Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Vince]

Some news regarding my little ancient gizmo of 22 pages back, for those who still remember it. Picture below for all the others...

Made by " CIMEL " in Paris according to the writing on the meter movement. 
Found a " CIMEL " today also in Paris, albeit not at the same address. Tried my luck and e-mailed them last Thursday night with pictures, asking if it belongs to them and what they could tell me about it.. application, documentation of any kind.. anything they might have.

Of course I fully expected to be ignored... imagine if I e-mailed HP about some ancient piece from them I found in some barn...

Well, what do you know ! Today they replied to me !!! Girl from marketing / sales dept.

See response below.

She said basically YES it is the same CIMEL company, and yes it is one of their products ! 
Was made in the 40's or '50's. It's for civil use. That she is sure about.
But that's about it. Couldn't tell me anything technical about it, no docs, no nothing as the engineers who made the thing are long dead of course 

She did try to speak some technical words but coming from a Marketing girl it was bound to be BS.. but at least she tried ! I respect her will to help ! 
Said that the generator produced 500Volts  !    I measured either 4V or 11V depending which range you select (50 or 150 ohms).
Said it was " a voltmeter as you said ".. HEY, never said it was a voltmeter mam, said it was an OHM-meter ! 

Then to conclude she THANKED me for digging out this little bit of their history and contacting them about it !   

So overall, an extremely positive customer experience, no fuss no stand, just direct human to human contact trying to help ! It still exists in 2021, I am baffled ! 

So don't be afraid to contact companies, an e-mail is free and takes a few seconds, you never know there might be actual nice human beings trying to help at the other end of the line !! 

[BU508A]

Somebody here in Germany which have such a plug and want to sell it to me?



As per datasheet (attached below) it seems to be a Schützinger HFS 13-52 plug.

Please send me a PM if you have one and want to sell it to me.

Thanks.

[Specmaster]

In other news, I took advantage of a low price on Amazon for some multiway test meter leads that come with various extras and adaptors to suit most types of meter inputs...

I've bought one of these sets on ebay a while ago. Maybe I'm spoilt by being used to Hirschmann for decades, but these leads are fine if you want to practice the Indian rope trick and it takes some scratching and rubbing of the tips to get the continuity tester of my DMM to respond. A classical case of you get what...

Ralf

Spec's post got my curiosity up so I checked that set out myself and after reading some of the reviews I was less than impressed.   

Well, the reviews for these that I have seen are a mixed bag, but the overall rating is pretty good. TBH, I already have a couple of sets of these leads but with fewer adaptors and I have zero issues with them, they are perfectly acceptable for normal everyday use. Resistance and continuity are all fine. As far as resistance goes, like so many other leads, and this includes genuine Fluke leads, if they show a small resistance when shorted out, then all that is required (if the DMM does not automatically do it) is depending on the meter, either use the NULL or REL button and then all readings will be spot on, no big problem with that.

They will generally be used very seldom, but in reality with my collection of AVO 8 meters, which will not accept modern shrouded leads, and of course the meters are only in the realms of 3% accuracy and only used either for a quick check on values for a sanity check, or where the service manual / charts specifically state that all readings were obtained using an instrument of 20,000 OPV, which is crucial for checking all voltages other than power rails because the meter loading on circuits such as voltage dividers. This is especially so output stages, when setting the volts on some circuits could not be done correctly using DMM's (typically 10M OPV) would result in clipping or other distortions because the loading effect of the meter is less and so the readings would be miles off.

[Brumby]

Yes, the 100,000th post did go through several changes of occupancy and when things started settling down, it was my post that was found there.  To help reduce the tendency for rewriting history and because the collective desire for bitseeker to occupy that post had become rather remote, I sought to make a celebratory statement - hence this:

To celebrate this significant milestone - we direct our thanks (and all the blame) to the founder of this thread...


  !

I trust there were some who appreciated that second image...

I did, but given the gold tolerance band, it could have been referring to any reply between 95,000 and (yes ok, most of these haven't been written yet) 105,000.

I will add oil on to the fire at this stage by pointing out that reply number 100,000 is post number 100,001 since the OP is un-numbered (0), and so technically the 100,000th post is reply number 99,999...
 

Tolerance band. Zero- vs one-based counting. Oh, my! You've made the nerdy even nerdier.

On the zero-vs-one based counting, I will address that by referring to the number labels that SMF puts on posts, but if that isn't adequate for some, then I suggest we reset our reference point and count the number of replies.

In regards to the resistor, while I was aiming at the nominal value, the relevance of the tolerance band did actually cross my mind, but with the dynamic nature of the post counts, including a tolerance band made sense - and, at the time, 5% did not seem to be an unreasonable margin.  Besides, what would the tolerance band be for 0.0005% (or better) ?

