Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cerebus]

Has anyone heard from Chris (bd) lately? 

I miss the (insert British term of endearment) cunt. 

He's lurking, I heard from him yesterday in reply to a German dad joke another of the TEA participants sent him and me (name withheld to protect the guilty).

[mansaxel]

And why do the rest of us get excluded from the Flachwitze? Speak up!

[Cerebus]

To put that in perspective... our Rav4, with a mid-tier options package (AC, AT, power windows, cruise, etc but no stoopit shit like butt warmers and the like) cost equivalent of ~22000€ new a few years ago.

mnem
needs more cowbell.

Butt warmer is never optional in Sweden. Our new V70 even has diesel heater. I've never tried it, since it was the first time yesterday morning that I noticed ice slush on the front windscreen (and we bought it in May, so no winter season yet). It wasn't serious; it could be squished away with a squirt of the washers (I'm running washer alcohol / water mix in the washer tank all year) and some sweeps of the wipers. But there's more where that came from...

Like Mnem, I used to place all the 'heated whatever' in cars into the "Bunch of pointless rubbish" pile, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Then back in the late 80s we had a series of unusually cold winters here in the UK. I used to have to drive to work each morning and after clearing off any overnight snow/ice I found that my hands got cold enough that several times I had difficulty getting my fingers to move fast enough to grip the steering wheel properly when doing all the shuffling necessary to edge back and forth out of a tight parking space (At the time I was driving a large, heavy and awkward Audi 100CD. Company car, not personal choice - I hated it.).

The lease on the Audi ended and then I inherited a Saab 9000CD company car for the last few months of its lease from a leaving sales director. That Saab was packed out with every extra in the book including a heated steering wheel. Having a seat and steering wheel that heated up in seconds, rather than waiting the minutes the interior heater takes to work, made a huge difference to the first few minutes of my drive - not to comfort per se but to safety as I now didn't have cold numb hands and could be certain that they would do what I wanted if and when called on to do it.

That completely changed my opinion about a heated steering wheel being a frippery for the UK.

[med6753]

To put that in perspective... our Rav4, with a mid-tier options package (AC, AT, power windows, cruise, etc but no stoopit shit like butt warmers and the like) cost equivalent of ~22000€ new a few years ago.

mnem
needs more cowbell.

Butt warmer is never optional in Sweden. Our new V70 even has diesel heater. I've never tried it, since it was the first time yesterday morning that I noticed ice slush on the front windscreen (and we bought it in May, so no winter season yet). It wasn't serious; it could be squished away with a squirt of the washers (I'm running washer alcohol / water mix in the washer tank all year) and some sweeps of the wipers. But there's more where that came from...

Like Mnem, I used to place all the 'heated whatever' in cars into the "Bunch of pointless rubbish" pile, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Then back in the late 80s we had a series of unusually cold winters here in the UK. I used to have to drive to work each morning and after clearing off any overnight snow/ice I found that my hands got cold enough that several times I had difficulty getting my fingers to move fast enough to grip the steering wheel properly when doing all the shuffling necessary to edge back and forth out of a tight parking space (At the time I was driving a large, heavy and awkward Audi 100CD. Company car, not personal choice - I hated it.).

The lease on the Audi ended and then I inherited a Saab 9000CD company car for the last few months of its lease from a leaving sales director. That Saab was packed out with every extra in the book including a heated steering wheel. Having a seat and steering wheel that heated up in seconds, rather than waiting the minutes the interior heater takes to work, made a huge difference to the first few minutes of my drive - not to comfort per se but to safety as I now didn't have cold numb hands and could be certain that they would do what I wanted if and when called on to do it.

That completely changed my opinion about a heated steering wheel being a frippery for the UK.

We have these simple and effective devices called "gloves" which are a required Winter wear and prevent numb and cold hands. Perhaps you've heard of them? Yes? No? 

[nfmax]

I have this same problem in spades - Raynaud’s phenomenon. Gloves don’t work, there is no blood flow to carry heat to the fingers. The compression of the gloves also aggravates it, as does gripping the wheel. It keeps me off the bike all winter as well:(

[Cerebus]

We have these simple and effective devices called "gloves" which are a required Winter wear and prevent numb and cold hands. Perhaps you've heard of them? Yes? No? 

