Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

that's what a varminter is good for....

[Cerebus]

Wallabies in Bedfordshire.

I think the tails and hopping frantically are just a result of human inbreeding out there.

No, that's Suffolk.

[med6753]

Fresh, streamed live from my garden.... after one Coypu parent eating grass with one baby coypu... then later I saw two babies eating alone, mom and dad weren't there any longer.... and now, right now... I see FIVE babies alone !!!  Boy they are reproducing fast !    Don't need their parents anymore either, they are big boys.

Well they maintain my "lawn" / weeds so that's good, keeps me from having to mow anything which I hate !

I can't help thinking "BBQ" but I'm in Texas. Do you have a BBQ by your back porch? 

Don't you touch my baby coypus, you cruel heartless trigger happy barbarian  !!!   

Don't have a back porch nor a BBQ... and I hate BBQ !! Way too much work and trouble than it's worth !

OK, some people like to eat them and make pâté with them.... Google says the Brits use the French word " Pâté " as is, is that right ?! Makes my life easier for sure but I can't believe there isn't a "proper" English word for Pâté...

Anyway I would never eat the thing, why not eat insects and horses and butterfly larvae while you're at it ! I know it's trendy but not my thing...

Those look like Europe's answer to what we call "woodchucks" or "ground hogs" here. Highly destructive if you have a garden. Dig holes for someone or livestock to step in a break an ankle or worse. They need to die but I don't think I'd want to BBQ them.

Coypu are American, not European. Vince's are probably the result of a zoo escape, rather like the Wallabies in Bedfordshire.

OK, they are called "Nutria" here and are originally from South America and have been introduced in multiple locations and are considered pests. "Coypu" is not a term I've heard before which is why I thought they were European origin.

[Vince]

Oh hell, call it what you want people... I googled it to stand a chance of being understood, sorry if Google didn't please everybody.
But you have the pics of the real thing so call it what you want... it's just a kind of Beaver that's all 

Yes they do an awful lot of damage here in the marsh my village sits in. Every summer the village organizes a hunt to try and kill as many of them as possible... I think they give you one or two Euros for each tail that you can produce...

As for me I find them cute. I prefer animals to human beings most of the time. Animals don't throw their garbage everywhere and don't make noise with crappy shitty music full blast 24/7 when you just want to relax and leave a peaceful life. Humans suck, animals are cool. Except mosquitos, of course ! But some human beings are decent as well. Just like the mosquitos, they are the exception to the rule....

[med6753]

Now that I've found all the correct documentation I hope to finally fix the ALT issue on the 475 scope tomorrow. Next project will be to pull out that Type 547 with the tweaked chassis and see if I can figure out where it's damaged. Once that's done I'm assuming the question remains on how to fix it? Based upon what I find I may be asking the group as to what would be the most efficient and effective way to tweak it back. So, have you thinking caps at the ready and stay tuned. 

[med6753]

Oh fuck, call ti what you want people... I googled it to stand a chance of being understood, sorry if Google didn't please you.
But you have the pics of the real thing so call it what you want... it's just a kind of Beaver that's all 

Yes they do an awful lot of damage here in the marsh my village sits in. Every summer that village organizes a hunt to try and kill as many of them as possible... I think they give you one or two Euros for each tail that you can produce...

As for me I find them cute. I prefer animals to human beings most of the time. Animals don't throw their garbage everywhere and don't make noise with crappy shitty music full blast 24/7 when you just want to relax and leave a peaceful life. Humans suck, animals are cool. Except mosquitos, of course ! But some human beings are decent as well. Just like the mosquitos, they are the exception to the rule....

Vince, I agree with you 100%. Most people suck. 

[Neomys Sapiens]

Don't you touch my baby coypus, you cruel heartless trigger happy barbarian  !!!   

Just call me "Conan". 

We could still shoot them for fun. Or make up a miniature minefield.
 

[Vince]

    

[Vince]

Don't have a back porch nor a BBQ... and I hate BBQ !! Way too much work and trouble than it's worth !

Them's fightin' words!   

I will break all your teeth and put you in a wheelchair !!! 

No. I simply can't afford to damage you. I need you to live long and healthy, be in tip top shape, otherwise I will never get my fully optioned up TDS 784D, and that would make me extremely sad indeed. 

[Vince]

Great post. Very interesting. Looks like the custom IC is a candidate for replacement with an MCU of some sort. Looks like it's just a few 4 bit registers and a counter and tristate mux on the output.

Never got involved with writing software, MCUs are alien to me, wouldn't know where to start.

Well looks to me like you now have the perfect excuse / opportunity to get started on the subject ! Get cracking !

Plus would need to get one of the Sony/Tek logic analyzers working, to investigate all the signals & timings.

See ? Why would you have bought these things if you didn't intend to do logic stuff one day ?
Here is your chance ! 

