Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cubdriver]

@mnem be careful what you knock yerself out with. Quadral Montan Mallet 46 kg, Vulkan 70kg, Titan 140 kg, all for Mark 3, single unit.

Yeah, I knew that would give you a chuckle.  Sounds about like what I needed to knock my arse out.

Did some more stripping of the nasty paint on the Dynaco bookshelf speakers I mentioned in the 'what did you buy today' thread... 

      -Pat

Dammit, Pat! Between you and the Valkyrie up there, you actually making me think about going back for these I saw at the Thrift for $20 the other day...

   

You have any idea how long it's been since I actually replaced the surround in a driver...?   

mnem
Obviously, the Q-mallet wasn't enough to knock any sense into me... 

The thrift is calling.  You know you want them…. 

I have Tung oil coming to refinish the Dynacos based on previous posts here (and will be sure to treat the used rags appropriately)

-Pat

[xrunner]

I learned that sticky labels and sharpies are a better investment 

For a simple label? You must be nuts.

It has to require processing, batteries, firmware, and a complex mechanical tape-feeding assembly - my god this is 2022! 

[Vince]

I learned that sticky labels and sharpies are a better investment 

I strongly disagree ! 

Sticky labels are too permanent a solution, and look crap on drawers, and need to be cut to size.. The labels on the drawer fronts are bound to need changing/modifying as the contents of the drawers vary as stock evolves, or I just decide to reorganize stuff to free some drawers. A paper label with some age on it is a huge pain to remove and clean up, however the label from that machine is in comparison way way way easier to get rid of.

I have sticky labels and a pen too... but I use it to label my tiny 6x8cm ZIP bags and little envelopes, where I put resistors and small diodes and screws and misc H/W when I take a TE apart and want a chance of being able to remember what screw goes where, 6 months later when I come to put it all back together...

[TERRA Operative]

Doesn't those zebra stripes indicate the end of the roll?

[mnementh]

_{HOLY FUCKING ASSCRACKERS!!!}
                                                                           

This is what I always imagined hacking trees with a chainsword would be like... 

mnem
*back out into the jungle*

[bd139]

I learned that sticky labels and sharpies are a better investment 

I strongly disagree ! 

Sticky labels are too permanent a solution, and look crap on drawers, and need to be cut to size.. The labels on the drawer fronts are bound to need changing/modifying as the contents of the drawers vary as stock evolves, or I just decide to reorganize stuff to free some drawers. A paper label with some age on it is a huge pain to remove and clean up, however the label from that machine is in comparison way way way easier to get rid of.

I have sticky labels and a pen too... but I use it to label my tiny 6x8cm ZIP bags and little envelopes, where I put resistors and small diodes and screws and misc H/W when I take a TE apart and want a chance of being able to remember what screw goes where, 6 months later when I come to put it all back together...

Just stick another one on top of the old label 

Also sod drawers.  They’re ok until you knock them over or need to move house.

[Robert763]

...
On investigation I found that the timing of the clock and data input signals did not meet the timing specification of the chip. Or anything actually becuase the clock changed just before the data    The signals came for a I/O card in a PC. The PC software subroutine had never been changed in the several years it had been in use without issue.  I also noticed that the same data was sent about 30 times. Talking to the now "head of Sofware" who wrote the subrotine he admitted that it didn't work at first but as repating the dats many times seemd to work he left it like that.
...

Ah! I think those software guys need educating with something heftier than a cluestick. Time to get out the metastability mallet. 

Actually I'm quite surprised that something that randomly hit a stable timing margin only one time in thirty managed to work at all.

That's actually quite a good example of the chewing gum and string quality of a lot of software that you'll always hear BD and me moaning about. Programming is hard, proper hard, and there's a tendency for programmers to develop hubris as well as code. Programmers have to learn a lot about each application area that they have to develop for as well as the actual computer technology that is their basic stock in trade, and I've noticed a tendency for a lot of then to acquire a delusional self belief that "If I can learn to do all this, I can do anything.". This has the obvious result of lots of Dunning-Kruger moments.