Well Captain Obvious, the thing is that gloves that are thick enough to keep ones hands warm are also too thick to handle a sub-zero steering wheel safely. That's why "driving gloves" are very thin, and that's why driving gloves don't keep one's hands warm.

[mnementh]

On the bench this morning... fixing it or completely fuxxoring it.

Last night, while working much more tired than than I should have allowed myself, I tried to set up a bookshelf which I'd just cut cable management grommets into. Everything went fabulously; nice and tidy and neat... until I plugged my large digital picture frame in. KAAA-ZZZAAAAP! POP! SMOKITY-SMOKE!

Turned out I'd grabbed the charger for my eBike out of the wrong drawer and dinn't even look at it twice; it's a CV/CC power pack that puts out up to 29.4V/2A.

So, after exhausting the usual culprits (turns out the smoke was a 470uF/16V electro that didn't like 2x rated voltage) that could easily be tested with just a meter, I decided it was time to track down the shorted whatever that remained the low-tech way: apply a current-limited power source set for the lowest voltage device on the board and see either A) what still gets warm or 2) if that doesn't reveal the diseased part, start looking for the device with the lowest measurable voltage dropped across its power pins. This is generally much quicker and able to resolve much better than trying to measure resistance. A quick look at datasheets indicates everything is 3.3V or higher... so set my power supply at 3.3V/400ma.

Right now it appears U10/THC63LVDM83R (a clone of TI DS90C383BMTX TTL/LVDS converter) is our main victim; with the low-noise LDO feeding it getting a little warm but barely. Next will be to desolder it with my cheap Chinese hot air gun, and if this removes the short, see what happens when I replace that bd139-ified cap and 3.3V regulator to the uPC.

Boy, I'd love a sanely priced IR camera for this kind of work...


mnem
tzzzzzzzzzt!!!

[mnementh]

   ??

   https://fingers-welt.de/gallerie/eigen/impro/essen/essen.htm

No associations with the cook.

I was looking at that and going "Marzipan Ritter Sport, so what?" Then I spotted the "Aioli". Yuck!

On a vaguely related note. Ritter used to do a "Kaffee und Sahne" variety of Ritter Sport that was sold in the UK. It disappeared and I have been forlornly hunting for it ever since, including in Germany, with no success at all. It was my favourite by quite a long way of all the flavours of Ritter Sport.

So what... almond butter confection and garlic...?

Seems a waste of perfectly good garlic to me...

mnem
*nukin' it*

[tggzzz]

What I'm thinking of doing is a combination of a camera setup and the shorting plug idea.  If the impedance of the light string rises above a dead short, just have it quietly log a time stamp and turn on an indicator that something happened so I can check the photos/video from the relevant time instead of scrolling through hunting for something.

Daughter has bought, probably from Amazon, a camera that she has mounted on her back fence.

My very imperfect understanding is that it is solar powered, connects to her WiFi, when an infrared sensor "fires", the camera starts recording on a memory card and transmits the video to the wifi. If useful, I could ask her for more details.

[mnementh]

To put that in perspective... our Rav4, with a mid-tier options package (AC, AT, power windows, cruise, etc but no stoopit shit like butt warmers and the like) cost equivalent of ~22000€ new a few years ago.

mnem
needs more cowbell.

Butt warmer is never optional in Sweden. Our new V70 even has diesel heater. I've never tried it, since it was the first time yesterday morning that I noticed ice slush on the front windscreen (and we bought it in May, so no winter season yet). It wasn't serious; it could be squished away with a squirt of the washers (I'm running washer alcohol / water mix in the washer tank all year) and some sweeps of the wipers. But there's more where that came from...

Like Mnem, I used to place all the 'heated whatever' in cars into the "Bunch of pointless rubbish" pile, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Then back in the late 80s we had a series of unusually cold winters here in the UK. I used to have to drive to work each morning and after clearing off any overnight snow/ice I found that my hands got cold enough that several times I had difficulty getting my fingers to move fast enough to grip the steering wheel properly when doing all the shuffling necessary to edge back and forth out of a tight parking space (At the time I was driving a large, heavy and awkward Audi 100CD. Company car, not personal choice - I hated it.).

