Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Robert763]

Did no one see my post #114732?

Yes, no, maybe.

The problem is that you keep on making posts like "I've just picked up a <generally desired object of TE lust> for <around 1/4 of what anybody expects to have to pay for it> and would you know, I've just discovered that I've already got two of them at the back of the garage that I'd forgotten I had.". So one never knows whether one of your posts is safe to read. It's a bit like deciding if you can safely turn on the news when you've already got dangerously high blood pressure. 

Sorry I just can't resist a bargain......

[Saskia]

seems I have a bidder for my Appartment.

Also stacking up on "things" that can be helpful when the excrements hit the encabulator ...

[mnementh]

Getting things ready for round 2 with the DMV tomorrow;    we may yet actually get the Saturn legal.

mnem

[Saskia]

congrats

[med6753]

More work on the Type 105.

Re-wiring the range switch took much longer than anticipated due to the tight quarters around the switch and yours truly made a boo-boo which took time to fix.  But it's finally installed completely and verified several times.



New fuse holder installed to replace the original broken one. Correct 3A slo-blo fuse installed. The unit came without a line cord so I made one up. It uses that obsolete male bulkhead connector but luckily it's flush with the chassis and the case. Unlike many 500 series scopes that used the recessed bulkhead connector which makes finding a correct line cord a challenge. But in this case a modern female receptacle plugs in without any issues.



The replacement capacitors arrived yesterday and tomorrow I'll start the re-cap.   

[vk6zgo]

Yup 🤣
I had one Airedale who would only do a 'trick' once, after that he would give you the eye and not move at all!
Seriously, any dog, cat who has been well cared for generally is a good companion - always exceptions though.

My childhood boon companion was a female Airedale---we had a lot of fun, romping like two puppies,& exploring the bush paddocks of our "farm".
At night, she slept alongside my bed, her snuffling noises during the night very comforting in the dark nights in the middle of the "bush".

She would copy the horse, who loved to roll, as horses do.
Mum said she was scared Gypsy would get squashed by her equine friend, as they rolled on the ground a few feet apart, but Honey was a very careful & clever horse, & never "squished" my dog!

[vk6zgo]

I would generally agree that these guys if well trained and looked after are the biggest sooks out but I had one Airedale who had been mistreated and we looked after him for his last 3yrs, he managed to bite 3 members of our household despite his age and decrepitude, to the point of us needing stitches, but at other times he really appreciated affection. They are one of the breeds that were used in the military - but also make a good house dog.
If you know Wallace and Grommit cartoons you will almost certainly see the similarities between Grommit and an Airedale 🤣
They are also great at picking up women at the dog park 😁

I am very, very much a cat person, but if I was forced to choose a dog, the Airedale Terrier is probably first on the list. Good-looking sturdy working dog, not bred into a nervous hangar queen just to get a pointier nose, but with muscles and a mind of its own.

I would not disagree with you on dog choice (but totally accept my bias) but any dog/cat who is cared for, invariably gives so much back. I have a work colleague who is completely smitten by donkeys - not an easy pet option 😁
@saskia - I try not to think too much about the past great dogs that I have shared time with on this planet.

My Uncle, who was an old prospector, made the profound comment:-
"It's a shame a dog doesn't live as long as a man.--------A man goes through a lot of good dogs in a lifetime!"

Cats loved him--he could pick up even the grumpiest feline, & have it purring away in no time, and our horse enjoyed a beer with him! (He would pour half the bottle in a bowl, & she would slurp it down)

[mansaxel]

Nothing wrong with that, I just love ASCII / curses based programs. Lightweight, easy to read on the screen, responsive, run on modest H/W, even small 8 bits micro-controllers I bet....

The big problem with that paradigm is that the vintage hardware and software are really bad at things like UTF-8 encoded characters. They often manage to somewhat miss-apply the Euro-centric bodges like LATRINE-1 and so on, but the tricks with multibyte chars are quite impossible.  I've gotten used to such things simply working. And on hardware terminals, they don't.

Hell, even brand new computers still use text interfaces in their BIOS !    There must be a reason for it... They could easily implement a full blown graphical user interface with mouse and touch screen if they wanted to.