That was the same team who wanted a bigger PIC for a simple task because they were using C++ and a huge comm libary that used a software UART. I'd  written the code for the prototype using PICBasic Pro and the hardware USART in the PIC. The production units shipped with my PBP code.
In another example they had to calculate a pulse width based on a couple of inputs from analog sensors and a user selected value. Precision requirement was quite high. They wanted a 32 bit floating point processor as they were going to work in engineering units. They looked blank when I pointed out that we were using 12bit ADC's and a 4.096V reference. I had to show them that they could do everthing with binary operators without losing precision or accumulating errors and I am most certainly not good at math. 

[m k]

That is very true. In fact if you have old Tektronix 7000 series scopes with the 3055's slapped on the back, you have to use older RCA transistors or add a miller capacitor because the new ones oscillate 

Speaking of 7000 series scopes; the one I was ogling took off into stratosphere prices 5 minutes before closing, so lost interest. People are crazy.

The way of the preserver.

[Cerebus]

Good staff evolve good processes. Bad staff evolve no processes or evolve them and circumvent them.

And management, in an attempt to get stuff made that works, jump on the latest cargo cult development methodology without any understanding of what the problem(s) is/are. Thus we get Agile^TM or some-such as a religion  and the rituals are followed like they would be if the High Priest says that such-and-such a ritual will rid the patient of their disease (and "Thank you for your 'donation'") when a doctor would say "Take this penicillin and stop shagging pox-ridden whores.".

[Vince]

I learned that sticky labels and sharpies are a better investment 

I strongly disagree ! 

Sticky labels are too permanent a solution, and look crap on drawers, and need to be cut to size.. The labels on the drawer fronts are bound to need changing/modifying as the contents of the drawers vary as stock evolves, or I just decide to reorganize stuff to free some drawers. A paper label with some age on it is a huge pain to remove and clean up, however the label from that machine is in comparison way way way easier to get rid of.

I have sticky labels and a pen too... but I use it to label my tiny 6x8cm ZIP bags and little envelopes, where I put resistors and small diodes and screws and misc H/W when I take a TE apart and want a chance of being able to remember what screw goes where, 6 months later when I come to put it all back together...

Just stick another one on top of the old label 

No, looks ugly. 

[Cerebus]

That sounds like the cue for a "Yo mama so ugly that ..." joke.

I shall resist. This time.

[Robert763]

...
On investigation I found that the timing of the clock and data input signals did not meet the timing specification of the chip. Or anything actually becuase the clock changed just before the data    The signals came for a I/O card in a PC. The PC software subroutine had never been changed in the several years it had been in use without issue.  I also noticed that the same data was sent about 30 times. Talking to the now "head of Sofware" who wrote the subrotine he admitted that it didn't work at first but as repating the dats many times seemd to work he left it like that.
...

Ah! I think those software guys need educating with something heftier than a cluestick. Time to get out the metastability mallet. 

Actually I'm quite surprised that something that randomly hit a stable timing margin only one time in thirty managed to work at all.

That's actually quite a good example of the chewing gum and string quality of a lot of software that you'll always hear BD and me moaning about. Programming is hard, proper hard, and there's a tendency for programmers to develop hubris as well as code. Programmers have to learn a lot about each application area that they have to develop for as well as the actual computer technology that is their basic stock in trade, and I've noticed a tendency for a lot of then to acquire a delusional self belief that "If I can learn to do all this, I can do anything.". This has the obvious result of lots of Dunning-Kruger moments.

I would say that software quality is directly related to development practice and not necessarily individuals. Poor or inexistent development practice lead to low quality even if your staff are really good. When I say "development practice" I mean coding guidelines, code review, automated tests and submit procedure. All that is expensive though (in time and infrastructure) and you need to decide what level of quality you are looking for. If the question was never raised the quality level will probably be really low.

The far swing of that is aviation software validation like RTCA DO-178 (and DO-254 for things like CPLDs). While the standard allows different levels of validation for different applications (Design Assurance Levels) most companies seem to have written their processes so you have to produce ALL the documentation for even the most basic application. I think this is because they copy the example in the standard which is for critical software and don't know enough to even combine documents. Often consultants are used for this and they are not going to do more than they have to.
Anyway this results in huge cost and in many cases using relay logic or similar when a microcontroller would do a much better job with a few hundred lines of code.