The lease on the Audi ended and then I inherited a Saab 9000CD company car for the last few months of its lease from a leaving sales director. That Saab was packed out with every extra in the book including a heated steering wheel. Having a seat and steering wheel that heated up in seconds, rather than waiting the minutes the interior heater takes to work, made a huge difference to the first few minutes of my drive - not to comfort per se but to safety as I now didn't have cold numb hands and could be certain that they would do what I wanted if and when called on to do it.

That completely changed my opinion about a heated steering wheel being a frippery for the UK.

We have these simple and effective devices called "gloves" which are a required Winter wear and prevent numb and cold hands. Perhaps you've heard of them? Yes? No? 

I think a lot of the attitude towards (insert object here)-warmers has to do with age and experience. As you get older, and the cold makes moving harder and harder, anything that combats it becomes less and less of a luxury. Just like the inverse with AC in Tejas.

I'll admit that since moving up here... and noting the creeping misery of arthritis... heated grips on my snowblower sure would be nice.

But one of my first MVA calls as a young firefighter resulted in a short in the seat-warmer circuit on a LeBaron, which caught fire while we were doing site cleanup. Luckily we had the driver and his wife out of the car already; but it was a "special reminder" to us probies that one of the first things you do once you have the incident assessed and stabilized is disconnect the battery. That seat and 3/4 of the interior were fully involved by the time we had hoses back off the truck and charged.

So still... Hell no. Not having that right under my blubber-butt. It's highly flammable too.

mnem
 

[Neper]

I've had seat heating in my Volvos for decades. It didn't even have a switch, just came on by itself and gently enough that it removed the feeling of cold without giving you the impression of sitting on a hotplate. And, even more important, the warmth (I can't even call it heat) mostly came from the lower part of the backrest.

In my current car, not a Volvo, only the seat heats up and it feels like it's trying to BBQ my butt, already in switch position 1 of 3. They just don't make decent cars anymore.

[Specmaster]

To put that in perspective... our Rav4, with a mid-tier options package (AC, AT, power windows, cruise, etc but no stoopit shit like butt warmers and the like) cost equivalent of ~22000€ new a few years ago.

mnem
needs more cowbell.

Butt warmer is never optional in Sweden. Our new V70 even has diesel heater. I've never tried it, since it was the first time yesterday morning that I noticed ice slush on the front windscreen (and we bought it in May, so no winter season yet). It wasn't serious; it could be squished away with a squirt of the washers (I'm running washer alcohol / water mix in the washer tank all year) and some sweeps of the wipers. But there's more where that came from...

Like Mnem, I used to place all the 'heated whatever' in cars into the "Bunch of pointless rubbish" pile, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Then back in the late 80s we had a series of unusually cold winters here in the UK. I used to have to drive to work each morning and after clearing off any overnight snow/ice I found that my hands got cold enough that several times I had difficulty getting my fingers to move fast enough to grip the steering wheel properly when doing all the shuffling necessary to edge back and forth out of a tight parking space (At the time I was driving a large, heavy and awkward Audi 100CD. Company car, not personal choice - I hated it.).

The lease on the Audi ended and then I inherited a Saab 9000CD company car for the last few months of its lease from a leaving sales director. That Saab was packed out with every extra in the book including a heated steering wheel. Having a seat and steering wheel that heated up in seconds, rather than waiting the minutes the interior heater takes to work, made a huge difference to the first few minutes of my drive - not to comfort per se but to safety as I now didn't have cold numb hands and could be certain that they would do what I wanted if and when called on to do it.

That completely changed my opinion about a heated steering wheel being a frippery for the UK.

Heated seats yes, totally agree but heated steering wheel, nah, all you need is decent heating system with air recirculation setting so that you're actually warming up air that is gradually getting warmer all the time, rather than freezing air from outside the car. All decent cars should have that facility as a standard these days. I have had that in my cars for the last 25 years as well as heated seats and also ducted air for the rear occupants rather than relying on warm air from the front filtering through to the rear seat. The other thing I now have on my car is cooled front seats, no more getting of the car on a hot day with your shirt soaked through and clinging to your back, even with AC on, hot day, no problem, stick the climate control on a low number and switch the cooled seat on, sheer bliss.

