Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

The heat comes from a SS inverter PCB and as kind as they were to SMD fuse it they couldn't be bothered with any cable strain relief better than a blob of black Silastic !    Cheapskates ! 

And no gaskets to waterproof it. Don't drop it in the mud. 

[tautech]

The heat comes from a SS inverter PCB and as kind as they were to SMD fuse it they couldn't be bothered with any cable strain relief better than a blob of black Silastic !    Cheapskates ! 

And no gaskets to waterproof it. Don't drop it in the mud. 

Not very likely as after decades of toting around 12V 30W sealed beam spotlights has never seen one broken in use and I honestly don't remember one getting dropped in deep mud or a puddle. Higher risk to the inverter PCB comes from using it to press down an electric fence so to step over it and I distinctly remember one time decades ago using a plastic spotlight with a chrome finish on it to do that and quickly learnt chromed plastic conducts 5kV ! 
Never did that again ! 

[beanflying]

7 weeks to arrive  and it's first job was to spot a fat rabbit for the cat.



https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001192693767.html?spm=a2g0o.store_pc_groupList.0.0.753b202ejrnDRY&gps-id=pcStoreJustForYou&scm=1007.23125.137358.0&scm_id=1007.23125.137358.0&scm-url=1007.23125.137358.0&pvid=51f62a21-8dc7-4553-b3f2-974825527608

Didja burn yerself on the damned thing yet...? 

mnem
tssssst...

No tssssst yet but only had it ON for a minute or 2 and didn't notice it getting warm as forgot to check until you reminded me just now. 
But that's a good excuse for a longer venture tonight to find and drill  some of Bean's furry vermin providing the predicted shitty weather doesn't turn up and spoil the fun.
http://metvuw.com/forecast/forecast.php?type=rain&region=nzni&noofdays=10#

It's got a bit smaller spot than we're used to but certainly not too small to be a very useful hunting spotlight and with a good bit more range than our old 4" 30W sealed beam but trying to do a current draw on it last night with the Fluke failed as the new LED light's inverter didn't like the Fluke being in series.   
Need to wire it directly to one of our PSU's with a full output readout to see the current consumption.

Off now to charge the 12V Li jump pack to full tssssst 

Didn't get to go for a walk with it last night and the weather's no better tonight. 
However did run this LED spotlight for a while and the only thing that gets warm is the hard plastic handle grip ! 
Great for colder nights ! 

Current draw is ~1A which is brilliant (pun intended  ) as these small lightweight 13AH Li 12V jump start battery packs will last longer than I wanna be outside on the hill at my age. 
Hell if we'd only had such a setup decades ago. 

The heat comes from a SS inverter PCB and as kind as they were to SMD fuse it they couldn't be bothered with any cable strain relief better than a blob of black Silastic !    Cheapskates ! 

Couple of internal pics for study....

So 12W not 30W then  What sort of voltage in the board putting out to the LED?

Still have Dad's old hunting 30W spot somewhere used to work fine out to sensible Bunny blasting range with open sights.

[kleiner Rainer]

Just finished an upgrade to my old netbook - a ten year old Samsung N150Plus. SSD, 2GB RAM, upgrade from Win7 to Win10Home. Astonishingly, the original battery still has 57% of the nominal capacity left. Funnily, the free upgrade to Win10 still worked. Only problem was that the backlight brightness control didnt work, but that could be solved with some googling and tinkering with regedit.

This will become my travel/lab machine and will also be used to connect to my THS720P (via the nice THS7XX Hard Copy tool written by mrprecision). Since the mic input to the sound card ist stereo, it is also useful for ham radio SDR applications. The nice things are a matte display, quiet fan, 3 USB ports, a decent keyboard and a good quality soundcard. Size and weight make it very portable.

A complete service manual can also be found on the net. Replacement battery for 21€ is on the way, this should give 6 hours or more runtime again.