[Atomillo]

Good staff evolve good processes. Bad staff evolve no processes or evolve them and circumvent them.

And management, in an attempt to get stuff made that works, jump on the latest cargo cult development methodology without any understanding of what the problem(s) is/are. Thus we get Agile^TM or some-such as a religion  and the rituals are followed like they would be if the High Priest says that such-and-such a ritual will rid the patient of their disease (and "Thank you for your 'donation'") when a doctor would say "Take this penicillin and stop shagging pox-ridden whores.".

I'm on my third year of  engineering and I have to take a class about business (more specifically, it is called "Técnicas de Emprendimiento" which translate roughly to "entrepreneurship techniques") and about three weeks were about Agile management.

What a freaking (is it acceptable to use this word in the forum?) piece of crap (same question). To pretty much everyone of us it seemed like a cult. Sometimes we would do "simulations" in class of what a "Sprint Daylies" or "Sprint Review " would be.

After that, we did something called Belbin personality test and the teacher complained there were always very few "creative " and "entrepreneurial" people on his engineering clases....

What really enrages me is that we waste time in such bull crap but then we don't have to time to finish the subjects that really matter (for instance, in our class of Electrical Energy Conversion we haven't managed to reach solar system design).

Sorry for the rant but I'm just happy I'm not the only one who seems to be repelled by these things.

[med6753]

Fuck me ! 

Look at what just popped up here !  A Tek type 547 for only 20 Euros !!! 


OF COURSE it's local pick-up only and in Paris 500kms from me, as always !! 

https://www.leboncoin.fr/equipements_industriels/2168134078.htm

OK looks a bit rough on the outside but might be nice inside you just don't know. And at that price I couldn't care less, it's well worth the 20 Euros just as a parts mule !

Busy today but had to respond to this. I would not touch that with a 10 foot pole. It's very obvious it's been left out in the weather and I guarantee the internals are gonna be worthless shit.

It's not even worth scrap value. Stay away. (Maybe the vacuum tubes if it hasn't been raped)

Back to regular programming.

[tggzzz]

In a similar vein, I remember a story about some company that designed ages ago a board with a 68HC11 or something MCU. running at 4MHz or something, slow clock of back in the day. Their board was working just fine. Then years later suddenly their board was losing its mind, didn't work anymore.  Turns out the manufacturer for their MCU moved on to a newer fabrication process, as you do. The chip was internally then much faster, faster rise times. Of course the manufacturer didn't deem it necessary to inform their customers of this change !
So the board would act up, and had to be redesigned with "high-speed" techniques, then it would work again.

There's a standard tendency to concentrate on t_setup and forget about t_hold, which is just as important. Guess which one can be the problem with faster devices!

[Specmaster]

No dice. Gave it a careful clean to remove what I took to be near microscopic flux spatter from the manufacturing process. No effect.

I can't find any obviously buggered passives, time to move on to active components. This thing is full of analogue switches, my next move is to probulate those to see if any are failed short/open, since if that happened on the range division circuitry at some point it could have this effect I think.

I'm curious as to what the glass capsule parts are in the protection circuit; they are not GDTs, you can see a solid slug inside them, and they are marked "VRxx", and have a (in circuit) resistance of ~190MΩ. There are also some curious smd things labelled "BDxx" that look like slugs of carbon, and measure like a ZoL, but those are usually a ceramic substrate with a "0", right? These look like smd caps made of carbon   

Some macro photos of those mysterious objects would help to identify them, I think. 

You can see the glass capsule components easily enough in the pic I posted; they are just under the first and last PTCs. There's one of the mysterious "BDxx" carbon slugs on the bottom left of the pic, just under the shield contact spring.

If you are referring to what I think you are, the black bit slightly lower down than the shield contact spring, I see that as C7 capacitor 

[Kosmic]

Good staff evolve good processes. Bad staff evolve no processes or evolve them and circumvent them.

And management, in an attempt to get stuff made that works, jump on the latest cargo cult development methodology without any understanding of what the problem(s) is/are. Thus we get Agile^TM or some-such as a religion  and the rituals are followed like they would be if the High Priest says that such-and-such a ritual will rid the patient of their disease (and "Thank you for your 'donation'") when a doctor would say "Take this penicillin and stop shagging pox-ridden whores.".