On a really cold day when the windscreen is iced over etc, no need to clear it off manually, switch the heated windscreen on as well as the rear heated window and mirrors on and in a few moments, nice clear windscreen and mirrors. 

[med6753]

We have these simple and effective devices called "gloves" which are a required Winter wear and prevent numb and cold hands. Perhaps you've heard of them? Yes? No? 

Well Captain Obvious, the thing is that gloves that are thick enough to keep ones hands warm are also too thick to handle a sub-zero steering wheel safely. That's why "driving gloves" are very thin, and that's why driving gloves don't keep one's hands warm.

Obviously......if you had worn gloves while cleaning the snow/ice off the vehicle your hands would not have been cold and numb, would they? 

[AVGresponding]

I bit the bullet a week ago and ordered a 5-pack of these. My use case is various small consumers in the machine room, like fiber converter, SIP ATA boxes, and environment monitor Raspberry π. I have a 24V battery backed supply, called "Main Bus B" (of course) that I'm thinking of supplying these from, and to do that I need switching buck converters.

Don't tell mnem, he'll predict all kinds of electronic Ragnarok from using these...

And why do the rest of us get excluded from the Flachwitze? Speak up!

Be grateful. Be very grateful...



Latest accidental acquisition arrived today; Seaward Supernova Elite portable appliance tester (I balk at calling these things PAT testers, for obvious pedantry reasons).

In good working order and with a few calibration and service stickers, just needing flash test probe (readily available) and the earth bond lead (also readily available and easily made).
I didn't really need it (have a half-decent Robin tester), but it was too cheap to not throw a bid, and so I got for just over eighty quid shipped (really expected to get overbid), not bad for an item that retailed at twelve hundred or so before it was discontinued.
It seems to have been used in a production testing environment, and been well cared for, the protective film still on the LCD screen despite its age (probably 12 years or so).

As it's slightly different from our usual fare in this thread, I'll put it near the top of the teardown queue (still, don't hold your breath, work is busy right now).

[Cerebus]

We have these simple and effective devices called "gloves" which are a required Winter wear and prevent numb and cold hands. Perhaps you've heard of them? Yes? No? 

Well Captain Obvious, the thing is that gloves that are thick enough to keep ones hands warm are also too thick to handle a sub-zero steering wheel safely. That's why "driving gloves" are very thin, and that's why driving gloves don't keep one's hands warm.

Obviously......if you had worn gloves while cleaning the snow/ice off the vehicle your hands would not have been cold and numb, would they? 

Wrong, I did wear gloves for that. It was the freezing cold steering wheel that was the problem. What kind of idiot would try to drive off wearing thick wet/icy gloves?

[mansaxel]

I bit the bullet a week ago and ordered a 5-pack of these. My use case is various small consumers in the machine room, like fiber converter, SIP ATA boxes, and environment monitor Raspberry π. I have a 24V battery backed supply, called "Main Bus B" (of course) that I'm thinking of supplying these from, and to do that I need switching buck converters.

Don't tell mnem, he'll predict all kinds of electronic Ragnarok from using these...

I'm mostly concerned with the EMI/RFI problems they'll cause.  Trying to think of a sensible mounting option for them, that'll let me transport and fuse Main Bus B to them, isolate the RFI wasps and hornets from the rest of the world, making the loads switchable, and poking a suitable Zener Diode in after them to keep the voltses in check.

And why do the rest of us get excluded from the Flachwitze? Speak up!

Be grateful. Be very grateful...

I think I can take it, the cringe makes it worth it!

Latest accidental acquisition arrived today; Seaward Supernova Elite portable appliance tester (I balk at calling these things PAT testers, for obvious pedantry reasons).

  I like those specialised testers, because they're knowledge translated to empowerment. You can do most of it with a Megger and a DMM, I suppose, but it's hard and error-prone. Like optics testing (I'm doing a lot of it at work right now, that's why I'm going on about it) where I am faster with a handheld all-optical microscope but the USB scope can also look into female connectors and won't be damaged by the laser in the other end, if it's on. And it'll make a nice report saying that the ferrule was clean enough. If it was.

[capt bullshot]

But yes, a UHF RF signal generator should be on your shopping list. As it is on mine.