They actually do. Most computers have graphical BIOS by default now. You often can turn it off, and most of the time it's disabled if you manage to enable a serial console on them. This is something many servers now can do, making them almost Real Computers.

(A Real Computer has a serial console that defaults to 9600 8N1 and has a CPU that runs in Network Byte Order. )

Obligatory TE Paragraph:

Today (which, I realise is actually yesterday, but since I'm getting up early I'm going to not lose face and instead pretend it's Thursday still) was a day I did not use any TE. I did look at a bunch of cool gear, but not much TE: Annual visit to National Museum of Technology happened. Yesterday, (which was Wednesday, and actually day before yesterday) also had a museum visit. I'm fretting a bit over the SMF-related pains I'll have to endure to make a post about that happen. Which actually did contain TE.  Stay tuned.

Sooo many signal generators in that Danish Analog Audio Ebay. Pity they'll all run amok in pricing. I really could use one.

[vk6zgo]

Anyway, just figured the echo 

Can you move around with arrows?
You can't with VT220.

Yep I could use the 4 arrow keys just fine to move the cursor anywhere I wanted to... yet it's set to emulate VT220.
I guess emulation of anything is always the same story... it's never 100% true to the original, no matter what the S/W or H/W manufacturer claims... it's only a matter of will the user find himself in the corner case where he will actually notice/spot the discrepancies...

In case you later decide to use the device as your TE console terminal, remember that RS-port doesn't like spikes.
That can happen when you pull out the connector when both ends are powered and ground is disconnecting first.

I find this terminal box a cool retro piece of computing, I am happy I can play with it but.... realistically I don't think it's pratical enough for me to use it for actual duties... needs two thick power cables, a monitor, a keyboard... not portable, a mess on the bench, too much work digging out all that stuff, and storing it back, every time I need a terminal....

I think the most practical and realistic way of doing it, from my perspective at least, is to get an old laptop that's recent enough to run Linux, a minimalist implementation of it at least, yet old enough that it offers a real DB9 serial port, and RJ45/ Ethernet and a DB25 Printer port. Then I could run a terminal emulator on it a have all the other benefits like sending and receiving/logging data files, run S/W, debug tools, whatever one might one to do with old TE or development boards or computers or whatnot, over a serial port... all in a laptop, so self sufficient and compact, quick and easy to fire up when you need to. That's my plan anyway.

Of course I would also do that from the future stationary / desktop computer that I will add / dedicate to the lab bench at some point.

Back when I worked for Telecom Aust, we had an internal net called TacoNet.

This normally used "dumb terminals", but for some unknown reason, it was decided in our section to use an Olivetti IBM "clone", instead, so, to use it, we had to liberate the Olivetti from whatever else it was being used for, insert a floppy, & wait.
Ultimately, you would get an emulated terminal, & could do your "thing".

The "other bloke", in a hurried handover, showed me all this, & said:
 "Ohh----, I just remembered, one of the two floppies marked as for this job is corrupt, so I will just mark the bad one!"
He did so, & disappeared on his holiday.

All good, till I had to configure the thing!

In goes the floppy, all sorts of funny stuff on the screen, but no emulator appeared, so after waiting a similar time to that which a Commodore 64 takes to load "Frogger" from its Datasette, concluding I had done something dumb, I tried again.

After the third iteration of this, just when I was just about ready to  ask around for any "gurus", who might know what was wrong, my eye fell upon the "corrupt" disk.
"I wonder........"

I tried it, &, of course, it worked perfectly------the silly bugger had marked the wrong disk!!

[vk6zgo]

Oh boy just when I thought I was done with cable, found one last (I hope it's the last...) big box of cables.... like 10kg worth of cables.

Lots of printer cables, VGA, Ethernet round or flat, a few SCART cables and... this little guy below... wondered what that was.. DB9 one end, audio jack on the other ?! 

The shell on the DB9 plug is quite large and held by clips rather than sealed/molded so...  that was suspicious... could some electronics hide in there... opened it up, oh yeah some stuff to look at 

4 wires, minus the ground that's 3 signal wires..