[Neomys Sapiens]

Somebody here in Germany which have such a plug and want to sell it to me?



As per datasheet (attached below) it seems to be a Schützinger HFS 13-52 plug.

Please send me a PM if you have one and want to sell it to me.

Thanks.

Generally, this series of connectors is referred to as 4/14, as the inner contact is a 4mm Bueschel contact (as used in 4mm jacks) and the outer conductor is 13mm in diameter. This is not totally in line with the IEC designations, as those refer to the INNER DIAMETER of the OUTER CONDUCTOR as the second number, the first (correctly) being the OUTER DIAMETER of the INNER CONDUCTOR.
They appear in two variants, the one shown and the one with the outer conductor extending well forward. Some people refer to them as 'shielded banana plugs'. Are you sure that the connector above on the page you posted won't fit? Could you cut off the screen on a lathe? Because I have a bag full of them and I even have a BNC adaptor to spare, but I am not yet sure of those with the short screen.

[mansaxel]

But anything more subtle or complex than farcebook or twatter on a phone sucks even more!

I actually tech-assisted or mixed (we were 3 engineers) 6 bands Saturday evening. (which is why I was absent from Discord, btw) With an iPad as user interface, controlling a 32-channel mixer that looks little more than a box with connectors.

Or, I cheated. I had a 15" Macbook as extra remote, and did most of my work on that one. No physical faders, only glass, though. The keyboard gets used to name channels, full stop.

That is, I argue, more complex. Than most forum / community work. Not actually, because it's a set amount of complexity, not 100000+ posts by different people, but the amount of running around between functions is much higher.

I'm still convinced that the UI needs work. And I much prefer my analogue mixer in terms of ergonomics, but the sheer amount of clean-sounding functionality in that little show box is very tempting, especially at the price; about 950€.

The most satisfying part was coming up with a solution to monitoring. There is a phone jack. But it is on stage, because that's where the mixer is, and we had no use for it there. In the end, I made a 25m headphone cable from 1/4" stereo plug -XLR adapters, which I happen to have in pretty much every gender combination thinkable.

[bitseeker]

Some news regarding my little ancient gizmo of 22 pages back, for those who still remember it. Picture below for all the others...

Remember it? I haven't yet gotten to it. I skipped ahead when I saw we crossed the 100K line. I'm up to reply #98775 and hoping to reach 100K before bed.

...

So overall, an extremely positive customer experience, no fuss no stand, just direct human to human contact trying to help ! It still exists in 2021, I am baffled ! 

So don't be afraid to contact companies, an e-mail is free and takes a few seconds, you never know there might be actual nice human beings trying to help at the other end of the line !! 

What a cute hand-powered ohm meter. First time I've seen one. Enjoyed the story, too.

[bitseeker]

Geez.... 6 pages in just 18 hours.  Keeping up with this thread is becoming a real challenge.

They wanna hit 100000 replies by mid of September...

Well, now, that was foreshadowing, yet not ambitious enough.

[srb1954]

This better be full of unobtainium parts for this money:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265299452416

Fuckers want £500 to ship it to Sweden. Fantasy-land, all over.

Shipping to your country is relatively cheap compared to the £2500 they want to ship to my part of the world, and that's their economy shipping rate!

[bitseeker]

I just bought a Keithley 236 SMU and I'm also looking for triax cables of the 3-lug variety. I was planning on buying some Belden triax cable at ~USD2 per ~33cm off of ebay and then some of these triax connectors:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10000132950232.html

...which are expensive, but not nearly as insanely expensive as the OEM Keithley triax cables that are apparently still in use by somebody that is spending my tax money.

Are there only two flavors of triax connectors (2-lug and 3-lug), or are there others?

That red Soviet voltmeter is the most brutally gorgeous piece of test equipment that I have ever seen.

EDIT:

Was planning on building my own test fixture (how hard could that be?  ) and then start plotting some curves (maybe getting a GPIB adapter eventually).

There are lots of "triax" connectors. Even in the BNC style you have 2 or 3 lug, 3 lug that are not 120 degrees apart and internal connections for either "triax" (1 conducotor 2 isolated screens) or "twinax" (2 conductors 1 screen). Then ther are minature versions, Lemo/Fischer, Ampphenols own (1553), and a whole host based on at least two sizes of military contacts in a range of shells. Dealing with MIL-STD-1553 data buses which use twinax (PL75 is common) I've seen as many as 5 different connector types in a single system 

And there are lots of triax adapters to add to the fray. When my eyes stopped watering at the cost of the cables, I figured I might get a triax-to-BNC adapter for non-critical use only to find that there are many ways to do that. Do you want to float the extra conductor? If so, which one? Would you rather join two together? If so, which ones?