And now some measurements with hwinfo, to stay on topic: 

HWiNFO32 Version 7.04-4480

DG1SMD-N150 ---------------------------------------------------------------

 [Current Computer]
  Computer Name:                          DG1SMD-N150
  Computer Description:                   Netbook
  Computer Brand Name:                    Samsung N150P/N210P/N220P
 [Operating System]
  Operating System:                       Microsoft Windows 10 Home Build 19042.985 (20H2)
  UEFI Boot:                              Not Present
  Secure Boot:                            Not Present

Intel Atom N450 -----------------------------------------------------------

 [General Information]
  Processor Name:                         Intel Atom N450
  Original Processor Frequency:           1666.7 MHz
  Original Processor Frequency [MHz]:     1667
  CPU ID:                                 000106CA
  CPU Brand Name:                         Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450   @ 1.66GHz
  CPU Vendor:                             GenuineIntel
  CPU Stepping:                           A0
  CPU Code Name:                          Pineview-M SC
  CPU Technology:                         45 nm
  CPU S-Spec:                             SLBMG
  CPU Thermal Design Power (TDP):         5.5 W
  CPU Max. Junction Temperature (Tj,max): 100 °C
  CPU Type:                               Production Unit
  CPU Platform:                           FCBGA8 (BGA559)
  Microcode Update Revision:              107
  Number of CPU Cores:                    1
  Number of Logical CPUs:                 2
 [Operating Points]
  CPU LFM (Minimum):                      1000.0 MHz = 6 x 166.7 MHz @ 0.9500 V
  CPU HFM (Base):                         1666.7 MHz = 10 x 166.7 MHz @ 1.1625 V [Locked]
  CPU Current:                            1662.1 MHz = 10 x 166.2 MHz @ 1.1625 V
  CPU Bus Type:                           Intel Direct Media Interface (DMI) v1.0
  Maximum DMI Link Speed:                 2.5 GT/s
  Current DMI Link Speed:                 2.5 GT/s
 [Cache and TLB]
  L1 Cache:                               Instruction: 32 KBytes, Data: 24 KBytes
  L2 Cache:                               Integrated: 512 KBytes
  Instruction TLB:                        4 KB Pages, Fully associative, 32 entries
  Data TLB:                               4 KB Pages, 4-way set associative, 64 entries

Motherboard ---------------------------------------------------------------

 [Computer]
  Computer Brand Name:                    Samsung N150P/N210P/N220P
 [Motherboard]
  Motherboard Model:                      Samsung N150P/N210P/N220P
  Motherboard Chipset:                    NM10 (Tigerpoint)
  Motherboard Slots:                      4xPCI Express x1
  PCI Express Version Supported:          v1.1
  USB Version Supported:                  v2.0
 [BIOS]
  BIOS Manufacturer:                      Phoenix Technologies
  BIOS Date:                              04/30/2010
  BIOS Version:                           01KY.M008.20100430.RHU
  UEFI BIOS:                              Not Capable
  Super-IO/LPC Chip:                      SMSC FDC37M81x

Battery #0 ----------------------------------------------------------------

 [General Properties]
  Device Name:                           
  Manufacturer Name:                      SAMSUNG Electronics
  Serial Number:                         
  Unique ID:                              SAMSUNG Electronics
  Chemistry:                              Lithium Ion
  Designed Capacity:                      47520 mWh
  Full Charged Capacity:                  27000 mWh
  Wear Level:                             43.2 %
 [Current Power Status]
  Power Status:                           Discharging
  Current Capacity:                       23490 mWh (87.0 %)
  Current Voltage:                        11.779 V
  Discharge Rate:                         -8057 mW

Greetings,

Rainer

[tautech]

So 12W not 30W then  What sort of voltage in the board putting out to the LED?

Dunno didn't check and after posting hoped no one would ask. 
Back together again with temp strain relief in the form of a cable tie inside the case which needs something better and might be a small cable gland if I can make one fit.