Damn need one of those nice HP MSOs, like Vince got recently. 

Ask Robert t lend you his ! 


First step is to draft the requirements for this chip. what are all the inputs, the outputs, what does the chip do with them exactly, how does it behave.

Once that's 100% clear / defined, then you can decide on how best to implement it given your abilities and will to learn and experiment with new stuff...

If MCU's seem too much to your taste, maybe you can implement t using discrete logic chips instead.

Using small surface mount chips with chips on both sides, or even if needed a stack of two such boards, it could fit.

This is NOT a problem my dear, to the contrary it's a marvelous OPPORTUNITY to learn more stuff and play with new toys ! 


Have fun and do report regularly, we will be there to assist 

[xrunner]

I'm thinkin' Julia Child the French Chef could've put her French cooking skills to work on the critters and cooked up a good mess 'o them things you'd love.

But I'm stoppin now Vince, there's a bunch of Cowboys and Indians having a battle up the street I gotta go ...

[Vince]

I'm thinkin' Julia Child the French Chef could've put her French cooking skills to work on the critters and cooked up a good mess 'o them things you'd love.

With a name like that, she sounds about as French as a Kangaroo ! 

This gal is one hell of an imposter, probably doesn't even know where France is on a map, I would ask for my money back !!

[mnementh]

Don't have a back porch nor a BBQ... and I hate BBQ !! Way too much work and trouble than it's worth !

Them's fightin' words!   

I will break all your teeth and put you in a wheelchair !!! 

No. I simply can't afford to damage you. I need you to live long and healthy, be in tip top shape, otherwise I will never get my fully optioned up TDS 784D, and that would make me extremely sad indeed. 

Now that... is a textbook example of "Enlightened Self-Interest". 

mnem
Would be great to see it practiced a lot more... everywhere.  

[mnementh]

I'm thinkin' Julia Child the French Chef could've put her French cooking skills to work on the critters and cooked up a good mess 'o them things you'd love.

With a name like that, she sounds about as French as a Kangaroo ! 

This gal is one hell of an imposter, probably doesn't even know where France is on a map, I would ask for my money back !!

LOL...she died decades ago, V... good luck getting it.

Worse, she is widely known for bringing French cuisine to mainstream America in an age when we could barely get bangers & mash right. For that, her soul must no doubt bear a great deal of Karma... both good and bad. 

mnem

[Vince]

 


OK thanks for the info....  so definitely not French then, that was just the name of the TV program  that's all ! 

I prefer that.... that's more plausible...

[BU508A]

Oh hell, call it what you want people... I googled it to stand a chance of being understood, sorry if Google didn't please everybody.

I'd have linked to the Wikipedia article for the Coypu, so that everybody could check it out by themselves.
 

[BU508A]

Now that I've found all the correct documentation I hope to finally fix the ALT issue on the 475 scope tomorrow. Next project will be to pull out that Type 547 with the tweaked chassis and see if I can figure out where it's damaged. Once that's done I'm assuming the question remains on how to fix it? Based upon what I find I may be asking the group as to what would be the most efficient and effective way to tweak it back. So, have you thinking caps at the ready and stay tuned. 

I'd suggest this:


  

[Specmaster]

I have been working on this CCTV system made by Technomate over the last few days, I got it with a duff power brick, the parts required to repair it would have to come from China and not only expensive, but take simply ages to arrive, so I purchased a new one from Amazon. The consol was drive less, so I fitted a salvage unit from an old sky + satellite box, cleaned up the 4 cameras and plugged them into the consol and tada they all work, but I was unable to get into the menus to set the parameters to make the system record anything.

It kept asking for a password, even though the memory retention battery was dead and the date and time was reset to 1970 I went through all the normal default passwords that most things come with, such "0000", "1234" and "admin" etc, all were rejected. The user manual makes zero reference to any such password, I was beginning to pull what little hair I have left, out of my head  I even emailed the person who I got the system from to if they could remember what the password was, no reply has been received.

In desperation, I searched for CCTV forums and found one that allowed to me to be a guest on it, so I searched for passwords for my system and found that someone else asked the same question and had been resolved. I looked at the answer, and I was almost there before. Apparently the default one is "123456", so I typed that in and yes, it works, I appear to have a fully working 4 channel CCTV system with full nighttime capabilities. The nighttime vision is almost as good as daytime ones, apart from the images are black and white instead of full colour.

Next to figure out how the alarm system functions and how to use it, as according to some blurp I have read, the system can be setup to automatically wake up on one or more cameras seeing some movement, and switch the system into recording mode so that the hard drive does get rammed full in the course of a normal day, instead it will just record when something is being detected, handy that.

Now to repair the Cat cables that came with the system, as the excess length was simply chopped off and a new RJ45 fitted to the installed cables and I have the remains stuffed in the box that the system came in. How did I test the system I hear you all cry, I used my expensive Ethernet patch cables that I need for my home network. 