A couple electrolytic caps on one side, and on the other side, 3 diodes 3 resistors 4 caps, some kinda of tranny or whatnot and... an IC.  SN75C1406... looked at the datasheet, made by TI.
A 3 way transceiver for serial ports.... OK....

So it's just a serial cable, nothing fancy... just with a jack plug on one side, weird... didn't know serial ports used also audio jacks, oh well why not I guess ?! 

Maybe it's meant to interface to tape players on old computers to read data ?!.......

Will keep it just in case...

Looks a lot like one of the interfaces which were popular in ham radio circles, to connect computer derived Morse, RTTY, Packet Radio signals into the audio side of a Transceiver.
Not used so much now most computers lack a DB9 connector.

[srb1954]

I'd prefer this anytime:


    

And it's a lot cheaper to maintain in the long run. 

[mnementh]

We certainly could buy a lot of TE for what those cost...

mnem
Well,there's no doubt she's a mammal, is there...?

[Cubdriver]

We certainly could buy a lot of TE for what those cost...

mnem
Well,there's no doubt she's a mammal, is there...?

True, but I’d question how much by weight or volume was real and how much was synthetic.  (I personally much prefer non augmented hardware, thanks just the same…)

-Pat

[Saskia]

ok, Mouser sold the already paid for KRIA SOM to someone else and pushed the delivery date  (scheduled for March) to mid of August while keeping the money. I need that KRIA SOM for my objectives at work. They did not refund the payment for the first KRIA SOM which means that I am about 800€ short.

I am pissed off.
Big time.

[tggzzz]

ok, Mouser sold the already paid for KRIA SOM to someone else and pushed the delivery date  (scheduled for March) to mid of August while keeping the money. I need that KRIA SOM for my objectives at work. They did not refund the payment for the first KRIA SOM which means that I am about 800€ short.

I am pissed off.
Big time.

I had something similar with Avnet Express a few years ago. They confirmed an order and later I discovered by chance that the delivery had been pushed from "available" to 5 months.

Haven't used them since, and hope they haven't infected Farnell in that way.

[mansaxel]

As hinted at, I was away all Wednesday doing recreational things. A road trip with family to visit the Swedish Royal Air Force Museum. We've been there before, but the children wanted to go again, and this week is school winter holidays here, so time was available. I've taken a few days off to keep them company.

The museum is arranged around a couple themes. There is an early flight department, up to and including WW2 era. This unfortunately is closed for renovations, but the Cold War section is available. That period was acutely felt and acted upon by our military; even if we were officially independent of alliances (and somewhat still are) to those in the know, there was only one side who was the potential enemy.  The Cold War section is thematic, with a context per decade, and the focal part in m² must be said the early 1950s, when the air force was the 4th largest in the world, and there were a number of very hot incidents.  As a modern museum, with ambitious staff, there of course is a pedagogic effort that goes a long way towards explaining things. To someone very well versed in the subject, that of course might be less interesting, but to the layperson, it is probably the better choice.

Some comments on the pictures:

A somewhat closer pic than Spec usually manages. Less engines running, though.

We spoke on 400Hz mains the other day. This is one of the major users.

Fly-by-wire! A look in the main landing gear bay of an A32A Lansen attack aircraft.

A lot of Cold war in the 80s centered around the submarine threat; eventually nearly all of the Boeing Vertol choppers were outfitted to hunt them. These depth charges are clearly just for show -- the text means "Harmless" (Which is strange, they usually write "BLIND" on them in the "Inert" meaning,)

There is TE! In a corner, in the display on radar and fighter control, the area where most electronics were gathered.

Also, a reminiscence of some Ebay ads, touting "minor scratches". This AN/APR-5A spent 52 years on the bottom of the Baltic sea, after being thrown out at water impact of a SIGINT aircraft (A C-47 owned by the Air Force, and staffed by them and our SIGINT Agency)  shot down with loss of all hands, by a Soviet MiG-15 in 1952.

The plane was found in 2003 and raised in 2004. It is now displayed in a large section of the museum, where as much as can be found about the story is displayed.

[BU508A]

Blowing up capacitors - in slow motion!

Bonus: the high speed camera is a type 7510!   