Still have Dad's old hunting 30W spot somewhere used to work fine out to sensible Bunny blasting range with open sights.

Yes 30W incandescent is fine for most 22 work but the longer and brighter beam of this LED can spot stuff at 3x the range so saves some walking but these days we mainly spot from an ATV so to cover lots of ground with much less effort and time.

I'd resisted going to LED spotlights until I spotted this nice 30W compact one which will work fine for possum and rabbit work as we're not using extreme range spotlights and centerfires like you chaps do for roos.

[tggzzz]

Just finished an upgrade to my old netbook - a ten year old Samsung N150Plus. SSD, 2GB RAM, upgrade from Win7 to Win10Home. Astonishingly, the original battery still has 57% of the nominal capacity left.

I'm writing this on an 11 year old Samsung N130. MS wouldn't let me reinstall WinXP (long story), so it is using Xfce/Ubuntu. Only disadvantage: a 600*800 screen.

The battery life is still a over 2 hours. I credit that with Samsung providing and my using a bios setting that stops the battery being charged when it has reached 80% "full".

I use the same principle, albeit manually. on other Li battery devices: try to keep the charge between 40% and 80%.

[tggzzz]

I'll post a picture when she is up to weight. She was so skinney when we got her she looked more like Scrat the sabre tooth squirrel from Ice Age than a landshark.

With restoration projects, it is traditional to post before and after pictures

[kleiner Rainer]

The battery life is still a over 2 hours. I credit that with Samsung providing and my using a bios setting that stops the battery being charged when it has reached 80% "full".

I use the same principle, albeit manually. on other Li battery devices: try to keep the charge between 40% and 80%.

Thats what I did too. Will do it again as soon as the new battery is installed, but with the old battery it doesnt make much sense now.
By keeping my ebike battery at 60% during winter, I got 10 years of life out of it. A replacement is on its way. The original battery would still work, but the last two kilometers going home from work are on a 7% grade, and the high internal resistance keeps triggering the BMS.

[VK5RC]

So 12W not 30W then  What sort of voltage in the board putting out to the LED?

Dunno didn't check and after posting hoped no one would ask. 
Back together again with temp strain relief in the form of a cable tie inside the case which needs something better and might be a small cable gland if I can make one fit.

Still have Dad's old hunting 30W spot somewhere used to work fine out to sensible Bunny blasting range with open sights.

Yes 30W incandescent is fine for most 22 work but the longer and brighter beam of this LED can spot stuff at 3x the range so saves some walking but these days we mainly spot from an ATV so to cover lots of ground with much less effort and time.

I'd resisted going to LED spotlights until I spotted this nice 30W compact one which will work fine for possum and rabbit work as we're not using extreme range spotlights and centerfires like you chaps do for roos.

While they are not cheap, NZ makes an absolutely cracking hot (literally and figuratively) mountain bike headlight, the Gloworm XSV, over 3000 lumen, with temp control, battery, remote control etc and you can change the light spread pattern to match what you want. Waterproof, rugged, really well made, with lots of mounting options via a gopro type mount. About 420 Aussie $.

[Robert763]

I'll post a picture when she is up to weight. She was so skinney when we got her she looked more like Scrat the sabre tooth squirrel from Ice Age than a landshark.

With restoration projects, it is traditional to post before and after pictures

OK,
Here is the picture from the Woodgreen website. The only one they had due to her nervousness. She had lost even more weight by the time we picked her up.

[mnementh]

What could possibly be better than a perfectly toasted everything bagel with too much of everything for your Anniversary morning breakfast...?

TWO of them, made by your son. 

That's right, folks, he can be taught! This is the kind of valuable skill that will help him keep a good wife once he's got her.

Cheers all!

mnem

[mnementh]

Just a brim on glass works with it curve down. Because of the design following the original two piece so you can print/use minimal printed bits and keep the old towers it prints best curved side down. Print it the other way up you need to deal with the support removal pita.