[mansaxel]

After being poked at by BD in Discord yesterday, I'm going to instrument my resolvers using Prometheus and Grafana, just to check what the fuss is about.  Also, I'm going to repeat the performance with the other Google address.

Black box exporter DNS probe … https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md#dns_probe

Actually no, https://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/unbound_exporter/

[factory]

Great post. Very interesting. Looks like the custom IC is a candidate for replacement with an MCU of some sort. Looks like it's just a few 4 bit registers and a counter and tristate mux on the output.

Never got involved with writing software, MCUs are alien to me, wouldn't know where to start.

Well looks to me like you now have the perfect excuse / opportunity to get started on the subject ! Get cracking !

Plus would need to get one of the Sony/Tek logic analyzers working, to investigate all the signals & timings.

See ? Why would you have bought these things if you didn't intend to do logic stuff one day ?
Here is your chance ! 

Damn need one of those nice HP MSOs, like Vince got recently. 

Ask Robert t lend you his ! 


First step is to draft the requirements for this chip. what are all the inputs, the outputs, what does the chip do with them exactly, how does it behave.

Once that's 100% clear / defined, then you can decide on how best to implement it given your abilities and will to learn and experiment with new stuff...

If MCU's seem too much to your taste, maybe you can implement t using discrete logic chips instead.

Using small surface mount chips with chips on both sides, or even if needed a stack of two such boards, it could fit.

This is NOT a problem my dear, to the contrary it's a marvelous OPPORTUNITY to learn more stuff and play with new toys ! 


Have fun and do report regularly, we will be there to assist 

I'm currently trying to use stuff I have in all the parts I bought from work, no idea if I have any old MCUs or not, I do have a good selection of Op-Amps though.

Here is what is on the proto-bodge-board, dodgy negative pulse goes in, first Op-Amp circuit loads it down quite a lot, positive pulse out via the 1N4148.


Maybe need to try a dual or quad device and reduce the wire length.    Have LM747, LM1558 dual and LM124, LM148, LM324, LM2904 quad. And probably others, need to take better pictures of the component storage units, or list stuff & sort them if I ever have enough time.

Thinking about the ohms range problem, the shield between the number readout bulbs™ & input jacks, is currently removed, could I be picking up noise?


Circuit diagram PDFs of the Advance DMM2 attached, for those following along. 

David

[tautech]

I’m thinking fat rats.

I’m sure Saskia is thinking targets 

Oi ! Me too, in that I probably do a lot more of vermin maintenance due to not being in suburbia.

With the right launcher each one disappears into a red mist......very addictive.   

[Vince]

 

[AVGresponding]

...Thanks everyone for the info on how these things work. I can now button it back up and move on to the next item in the list...

Not quite... I know you may already know this, but just in case you don't; these things are designed to use a deep-cycle battery, which has a bit higher IR than your car/motorcycle starting battery there, and the float charge it puts across the battery terminals can cook a starting battery to death.

Once you're back among the gainfully employed, you'll want to invest in a SLA/GMA battery of similar capacity to the one you took out of the thing. Or maybe one small enuf to fit inside. 

Cheers!

mnem

In point of fact a liquid lead acid such as a car battery handles the float voltage of an average UPS just fine; it's lower than the float voltage of a car charger system (usually around 13.8V as opposed to 14.4V for a normal 6-cell battery). The main problem with using a liquid lead acid is you'll get increased corrosion since these things are designed to use SLA batteries which don't really spit much acid out unless you heavily abuse them.
If you want to extend the life of an SLA if you get one for it, make sure your float is 13.2-13.6V, unless you keep the battery in the fridge... in which case 13.8V is fine. Try not to get a cheap Chinesium SLA, they aren't that much cheaper than a decent brand like Yuasa or Hawker Siddeley, or Haze, but they use badly recycled lead and tend to have very much shorter lifespans, very much less capacity, and very much higher ESR.

[nixiefreqq]

used to ventilate ground hogs on a regular basis. 

the farmer who owned the hay field behind the house asked me to.

sometimes his hay wagon would fall axle deep into those damn rodent holes.

never ate one though.   around here they often have hepatitis.

edit - popped one once on the second of feb.  felt bad about the timing but the poor thing was foaming at the mouth and spinning in circles in the middle of an icy dirt road.  probably rabies.   did not eat that one either.

[med6753]

Now that I've found all the correct documentation I hope to finally fix the ALT issue on the 475 scope tomorrow. Next project will be to pull out that Type 547 with the tweaked chassis and see if I can figure out where it's damaged. Once that's done I'm assuming the question remains on how to fix it? Based upon what I find I may be asking the group as to what would be the most efficient and effective way to tweak it back. So, have you thinking caps at the ready and stay tuned. 

I'd suggest this:


  

Hopefully it won't require this.