There's one of these: http://wunderkis.de/mg3633a/ waiting for a new owner. It's #3 from the repair reports, with the attenuator waiting for a cleaning, just like #1.
It's in not so nice optical shape, but working. It was intended as a reserve unit, but I never need it.
It doesn't reach full output level in the lower frequency range (up to 1.3 or so GHz), and the output level is about 1dB off in this range.
If you're pedantic, let it pass by.

And I can't be bothered to ship it outside EU.

what is the price of this nice boat anchor ?

320EUR plus shipping

[AVGresponding]

I bit the bullet a week ago and ordered a 5-pack of these. My use case is various small consumers in the machine room, like fiber converter, SIP ATA boxes, and environment monitor Raspberry π. I have a 24V battery backed supply, called "Main Bus B" (of course) that I'm thinking of supplying these from, and to do that I need switching buck converters.

Don't tell mnem, he'll predict all kinds of electronic Ragnarok from using these...

I'm mostly concerned with the EMI/RFI problems they'll cause.  Trying to think of a sensible mounting option for them, that'll let me transport and fuse Main Bus B to them, isolate the RFI wasps and hornets from the rest of the world, making the loads switchable, and poking a suitable Zener Diode in after them to keep the voltses in check.

I have to confess I forgot to check the output on the ones I bought for switching noise   

[tautech]

Has anyone heard from Chris (bd) lately? 

I miss the (insert British term of endearment) cunt. 

Not a squeak ! Normally pops into Discord for a chat but didn't even do that so I'm guessing he may have found some new redhead bd140 to use all his spare time. 

I'll pop him mail and see if he's still sucking air.

Nailed it ! ^^^ 
Yep BD seems great but time poor.

[SoundTech-LG]

I discovered this open circuit in my outdoor lighting in the back yard yesterday.  No test equipment necessary, visual inspection was perfectly adequate for locating the cuts and two inches of missing cable.  I’m not happy about this being vandalized again.

Weird, do your neighbours hate you THAT much ? What the hell did you do to them ?! 

Or do you have a flight of black cockatoos which have escaped from a zoo?

In Oz, they, & others of their ilk are very fond of cables, which they cut with very much the appearance of sidecutters, due to the shape of their beaks.

No, no problems like that.

Since you mentioned birds though, I do have a pair of bird feeders in the back yard and the one near the fence between our houses kept mysteriously getting knocked over until I moved the pole it's on out of arm's reach of the fence.

The three times the lights have been vandalized started last fall when the cable got cut closer to the house and I had to replace that string which lasted the rest of the season fine.  But the first time I went to use them in the spring of this year, I found each string unplugged from the next.  Birds don't do that.  Then there was this incident.  Each of them has been on the same side of the back yard; the lights on all three other sides of the yard have been left alone except for some squirrel damage (broken clips near the other bird feeder where the squirrels launch themselves off the fence) and storm damage (a lot of broken clips everywhere) and the other bird feeder hasn't been uprooted and thrown anywhere.  The bird feeder and it's pole being thrown over always landing pointing away from the fence and the cut up/unplugged Christmas lights have only happened on that one side of the yard.

What I'm thinking of doing is a combination of a camera setup and the shorting plug idea.  If the impedance of the light string rises above a dead short, just have it quietly log a time stamp and turn on an indicator that something happened so I can check the photos/video from the relevant time instead of scrolling through hunting for something.

Unfortunately SQUIRRELS love wires inside/out. They LOVE my christmas light wires...

https://neeness.com/how-to-stop-squirrels-from-chewing-wires/

[Robert763]

Nice Oltronix Triple PSU in UK
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115046075323
Seller has a single output one too

NAWTS

[Cubdriver]

To put that in perspective... our Rav4, with a mid-tier options package (AC, AT, power windows, cruise, etc but no stoopit shit like butt warmers and the like) cost equivalent of ~22000€ new a few years ago.

mnem
needs more cowbell.

Butt warmer is never optional in Sweden. Our new V70 even has diesel heater. I've never tried it, since it was the first time yesterday morning that I noticed ice slush on the front windscreen (and we bought it in May, so no winter season yet). It wasn't serious; it could be squished away with a squirt of the washers (I'm running washer alcohol / water mix in the washer tank all year) and some sweeps of the wipers. But there's more where that came from...