No real reason to split the model but I think I only needed one tower so it made sense to keep it like the real Tek one.

Hairspray goes in the hair of 80's holdouts along with shoulder pads 

Don't even need that. I just forgot to clean my print surface and re-tweak the first layer; I've been doing large, low-internal-stress prints for a while and got lazy, because this clone Build-Tak print surface (came with the filament) sticks like a mofo, provided you clean it once in a while.  So well, in fact, that I have to tweak the first layer a little extra-loose (per the MFR's instructions) on large flat prints, or I can't get them off it, even prying with pliers.

The positive flip side of that is it leaves this delicious matte sandstone-like finish:



mnem

[kj7e]

Been a busy new toy, clean up and calibration week.  HP 4332a LCR meter added thanks to a fellow member.

[mnementh]

Didja burn yerself on the damned thing yet...? 

mnem
tssssst...

Didn't get to go for a walk with it last night and the weather's no better tonight.     However did run this LED spotlight for a while and the only thing that gets warm is the hard plastic handle grip ! 
Great for colder nights ! 

Current draw is ~1A which is brilliant (pun intended  ) as these small lightweight 13AH Li 12V jump start battery packs will last longer than I wanna be outside on the hill at my age. 
Hell if we'd only had such a setup decades ago. 

The heat comes from a SS inverter PCB and as kind as they were to SMD fuse it they couldn't be bothered with any cable strain relief better than a blob of black Silastic !    Cheapskates !     Couple of internal pics for study....

Yup... that thing is like 99% off the shelf parts; the business end is a commodity LED flashlight module used by probably a hundred different flashlight "manufacturers", and that inverter a commodity CC LED lighting driver. Some are buck only; some are buck/boost and will typically take any voltage from 2.5V-9V (intended for battery power) or from 5-30V (AC PSU) and step-up/step-down as needed to provide a fixed current drive no matter what the VFd of the LED.

Your lamp is probably a multi-series-element CREE LED or clone; at a guess, I'd say driving the LED somewhere around 7-11V @ 800ma (the ones like this that don't set the CC with a resistor divider seem to always be ~800mA), so 6-10W nominal output. You should be able to get a close enough measurement using the 10A range on your Fluke; they're usually not as finicky aboot the big shunt inside the meter.

Cheap, thin wiring is epidemic with these cheapo LED lighting things; I often find them using such thin wire it gets warm and is actually starving the driver and/or LED for current.

mnem
 

[Cerebus]

The GPSDO software/hardware is slowly getting there. Latest overnight test:



The big spikes in the middle are where it lost adequate sight of the GPS satellites for a while - a combination of poor antenna placement and weather. So that's a sort of holdover situation, except that I haven't written the code for holdover proper yet so it's simply relying on the timing holdover on the GPS receiver (which is good for a GPS receiver, but not that good).

Still, holdover aside, it's keeping frequency to within two parts per billion and time to within a couple of milliseconds. The mean frequency error after lock-up is 4.9 x 10^-11 (1 sigma = 2.13x 10^-9) including the 'holdover' period which is perfectly respectable but I need to get the peak deviations lower. With a shorter time constant (256) rather than the time constant used above (1024) it keeps frequency to within one part per billion (peak deviation). Some tweaking - part software, part hardware - can definitely get that to within 0.1 ppb.

To put things into perspective, 1 ppb mean frequency error (i.e. 1 x 10^-9) is equivalent to a clock losing or gaining a second in 31 something years, so 2 and a bit seconds accuracy over Med or tggzzz's lifetime, slightly less over mine.  I'm currently getting more than an order of magnitude better. Not too shabby, but I know the peak deviation can be improved.

Making progress, slowly.

By the way, the EFI control on these CTI OCXOs has lousy linearity. To be fair the data sheet only claims 10% linearity and I'm sure it meets that, but it makes fine numerical control interesting. I suspect that I've also got some broadband noise in the EFC line and need to add some low pass filtering to that for the sake of better short term phase noise if nothing else (at the moment it comes straight out of the DAC).

