Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[factory]

Random capacitor testing from BigClive. 



David

[Saskia]

cleaning out the old appartment. Need to properly clean the kitchen, stove, floor, etc.

And then I found sumting called Kärcher.

A steam cleaner does help.

a lot.

mah back hurtz

Until you clarified I thought that you meant that you'd pressure washed the whole apartment. I've lived places that could have done with that... 

I did. The kitchen, that is  but I had to mop it dry afterwards. Also had to lug the  surplus fridge down the stairs. Still need to do the bathroom, then clean out the basement. Soo looking forward to just be done with it.
 

[Specmaster]

I thought all those that have a New Year's resolution to lose weight might be interested in the latest device to help you achieve your goals.
 

[Carl_Smith]

I have an 8-Bit (1.1.5) controller board, but I'm trying to compile Marlin for a STM32F103 board because it uses TMC motor drivers which make the printer considerably quieter.

McBryce.

I've seen where people confuse the 32 bit processor as necessary for a quiet printer.  They don't realize that it's not the processor that makes it quiet, it's the TMC stepper drivers.  Often they come together because the TMC drivers are more expensive so they tend to be designed into more expensive boards that also have a 32 bit processor.

It was my understanding that only 1.9.x are intended for 8-bit, and that 2.x.x are all intended for 32-bit and PlatformIO. My dabblings with P-IO yielded similar results to McBryce above; I just didn't need the BS at the time so back-burnered the project.

I assumed that 2.x.x could be compiled using the STM32duino IDE/Tools, but that's sortof like just another new IDE and toolbox to learn, and I needed to be using my CR6-SE, not doing brain surgery on it. That will have to to wait until I have Mad Scientist Lair time and money.

mnem
*poke-ily... prod-dity... scope-ity*

I'm not sure what the intent of the mainline Marlin developers was with version 2.  It may very well be true that they intended it for 32 bit boards.

I don't normally admit where I work online just because I don't want to worry about someone interpreting what I say as speaking for whatever company I currently work for, and also because I don't want people thinking I'm tech support for their products.  But this is a small corner of the net so that's not likely to happen.

I work for Lulzbot.   I've spent the last two years messing with 3D printers all day.

We have shipped thousands of printers with 8 bit boards running version 2 Marlin firmware and it works fine even if the Marlin developers didn't intend for that. 

The Mini 2 and Sidekick product lines use the Ultimachine Einsy Rambo board with the 8-bit Atmega2560 and Trinamic TMC2130 stepper drivers.  The Workhorse printers use the Ultimachine Rambo board with Atmega2560 and Allegro A4982 stepper drivers.  We have firmware for these printers that is a fork of the almost current mainline Marlin code.
(If you have a Lulzbot with version 2 firmware and the blue 128x64 LCD, poke around in the menus and you might find games like Invaders and Snake.)

The Pro printers use a 32 bit ARM based Ultimachine Rambo board and Trinamic drivers.

I'm now getting sucked into their R&D department slowly and I'm supposed to be learning all the details of the firmware development despite the fact that all my coding skills are 20 years out of date and I'd never used VSCode, Platformio, Git, or Gitlab until a few months ago.  And I never really properly learned C or C++ despite being an electrical engineer for more than a couple decades.  I want to design new controller PCBs but I get to learn firmware because that's what they need right now...

[mnementh]

LOL... that sounds like a dream job for me; getting paid to tinker with 3D printers all day. *sigh*   

And if Marlin is any indication of even the neighborhood of the state of the art, I'd be worried that your Kung-Fu is too fresh, not too old. 

As for McBryce's 32-bit/Trinamic board... I'd guess his is one of the many that came with the drivers soldered in; I'm pretty sure he's savvy enuf to know the Trinamic drivers are platform-agnostic.  That said... I imagine that if he wants to enable a bunch of features along with managing those drivers in the firmware, he may very well need the 32-bit processor to do it all. Especially if he's using a touchscreen panel.

mnem
As opposed to tinkering on printer-printers all day... which I've done, and is a complete shithole deadend job...