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/fun-for-nerds/msg4042522/#msg4042522

[Vince]

A road trip with family to visit the Swedish Royal Air Force Museum.
Some comments on the pictures:

Wow ! 1MP pics less than 100KB ?! What happened to you  ! 
That's even smaller than mine.
Perfect size, plenty beautiful enough, super light weight, no need for more pixels at all.

You surprised me, I am.. stunned. Come here for a big hug ! 

There is TE! In a corner, in the display on radar and fighter control, the area where most electronics were gathered.

Wow they could not even be bothered to replace the missing red knob ! 
Please go back there and fix that poor little scope... or send the museum a knob with instruction on how to fit and where the scope is located in their museum... it is painful to see that poor scope amputated like that 

[THDplusN_bad]

Forgive me as I had to shake off the international news and and I went for a creative moment in my workshop last night: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/workshop-accessory-night-diy-made-teflonptfe-jaws 

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad

[Vince]

Nothing wrong with that, I just love ASCII / curses based programs. Lightweight, easy to read on the screen, responsive, run on modest H/W, even small 8 bits micro-controllers I bet....

The big problem with that paradigm is that the vintage hardware and software are really bad at things like UTF-8 encoded characters.

Why could they not display UTF8 ? If the S/W handles it, why could would it not work if the S/W is running on an old computer rather than a more modern one ?

Anyway, who cares about UTF8, it never works... in 2022 I still come across some file or some S/W or some web site that displays garbage every now and then. Character encoding will never work, just like the internet will never work, as BD said because it's just a mega huge pile of garbage layers on top of the other, loosely stitched together, and the fact that you can get any website to display is a daily miracle...

I have long given up on the concept of computing that "just works". It's just a huge pile of garbage that will never be fixed because you can never afford to break existing things for anyone... just like Intel CPU's will forever be x86 because of 40 year old compatibility....

Fixing computing is like trying to make all the countries in the world to use the same power plug/socket, same line voltage, same language, same taxes and laws.... it's just never going to happen. World will forever be a huge patchwork loosely kept together...

That said..just forget about me talking about "ASCII" apps, OK, all I meant was " Text " UI... I don't care how the text is encoded under the hood, as long as it works ! 

I have one question though...maybe you know, or someone.

We oppose text UI which were then replaced by graphical UI. But, were there ever any system that used, simultaneously, text AND graphics ?

A few years back I was toying, still am, with the idea, for fun and educational purposes, of designing my own little retro computer, based on a 68.000 CPU.
I of course want to go for a text UI because I like it better, and it requires little H/W resources, and simple enough (didn't say simple... only simple "enough"), that I did stand a chance of getting something to work, to some degree.... Whereas a full blown graphical UI is completely out of my reach skill-wise, and time wise as well. I mean, the goal is to do everything from scratch, so I would not be using any ready-made library / sub routines, that would defeat the purpose....

BUT... I still would want to be able to display graphics on a screen.... while still using a text UI.

I mean, I bought 10/15 years ago for one of my projects below, a graphical LCD 256x128, and the controller chip in it can handle several "layers".  You can have a text layer, AND a graphical layer, super imposed on the display. So you can use the text layer to implement the user interface, and use the graphical layer when you want to display a graphical element along with the text.

So I was thinking maybe there exist a CRT controller chip that exists out there, that can do the same, that I could use in my computer project.

this way I could easily display graphical elements on th screen while still using a simple text UI. Say I want to display a picture or a graph in some techy / scientificy application S/W.
I would use the text layer to display the user interface, menus, "draw" a box outline in part of the scree using the special/extended ASCII characters, then i would "fill" the ASCII box outline using the graphical layer, to display whatever. A pic, log, a chart showing some data point, what have you.

So did any system like that exist back in the day, or was it dichotomous, either 100% text, or 100 graphical, but never both at the same time, mixed, on the same screen ??

[mansaxel]

Why could they not display UTF8 ? If the S/W handles it, why could would it not work if the S/W is running on an old computer rather than a more modern one ?

Because, the character set of the terminal is set in silicon -- sometimes you can switch between a few different versions but there is a limited number of glyph shapes in the firmware and then there are a few tables to map those to 7- or 8-bit bytes.  You must remember that nothing outside the terminal shapes the characters -- the host just sends bytes to the terminal and expects it to render them.