[Saskia]

assembled the exercise bike.
Did my 7.5 km round today.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Found for our friends in the UK:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/154455708250

https://www.ebay.de/itm/274805780155

[Cerebus]

                 
                                                                     Artist: TinkerDwagon
                                                           Title: The Role of Failure in Design     
                                                                               Date: 2021
                                                                Medium: Fail and PLA Filament
                                                            Dimensions: 26mm x 15mm x 15mm

I think I'm gonna call that one a fail... or modern art.

mnem

Looks like it came unstuck from the bed. Use hairspray (on the print-bed, not for your hair).

McBryce.

I think he'd need Mr. Wells time machine to do the latter. 

[mnementh]

With no off street parking at home and a 60A single phase mains supply already running air/air heat pumps plus usual domestic loads a full electric car is not really an option for me. However with a 20 mile commoute and free charging at work I bought a used Outlander Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV). This gave me zero fuel cost commute. Then Covid came along 
It's got lots of space for TEA trips or the dog. So far the only TE it's seen is a HP 8920B and a Tektronix 492BP. Ths dog died but we got a rescue last month. She's a German Shepard / Siberian Huskey cross and had a few issues so has taken a bit of time away from TEA but she's doing OK now.

Heh, heh, a Land Shark / Werepuppy cross - sounds fun.

She is. Our previous dog, from Woodgreen was  shepard cross supposedly huskey but looked like the was a bit of rottie in the mix. She was a nervous dog. We had hear for 12 years.  Luna was not doing well in the shelter and when we showed interest it was come and get her. None of the usual interview and two visits, Woodgreen are fussly about who adopts their animals.
I'll post a picture when she is up to weight. She was so skinney when we got her she looked more like Scrat the sabre tooth squirrel from Ice Age than a landshark.

That sounds like our vicious "Kitty" dog; she was mum & mine, a foundling dropped off at the barn. Dobie/Wolf/Husky mix (coloring more Dobie) according to grandmomma, who was a AKC registered breeder. 

She was a big pup, and her tail had a life of its own... those joke cartoons where the tail sweeps entire shelves bare when it wags were daily life with her, but after she grew up, everybody agreed she would have just looked "wrong" with tail & ears cropped. Loyal as the day is long and fiercely protective of the both of us, she made it to 26 before passing peacefully in her sleep at the head of my bed.

mnem
*soft sigh, remembering furry family now long gone*

[Cerebus]

What could possibly be better than a perfectly toasted everything bagel with too much of everything for your Anniversary morning breakfast...?

TWO of them, made by your son. 

That's right, folks, he can be taught! This is the kind of valuable skill that will help him keep a good wife once he's got her.

Cheers all!

mnem

I know you said "too much of everything" but it does, however, look like the "Schmear" turned into something a little more like a Stein. 

[mnementh]

Hey... When I'm on keto, I get a day off every two weeks (if I don't cheat like a dumbass); I've got some deprivation to make up for.  Also, the boi is a worse cream cheese addict than I am... there's no doubt he's a Polack.

mnem
 

[BU508A]

New video from "The Signal Path" about the Siglent SSG5060X-V signal generator:

[kj7e]

assembled the exercise bike.
Did my 7.5 km round today.

Nice, here is my ride yesterday;

https://www.strava.com/activities/5340970475

[med6753]

Hey... When I'm on keto, I get a day off every two weeks (if I don't cheat like a dumbass); I've got some deprivation to make up for.  Also, the boi is a worse cream cheese addict than I am... there's no doubt he's a Polack.

mnem
 

Cheese addict here too. However, I am NOT Polack. 

[Cerebus]

New video from "The Signal Path" about the Siglent SSG5060X-V signal generator:

For something from Siglent that has a surprising lack of ugly to it. I haven't looked any closer to see if the control layout make sense, but aesthetically it's a step up for Siglent.