[TERRA Operative]

Well, I just measured my new crystal on the 5445A frequency meter (GPS referenced) it's reading 0.999997511MHz.
I swore it had a VCF input, but nope, must have been thinking of a different datasheet.
I guess 0.00025% low isn't terrible but I'd like better.

I'll let this all run for a few hours and see where it stabilizes.

[xrunner]

I've been doing some receiver testing because I wanted to compare my results to what the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) did in their test reports. I also have a ham friend who is curious about how the tests are done. I've never heard any local hams even talk about these types of tests much less doing any of them.

I did a 12 dB SINAD (signal + noise and distortion) test using a "Sinadder" which is a little unit made for doing this test. I did the test on a Yaesu FT-7250D. The manufacturer's claimed sensitivity in the 2 meter band for a 12 dB SINAD is 0.16 uV. The ARRL measured 0.14 uV, and I measured exactly the same as the ARRL did.

I also wanted to test the SSB sensitivity (10 dB S+N/N, 2.4 kHz bandwidth, 10 dB Noise floor (MDS)) of an HF radio. I used my FT-450 for this. The manufacturer claims 0.25 uV and I got 0.18 uV. The ARRL didn't do that test rather they do an MDS test for all the HF radios. For this unit they measured an MDS of -136 dBm and I got -137 dBm. Not bad.

Instrumentation used:

Agilent 8648A RF sig gen
hp 355D step attenuator
Helper Instruments Co. Sinadder
hp 400E AC Voltmeter
Rigol DS1054Z scope
8 ohm audio load

[Vince]

I am not into HAM and radio and don't understand any of what you said.. I am sorry, my eyes were glued to the pictures, licking that beautiful HP RF synthesizer... such a beauty ! One day I will have one like that..... every night I dream of having one of this generation...
The little HP/ Agilent PSU underneath it, is very cute as well. 

[Cerebus]

I guess 0.00025% low isn't terrible but I'd like better.

2.5 ppm? You could drive a bus through 2 and a half ppm! 

My messing about with GPSDOs and OCXOs last year got me used to fussing about things on the close order of 1 ppb or less. A few ppm error on an oscillator has begun to sound like an approximation rather than precision. What I find frustrating after that is that while sub ppm accuracy on an oscillator was almost easy (and cheap) to achieve, that a 2.5ppm absolute error on any kind of voltage reading would be good to excellent (typical high quality lab transfer uncertainties are on the order of 0.3ppm) and expensive to achieve.

[Zucca]

Off to check Klipper, RasPi is an option, but I don't want to have to boot a PC every time I want to print something.

I always turn my PC if I want to print something, either I have to design the part or to send the data to the printer.
That said you know for sure booting a not windows machine can be very fast, so if you want to print a gcode already to the printer (octoprint level) it is still a no brainer.

That said I can't believe the dwagon has not compiled Marlin in Platformio yet.... his knowledge in 3DP is high, you are missing a big piece in the pie my friend :-))  the good news is if Klipper is as good as they said you will never need to compile anything to upgrade or change config. Klipper approch is clever, stupid fast firmware on the printer board and clever big brain SW and config on the Klipper host. New SW features? Touch the host, NOT the board!

That said Platformio/VSCode is the Arduino IDE killer for sure, all the rest still needs my investigation. I can't see how it can compete with MPLAB ICE, but never say never. VSCode is a very very powerful machine.

I work for Lulzbot.   I've spent the last two years messing with 3D printers all day.

What Carl_Smith said is 100% right. I understand the steep curve and the pain to deal with code and not transistors.
It is not an impossible task, you can do it. And with the magic EE background you can do it WELL.

[Carl_Smith]

LOL... that sounds like a dream job for me; getting paid to tinker with 3D printers all day. *sigh*

Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it's a huge pile of frustration.  My current job time is split between my new R&D work and my previous work on the production line.  So I get to try and work on firmware and electronics.  But I still spend more time basically being quality control and supervisor of the calibration department, where we spend too much time adjusting every printer manufactured to run optimally.  It often gets frustrating when I'm fixing the same production mistakes over and over.

