-backup/

@bd139, is your TEA thread backup script still running? Coincidentally, I was thinking about it the other day.

Ah, just saw your post from yesterday:

Nice one 

I really need to finish my archive scripts off. It's clear there is a risk that we lose everything.

So, bd, in what format are you storing the thread contents? Since I have domains for TEA, now, I can put up a read-only archive/mirror.

[mnementh]

Most of what was lost in here can be reviewed from the links below:

Text Dump:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/?action=dlattach;attach=1216163

.pdf of the last page in zip archive (Looks nice & forum-y):

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/?action=dlattach;attach=1216166

Cheers!

mnem
 

[bitseeker]

Thanks, mnem. Looks like the thread didn't get too far beyond the last backup.

[bitseeker]

You know those HP 66xx system DC power supplies with all the terminals in the rear? Check out the awesome job modding binding posts onto this one:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/any-better-way-to-use-a-hp-6625a-than-dragging-cables-from-the-rear-outputs/msg3552857/#msg3552857