I'm on my third year of  engineering and I have to take a class about business (more specifically, it is called "Técnicas de Emprendimiento" which translate roughly to "entrepreneurship techniques") and about three weeks were about Agile management.

What a freaking (is it acceptable to use this word in the forum?) piece of crap (same question). To pretty much everyone of us it seemed like a cult. Sometimes we would do "simulations" in class of what a "Sprint Daylies" or "Sprint Review " would be.

After that, we did something called Belbin personality test and the teacher complained there were always very few "creative " and "entrepreneurial" people on his engineering clases....

What really enrages me is that we waste time in such bull crap but then we don't have to time to finish the subjects that really matter (for instance, in our class of Electrical Energy Conversion we haven't managed to reach solar system design).

Sorry for the rant but I'm just happy I'm not the only one who seems to be repelled by these things.

There's some good stuff in Agile (targeting scoped milestones and iterating) but yes the real process sound silly. I think I only worked at 1 place where they tried to implement it by the book and it didn't last. Everywhere else we ended up doing something Agile like but a lot simpler.

[Saskia]

in our company they are worshipping the holy agile. they wanted to send me an agile coach for a waterfall project with a 120 item work breakdown structure .

[bd139]

I mostly spend my time these days undoing “agile” processes. They are tuned for rapid delivery of shit. This accumulates over a 5-8 year span. Most people are proponents only because they haven’t been at the failure point of the process because that’s above the average employment span at one org.

[Kosmic]

I mostly spend my time these days undoing “agile” processes. They are tuned for rapid delivery of shit. This accumulates over a 5-8 year span. Most people are proponents only because they haven’t been at the failure point of the process because that’s above the average employment span at one org.

Yeah well, it's never easy to convince the managers that you need to spend a certain amount of time doing refactoring and not producing any visible value from their point of view.

[bd139]

That's where it fails though. Each sprint or kanban item is focused on getting from A-B and never what is required to get to A first. It gets even worse under SCRUM because the chickens aren't allowed to cluck while the pigs lead them off this cliff. Apparently they got rid of that part of the methodology lore eventually suggesting that they are building the process model on lore and probably snooting some mind altering substances rather than actually doing any analytic work on process modelling.

I actually quit the last place because I was fed up of this exact shit. I actually needed to distance myself from the company to protect my reputation.

[med6753]

You guys are reminding my final days at Itty Bitty Morons in the mid 2000's with that "agile" shit which they could shove up their arse sideways. Shutter. 

[bd139]

IBM did agile really well though. As in for society. They managed to crater most of their software proposition with it 

[Specmaster]

Fuck me ! 

Look at what just popped up here !  A Tek type 547 for only 20 Euros !!! 


OF COURSE it's local pick-up only and in Paris 500kms from me, as always !! 

https://www.leboncoin.fr/equipements_industriels/2168134078.htm

OK looks a bit rough on the outside but might be nice inside you just don't know. And at that price I couldn't care less, it's well worth the 20 Euros just as a parts mule !

Busy today but had to respond to this. I would not touch that with a 10 foot pole. It's very obvious it's been left out in the weather and I guarantee the internals are gonna be worthless shit.

It's not even worth scrap value. Stay away. (Maybe the vacuum tubes if it hasn't been raped)

Back to regular programming.

Thanks Med, you just confirmed what I said before, maybe Vince won't be so confused this time around, as you spelled it out for him 

[bd139]

Ugh so my middle one wants a gaming PC. She has a T495 Ryzen 5 3500U pro laptop which isn't cutting the mustard now. Plus the constant fan noise is pissing me off 

Anyone care to comment on the following idea:

- Ryzen 5600G
- 16Gb corsair LPX 3200 RAM (2x 8Gb)
- 500Gb Samsung 870 Evo Plus
- Be quiet 600W supply
- Lian Li Liancool 205M
- have monitor, keyboard, mouse, MSI B550 board, be quiet cooler floating around already which can go in it. Oh and a ripped off win 10 pro license 

Will upgrade the GPU next year...