Interestingly a Keithley 220 current source I bought a few years ago kept throwing an error, which I discovered was due to such an adapter that someone had installed on the rear output connector. It wasn't shorting two conductors, but leaked enough current between two of them that the current source got upset. Removed the adapter and the thing worked just fine. Easy fix!

[bitseeker]

We get weekly "intelligence reports" which are sent out by a dedicated team of internal analysts at work. I received one today stating that there is another major incoming shortage, apparently because Covid is somewhat starting to hit Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore. The only integrator who is stacked up with stock is Toyota apparently and they don't have the lead to cover this for more than 6 months. This is causing other people to buy up reserve stock and further shortages.

Ergo shit is about to be further fucked. But at least it's not toilet paper this time. 

Costco has started to put limits on some items. Hold onto yer toilet paper folks! This ride ain't over yet.

[capt bullshot]

In other news, received feedback from my boss who has spoken to my department head about my permanent telework.
Department head approved and cautioned that I should not get lost and forgotten due to being so far away from the site ...

My boss will tawk to HR to check what kind of paperwork is required. Once that is done I can move up north and toss the flat near campus which costs me 1200 quid/month.
Actually that's about the same as the house is going to cost me ...
Once we are in we will look for autonomous energy. Apparently Germany had a partial blackout on August 14. And with those smart meters it may be very easy to ration energy or cut people off. Can't have that ...

The event on August 14. was a routine event to cope with solar energy falling down in the evening (nothing suprising that), and constant demand. They've shut down some heavy industries that agreed to that in advance. A bit more than usual, as far as I understood, but nothing to be concerned about. It's their daily practice.
Afaik, Smart Meters that are to be used in Germany don't have the ability to cut your power locally. In other countries, this is different. They can shut down substations remotely, so your street (and some more) or a small village could be shut down "at will".
We've had a few events that caused (or might have caused) large area blackouts in Germany or Europe, these weren't related to regenerative energy.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_historischer_Stromausf%C3%A4lle

[AVGresponding]

Yes, the 100,000th post did go through several changes of occupancy and when things started settling down, it was my post that was found there.  To help reduce the tendency for rewriting history and because the collective desire for bitseeker to occupy that post had become rather remote, I sought to make a celebratory statement - hence this:

To celebrate this significant milestone - we direct our thanks (and all the blame) to the founder of this thread...


  !

I trust there were some who appreciated that second image...

I did, but given the gold tolerance band, it could have been referring to any reply between 95,000 and (yes ok, most of these haven't been written yet) 105,000.

I will add oil on to the fire at this stage by pointing out that reply number 100,000 is post number 100,001 since the OP is un-numbered (0), and so technically the 100,000th post is reply number 99,999...
 

Tolerance band. Zero- vs one-based counting. Oh, my! You've made the nerdy even nerdier.

On the zero-vs-one based counting, I will address that by referring to the number labels that SMF puts on posts, but if that isn't adequate for some, then I suggest we reset our reference point and count the number of replies.

In regards to the resistor, while I was aiming at the nominal value, the relevance of the tolerance band did actually cross my mind, but with the dynamic nature of the post counts, including a tolerance band made sense - and, at the time, 5% did not seem to be an unreasonable margin.  Besides, what would the tolerance band be for 0.0005% (or better) ?

Vishay only list 0.005%, but I did find this:

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/0-1-10-100-1000Mohm-1Tohm-0-0005-Resistance-Standard-box-Resistor-4066-/273564931614

[bitseeker]

Dave just mentioned the EEVblog forum TEA thread in his latest video at the 10 min 30 second mark.

"There's even a Test Equipment Anonymous, ah, in case you've got, you know, psychological problems collecting test equipment, which is quite common."

Added to the "TEA Around the Web" section of the OP.

Dave has spoken. TEA is now a common ailment.

He forgot to mention that the folks on the TEA thread will not help cure TE-collecting addiction, but are all enablers.

Whadda ya mean? We are helping. Who said anything about a cure?

[mnementh]

Warning - While you were reading 96 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.  

It's orificial: The dwagon has landed... In Brampton. 

The truck's been returned intact and 7 hours early at 2am; the WiFi is online and tomorrow's iced tea is brewing on the counter.

Time for me to drag my sorry carcass off to bed; myassiss dragon.

mnem
 yes dear, I'll bring some bath tissue up with me...

[bitseeker]

G'night dwagon! Glad to hear ya made it OK.