The core problem is that you only  have 128 or 256 glyphs to display, for 7 or 8-bit bytes respectively. That means that there is no way we can have the terminal display more than one "code page" (I hate that expression for the limitations it illustrates) at a time.  No simple 8-bit character set even comes close to containing the full typographical array of glyphs we expect to use. It's a limitation like the 5-bit Baudot code which requires a signalled shift to get digits, and lower case letters are even then impossible. Only slightly better.

What could offer a horrible compromise for old fat white men is to decide on one of those 256-character sets and then have the terminal driver in the host interpret and rewrite those UTF-8 characters (single-byte and multibyte alike) into the chosen set, skipping the rest, perhaps replacing them with something opaque.

If we for instance chose DEC Multinational I would personally be covered, but there would of course be friends and words I could not address completely.

This is something we'll end up losing any way we attack it.

Anyway, who cares about UTF8, it never works... in 2022 I still come across some file or some S/W or some web site that displays garbage every now and then. Character encoding will never work, just like the internet will never work, as BD said because it's just a mega huge pile of garbage layers on top of the other, loosely stitched together, and the fact that you can get any website to display is a daily miracle...

I have long given up on the concept of computing that "just works". It's just a huge pile of garbage that will never be fixed because you can never afford to break existing things for anyone... just like Intel CPU's will forever be x86 because of 40 year old compatibility....

Fixing computing is like trying to make all the countries in the world to use the same power plug/socket, same line voltage, same language, same taxes and laws.... it's just never going to happen. World will forever be a huge patchwork loosely kept together...

Au contraire! My experience is that the careful backward compatibility of UTF-8 allows us to introduce more of Unicode in ways that expands the possibilities of communication. UTF-8 becomes 30 years old this year, and it's my experience that nothing even comes close. Both in terms of acceptance and functionality.

[Specmaster]

"Téton" really ?

I'll let you decipher what it mean in french 

Follow the bouncing ball. 

Found a picture of "Teton Waters Ranch"

Geez, how the hell is she even standing upright, beats the hell out of me 

[Vince]

Why could they not display UTF8 ? If the S/W handles it, why could would it not work if the S/W is running on an old computer rather than a more modern one ?

Because, the character set of the terminal is set in silicon -- sometimes you can switch between a few different versions but there is a limited number of glyph shapes in the firmware and then there are a few tables to map those to 7- or 8-bit bytes.  You must remember that nothing outside the terminal shapes the characters -- the host just sends bytes to the terminal and expects it to render them.

Oh sure, but I wasn't talking about consoles, but old desktop computers hence you can use any S/W on it, UTF8 or whatever. Sorry if that was not clear.

Au contraire! My experience is that the careful backward compatibility of UTF-8 allows us to introduce more of Unicode in ways that expands the possibilities of communication. UTF-8 becomes 30 years old this year, and it's my experience that nothing even comes close. Both in terms of acceptance and functionality.

That's the problem here, assuming unrealistic things   

You can only be careful about what YOU do... but real life shows that the world as a whole, doesn't give a shit about being careful or competent or thoughtful... you just get what you get... so even though it works 99% of the time, I still today as I said run into stuff that doesn't work. I don't expect things to ever work 100% right, in an "open" world... the only systems that you can make to "just" work, are  systems you design from top to bottom and control every aspect of. So a computer fleet in a company where the sys admin controls everything yeah, might work, but the average Joe, clueless, incompetent, that doesn't care, using his random PC doing random stuff on random web site and random S/W with random files and data.... it's hopeless, you can't possibly expect things to just work...

[mnementh]

Forgive me as I had to shake off the international news and and I went for a creative moment in my workshop last night: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/workshop-accessory-night-diy-made-teflonptfe-jaws 

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad

Noted, visited, and inappropriate comments made.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

We certainly could buy a lot of TE for what those cost...

mnem
Well,there's no doubt she's a mammal, is there...?

True, but I’d question how much by weight or volume was real and how much was synthetic.  (I personally much prefer non augmented hardware, thanks just the same…)

-Pat

Yeah, she kinda reminds me of Katie Price.