The other frustrating thing about it is that while I am running around helping keep things working I get all these big ideas of cool things we could design into new printer models, or new features we could put into the firmware, but we just don't have the time and people to work on all of these grand ideas.  We do have some interesting things in the pipline though...

I also have this constant feeling that since I have access to all the 3D printing capacity I could want that I really should be thinking of things to print as much as possible. 

And if Marlin is any indication of even the neighborhood of the state of the art, I'd be worried that your Kung-Fu is too fresh, not too old. 

I think that the current 3D printer industry is based off hobby guys with their Arduino based boards is what made the whole thing possible to get going.  It didn't take a huge amount of sofware development skills to get the first machines working.  But at the same time I think it might be an anchor slowing the development down as well.  Take what I was previously talking about as an example.  I had a situation where I wanted to hook up an in circuit emulator to the controller, load up the code, and when it did something we were interested in, stop the code and step through it to see what was going on.  But I don't think anyone in the whole history of Marlin has ever actually debugged the code with an emulator and debugger software.  Yet I learned that stuff back in the mid 1990's at my first job out of college at an electric fork lift company.  Back then the emulator was a big pod you had to plug into a socket in place of the processor and it cost $20000 instead of a $160 Atmel-ICE pod, and I worried every time I used it that I would somehow blow it up, but I could debug code better then than what I can do now.  The whole Arduino community has never had the "luxury" of being able to debug code with advanced tools.  The best debugging you could do was to litter serial print commands of stuff you want to monitor throughout your code.  But there is a "release candidate" 2.0 version of the Arduino IDE available now that seems to be based on VSCode and has debugging capability included so maybe that is changing...

As for McBryce's 32-bit/Trinamic board... I'd guess his is one of the many that came with the drivers soldered in; I'm pretty sure he's savvy enuf to know the Trinamic drivers are platform-agnostic.  That said... I imagine that if he wants to enable a bunch of features along with managing those drivers in the firmware, he may very well need the 32-bit processor to do it all. Especially if he's using a touchscreen panel.

mnem

I am just getting into the Marlin stuff so I don't know if there are features in the mainline Marlin code that we aren't using at Lulzbot, that if enabled would be too much for the 8-bit boards.  Could be, but one interesting thing is that a lot of the touchscreen panels, including the ones we  use at Lulzbot, have a secondary processor right on the LCD.  So the main board running Marlin isn't pushing pixels directly to the LCD constantly.  Instead it sends higher level GUI commands to the LCD to draw buttons and display text and stuff, and the chip on the LCD handles that, and sends back coordinates of touches on the screen.  So having the high res touch screen probably doesn't add much overhead over the older style "glcd" that most printers use, including the non-touchscreen Lulzbot models.  We even use a touchscreen on the Lulzbot Bio printer that runs the same 8-bit controller as the Lulzbot Mini 2 and Sidekick printers.

As opposed to tinkering on printer-printers all day... which I've done, and is a complete shithole deadend job...

I've had a couple times when I told people I work at a 3D printer company, they say something like "so you can fix my laser printer then?" and I had to explain the difference.  I didn't admit that I could still possibly fix their laser printer even though they have little to do with 3D printers. 

[TERRA Operative]

I guess 0.00025% low isn't terrible but I'd like better.

2.5 ppm? You could drive a bus through 2 and a half ppm! 

My messing about with GPSDOs and OCXOs last year got me used to fussing about things on the close order of 1 ppb or less. A few ppm error on an oscillator has begun to sound like an approximation rather than precision. What I find frustrating after that is that while sub ppm accuracy on an oscillator was almost easy (and cheap) to achieve, that a 2.5ppm absolute error on any kind of voltage reading would be good to excellent (typical high quality lab transfer uncertainties are on the order of 0.3ppm) and expensive to achieve.

Well. make that 2.0ppm now, after sitting for a couple hours.
Gonna scrape the paint off the sides of the bus...