Like Mnem, I used to place all the 'heated whatever' in cars into the "Bunch of pointless rubbish" pile, at least as far as the UK was concerned. Then back in the late 80s we had a series of unusually cold winters here in the UK. I used to have to drive to work each morning and after clearing off any overnight snow/ice I found that my hands got cold enough that several times I had difficulty getting my fingers to move fast enough to grip the steering wheel properly when doing all the shuffling necessary to edge back and forth out of a tight parking space (At the time I was driving a large, heavy and awkward Audi 100CD. Company car, not personal choice - I hated it.).

The lease on the Audi ended and then I inherited a Saab 9000CD company car for the last few months of its lease from a leaving sales director. That Saab was packed out with every extra in the book including a heated steering wheel. Having a seat and steering wheel that heated up in seconds, rather than waiting the minutes the interior heater takes to work, made a huge difference to the first few minutes of my drive - not to comfort per se but to safety as I now didn't have cold numb hands and could be certain that they would do what I wanted if and when called on to do it.

That completely changed my opinion about a heated steering wheel being a frippery for the UK.

Heated seats yes, totally agree but heated steering wheel, nah, all you need is decent heating system with air recirculation setting so that you're actually warming up air that is gradually getting warmer all the time, rather than freezing air from outside the car. All decent cars should have that facility as a standard these days. I have had that in my cars for the last 25 years as well as heated seats and also ducted air for the rear occupants rather than relying on warm air from the front filtering through to the rear seat. The other thing I now have on my car is cooled front seats, no more getting of the car on a hot day with your shirt soaked through and clinging to your back, even with AC on, hot day, no problem, stick the climate control on a low number and switch the cooled seat on, sheer bliss.

On a really cold day when the windscreen is iced over etc, no need to clear it off manually, switch the heated windscreen on as well as the rear heated window and mirrors on and in a few moments, nice clear windscreen and mirrors. 

I put seat heaters into my Miata many moons ago, and absolutely loved them - made winter driving much more pleasant, and also permitted comfortable topless driving down into the 40s (4~10* C for most of you).  My current Jeep has them, too - very nice here in the northeast US.  As for steering wheel heat, I like that, too; unfortunately not an option on what I'm driving now.  My ex's Nissan had it, and it was great in the bitter cold.  Even with gloves on, my fingers tend to be cold, and gloves heavy enough to be somewhat comfortable temp-wise tend to be thick and make gripping the wheel tiresome.  It is much nicer to have a warm wheel heating my hands than an ice cold one sapping energy from my fingers.  I'm also someone who sometimes has to drive when the temp is in the single digits and teens (-15~-10* C), which is a level it often drops to in my neck of the woods.  Cooled to those temps, a steering wheel has considerable thermal mass and will take its damned sweet time warming up from the cabin air; often it simply NEVER reaches a remotely comfortable temp in normal winter driving unless you're on a very long trip.

-Pat

[med6753]

Volt-nut alert. Here's why the hp 3456A has been cooking. I decided to send the Siglent SDM 3055 in for calibration. I used the official partner (Transcat) as recommended by Siglent USA. Between shipping they had the DMM nearly 2 weeks. And it wasn't cheap. But I now have confidence that it's in spec.

They did an exhaustive check of every parameter and I have an 8 page report of all their findings. Bottom line....all parameters fell within the published accuracy spec and the expected high and low limit. So that's called "As found/As left". So they did not change anything. I'm happy with that. Based upon my observations in the nearly 3 years I've had this DMM I have not observed any appreciable drift.

So now I'll stop fussing about the last digits not matching. 

[MaxFrister]

I was perusing the HPAK E3633A service manual and ran across this:

Surface mount components should only be removed using soldering irons or disordering stations expressly designed for surface mount components.

Emphasis mine.  I think I'll have to get one of those although frankly an anti-disordering station might be more useful.

[mansaxel]

I have to confess I forgot to check the output on the ones I bought for switching noise   

Resistive load up to amps comparable with intended consumer, scope on AC, 1x probe, pay attention to probe connection so it does not contribute to noise. Play with scope.

I found this document on the converters I bought. Apart from the slightly hackish soldering job, sound advice.

Edit: The waveforms on input noise are identical to what I saw on the 465.