[AaronLee]

Not sure if this is the best place to put this, but being a number of you use Ebay, thought I'd ask. Is anyone else having delays with Ebay orders via GSP from items originating in the USA? I've had nothing but a stellar experience in the past, but suddenly I have three orders that seem to be in limbo. My best guess is that Kentucky, where their distribution center is located, is experiencing record COVID-19 cases, and it may be affecting processing of items. Two of my items are being held by FedEx in Kentucky, because they couldn't even be delivered to GSP, which really makes me think there's a serious problem inside their distribution center at the moment.

I saw a couple of items I might want to bid on, but think I'll hold off until I hear that there aren't anymore issues with GSP.

[bitseeker]

I don't know about GSP, but even domestic shipping in the US is sporadic these days. Sometimes stuff shows up days ahead of schedule. Other times, days or weeks late.

[med6753]

Not sure if this is the best place to put this, but being a number of you use Ebay, thought I'd ask. Is anyone else having delays with Ebay orders via GSP from items originating in the USA? I've had nothing but a stellar experience in the past, but suddenly I have three orders that seem to be in limbo. My best guess is that Kentucky, where their distribution center is located, is experiencing record COVID-19 cases, and it may be affecting processing of items. Two of my items are being held by FedEx in Kentucky, because they couldn't even be delivered to GSP, which really makes me think there's a serious problem inside their distribution center at the moment.

I saw a couple of items I might want to bid on, but think I'll hold off until I hear that there aren't anymore issues with GSP.

Unless this is very recent, like in the past few days, I had no trouble with my last Mouser order a week ago that was via FedEx through their Kentucky hub to me on time in 2 days.

[med6753]

We get weekly "intelligence reports" which are sent out by a dedicated team of internal analysts at work. I received one today stating that there is another major incoming shortage, apparently because Covid is somewhat starting to hit Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore. The only integrator who is stacked up with stock is Toyota apparently and they don't have the lead to cover this for more than 6 months. This is causing other people to buy up reserve stock and further shortages.

Ergo shit is about to be further fucked. But at least it's not toilet paper this time. 

Costco has started to put limits on some items. Hold onto yer toilet paper folks! This ride ain't over yet.

Autumn is coming. There will be plenty of leaves on the ground to collect. But they may be a little crunchy and irritating. 

[bd139]

Mmmm paper cuts on your arse. Fun!

Random question: does anyone know which company I can head to for a hammer drill that isn't a piece of shit? Needs to have a chuck that isn't garbage and needs to be mains powered. Need to use it to blow some light holes in brick work and drill Hammond boxes as well with a step drill.

Edit: currently considering Makita HP1640 at the moment. Proper chuck. Not too many horrible reviews. Available same day on amazon for 70 quid.

[bitseeker]

Costco has started to put limits on some items. Hold onto yer toilet paper folks! This ride ain't over yet.

Autumn is coming. There will be plenty of leaves on the ground to collect. But they may be a little crunchy and irritating. 

 

Well, we're also in a drought, so I think I'll stick with dry grass. Hopefully, it doesn't come to that.

[med6753]

I don't know about GSP, but even domestic shipping in the US is sporadic these days. Sometimes stuff shows up days ahead of schedule. Other times, days or weeks late.

I've had no issues really with UPS and FedEx. USPS on the other hand is a total shit show. And it's not because of Covid. It's total incompetence and stupidity. I'll give a good example later today after I get something delivered....hopefully.   

[bitseeker]

Come to think of it, most of my stuff recently was via USPS. However, an Amazon order recently scheduled for Friday is arriving later today. Not that I mind stuff arriving faster, of course.

Well, I only got up to reply #99350. To be continued...

Night all!

[AaronLee]

Not sure if this is the best place to put this, but being a number of you use Ebay, thought I'd ask. Is anyone else having delays with Ebay orders via GSP from items originating in the USA? I've had nothing but a stellar experience in the past, but suddenly I have three orders that seem to be in limbo. My best guess is that Kentucky, where their distribution center is located, is experiencing record COVID-19 cases, and it may be affecting processing of items. Two of my items are being held by FedEx in Kentucky, because they couldn't even be delivered to GSP, which really makes me think there's a serious problem inside their distribution center at the moment.

I saw a couple of items I might want to bid on, but think I'll hold off until I hear that there aren't anymore issues with GSP.

Unless this is very recent, like in the past few days, I had no trouble with my last Mouser order a week ago that was via FedEx through their Kentucky hub to me on time in 2 days.

There was no problem with FedEx. They got it to Independence, Kentucky quickly, which is just a few miles from Erlanger, Kentucky where the GSP center is. Then an exception saying the packages are on hold with FedEx and can't be delivered to GSP. Another package made it to GSP, which usually means in less than 24 hours an international tracking number will be generated with the international carrier, but nothing for that package yet. Anyways, I'm in no hurry to get my orders, but just slightly concerned if something's happening there at GSP we don't know about.