[Carl_Smith]

Been a long time since I've bought any TE.  But this is tempting me a lot:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/313865293335

I've wanted one of these Tek handheld scopes since I used one back in the late 1990's when I worked at the electric forklift company.  It's just too cool that you can hook one channel to a motor in an H bridge and the other channel to the logic driving the H-bridge and not short everything out when the motor polarity flips.


Edit: or maybe this one:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/175138573048

[AVGresponding]

Been a long time since I've bought any TE.  But this is tempting me a lot:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/313865293335

I've wanted one of these Tek handheld scopes since I used one back in the late 1990's when I worked at the electric forklift company.  It's just too cool that you can hook one channel to a motor in an H bridge and the other channel to the logic driving the H-bridge and not short everything out when the motor polarity flips.


Edit: or maybe this one:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/175138573048

That's a wee bit on the expensive side; I've a couple myself and you'd have to add them together to get to a £300 purchase price. I'd suggest $200 is more like a fair price if they are complete sets, and if the batteries are usable (they are expensive to replace/a faff to make).

Nice scopes though.

[med6753]

Well isn't this interesting. I received an email from hvstuff.com informing me that they shipped my order from 21st December last year. After my 2 unsuccessful attempts to contact them and escalating to PayPal and they were also unsuccessful in contacting them. So PayPal refunded me in full. So if indeed they did ship and I receive it I am under no obligation to pay for it if they try to bill me. The refund effectively cancelled the order so I'm now covered under the "unsolicited goods" law. I can consider it a gift and keep it. Which I will do if it shows up.

Now if anybody thinks I should "do the right thing" and send it back then I kindly invite you to fill out the annoying customs form and pay for the shipping charges back to China. This boy isn't.     

[TERRA Operative]

Free stuff? nice

[Robert763]

I've been doing some receiver testing because I wanted to compare my results to what the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) did in their test reports. I also have a ham friend who is curious about how the tests are done. I've never heard any local hams even talk about these types of tests much less doing any of them.

I did a 12 dB SINAD (signal + noise and distortion) test using a "Sinadder" which is a little unit made for doing this test. I did the test on a Yaesu FT-7250D. The manufacturer's claimed sensitivity in the 2 meter band for a 12 dB SINAD is 0.16 uV. The ARRL measured 0.14 uV, and I measured exactly the same as the ARRL did.

I also wanted to test the SSB sensitivity (10 dB S+N/N, 2.4 kHz bandwidth, 10 dB Noise floor (MDS)) of an HF radio. I used my FT-450 for this. The manufacturer claims 0.25 uV and I got 0.18 uV. The ARRL didn't do that test rather they do an MDS test for all the HF radios. For this unit they measured an MDS of -136 dBm and I got -137 dBm. Not bad.

Instrumentation used:

Agilent 8648A RF sig gen
hp 355D step attenuator
Helper Instruments Co. Sinadder
hp 400E AC Voltmeter
Rigol DS1054Z scope
8 ohm audio load

I wish the RSGB would do proper technical tests of equipment they review. The stated reason is unless they use calibrated equipment they could be sued for publishing bad results and calibrated equipment is too expensive for the number of tests they do.  I translate this as "we don't want to upset the advertisers who loan us the kit for review".

[Robert763]

I am not into HAM and radio and don't understand any of what you said.. I am sorry, my eyes were glued to the pictures, licking that beautiful HP RF synthesizer... such a beauty ! One day I will have one like that..... every night I dream of having one of this generation...
The little HP/ Agilent PSU underneath it, is very cute as well. 

That's the difference between collecting TE and using TE 
Unfortunatly most of my use of personal TE is for work and while I've been doing some relly interesting stuff recently I'm not allowed to talk about it 

[mansaxel]

So, a page-number related upload.  In the "Designs we'd rather forget" department, the JBL 4530 features prominently. Of course, there are some who swear by it; If we're talking horn loaded speakers I'm more into the blue ones, but have manhandled 4530s in the Disco circuit (Citronic integrated 2-record-player console,  QSC Model 41 amplifiers, BSS FDS-360 crossover, a RCF 12"/Beyma Dolly clone mid/high box, and the aforementioned scoop bin.) enough to have memory triggers set up for it.

[nfmax]

I guess 0.00025% low isn't terrible but I'd like better.

2.5 ppm? You could drive a bus through 2 and a half ppm! 

My messing about with GPSDOs and OCXOs last year got me used to fussing about things on the close order of 1 ppb or less. A few ppm error on an oscillator has begun to sound like an approximation rather than precision. What I find frustrating after that is that while sub ppm accuracy on an oscillator was almost easy (and cheap) to achieve, that a 2.5ppm absolute error on any kind of voltage reading would be good to excellent (typical high quality lab transfer uncertainties are on the order of 0.3ppm) and expensive to achieve.

Well. make that 2.0ppm now, after sitting for a couple hours.
Gonna scrape the paint off the sides of the bus...

If that distresses you try measuring temperature. At room temperatures, achieving even a (genuine) 200ppm calibration uncertainty would cost more than I care to pay for!

[mansaxel]

I guess 0.00025% low isn't terrible but I'd like better.

2.5 ppm? You could drive a bus through 2 and a half ppm! 

My messing about with GPSDOs and OCXOs last year got me used to fussing about things on the close order of 1 ppb or less. A few ppm error on an oscillator has begun to sound like an approximation rather than precision. What I find frustrating after that is that while sub ppm accuracy on an oscillator was almost easy (and cheap) to achieve, that a 2.5ppm absolute error on any kind of voltage reading would be good to excellent (typical high quality lab transfer uncertainties are on the order of 0.3ppm) and expensive to achieve.

Well. make that 2.0ppm now, after sitting for a couple hours.
Gonna scrape the paint off the sides of the bus...

If that distresses you try measuring temperature. At room temperatures, achieving even a (genuine) 200ppm calibration uncertainty would cost more than I care to pay for!

Heh, try pH measurement.

/grumpy pool owner.

[Andrew_Debbie]

Lots 550 and above are in Blackburn, which I believe is nearer you. I wonder how many people that will catch out!

I spotted that and looked at the location on Google maps.   I don't recall anything in Blackburn I wanted.

Not even 4000 holes that fill the Albert Hall? 

(oh, boy)

There are two Olympus BHM microscopes in the Engineering Auction.      The BHM is a metallurgical microscope.


Illumination comes either down through the objective (!)  or from channels around the objective.   Absolutely no idea if it is possible to swap in parts from other BH series microscopes.

No photos from PP yet, but google found me this one:

[Vince]

I am not into HAM and radio and don't understand any of what you said.. I am sorry, my eyes were glued to the pictures, licking that beautiful HP RF synthesizer... such a beauty ! One day I will have one like that..... every night I dream of having one of this generation...
The little HP/ Agilent PSU underneath it, is very cute as well. 

That's the difference between collecting TE and using TE 

Fear not, as lab V2.0 is progressively coming together, closer and closer to operational status, 2022 should be the year where finally I transition from collecting, to actually using.. 

[Vince]

Lots 550 and above are in Blackburn, which I believe is nearer you. I wonder how many people that will catch out!

I spotted that and looked at the location on Google maps.   I don't recall anything in Blackburn I wanted.

Not even 4000 holes that fill the Albert Hall? 

(oh, boy)

There are two Olympus BHM microscopes in the Engineering Auction.      The BHM is a metallurgical microscope.


Illumination comes either down through the objective (!)  or from channels around the objective.   Absolutely no idea if it is possible to swap in parts from other BH series microscopes.

No photos from PP yet, but google found me this one:

I know squat about microscopes, but just looking at the control box design I can at least say it's from the '70s ! 
So looks like these scopes are sought after...

[Andrew_Debbie]

The BH series is mid '70s ...   No idea when Olympus stopped making them.

I will not be bidding.