Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[grizewald]

I used to live three stops closer to town. Nice area, that. Yours probably more so than where I lived. Now am on the other side of the city, but with much more forest:

That, too, will burn if lit. We'll have to make sure it does not.

My only plus, if Majroskogen started to burn is that the local fire station is within 500 metres of me. Considering how dry it is now, I doubt if they would have much chance of doing anything about it though. It looks like you would be in similar trouble. A tinder dry forest right up to your property is pretty much a recipe for disaster as these heatwaves get more frequent.

Cut them in halves, dip them in boiling water for 1 minute, then fry them in a generous amount of butter with equally generous amounts of salt and pepper, until there's some browning. Serve.

I was going to say "where's the bacon fat", but Cerebus (obviously a man with good taste) beat me to it.

On the TEA front, the Ukrainian and Swedish post organisations conspired to truly amaze me today.



The Ukrainian post for still operating an efficient service in the middle of a war and the Swedish post for only taking four days from the arrival of my package in Sweden to delivering it to my local agent. They even managed to find the VAT payment that eBay had already made on my behalf and not try demanding that I pay it a second time, together with their charges!

I really have no idea how good these three standard resistors are yet. They are 1, 10 and 100 ohms from 1982, 1970 and 1969 respectively. The only problem I have at the moment is that the Bakelite on the binding posts has embrittled to the point that it's just crumbling. Two fell apart almost immediately and another cracked as I was tightening it down on a spade connector. So tomorrow will be taken up with creating two suitable models, printing six of each and then breaking the remaining Bakelite to free all the inserts and melting them into the new housings.

As for making any useful measurements, I think that's going to have to wait for my temperature controlled chamber to get finished and the indoor temperature to stabilise at something bearable. Right now, I can either have the AC off and watch the zero offset of my Datron go further and further negative as I start to sweat more and more, or have the AC on, be comfortable, and watch it climb in the other direction instead.
 

[25 CPS]

Continuing with the Keysight U1177A that had the leaked batteries in it, I decided to do a bench test to see if it was truly dead when a cleanup and new cells failed to bring it back to life.  In the process, I discovered that another U1177A had leaked cells in it.  Today just isn't my day.



The Keysight one at the top was the DOA one that came with the U1231A multimeter, the one with the battery cover off is the one I just discovered went bad and the one on the right is good.



This time it's GP instead of Duracell.

I cleaned up the second one as well and decided to approach bench testing both of them using an external power supply clipped on to the battery compartment terminals along with a multimeter clipped onto the terminals in order to be confident that each U1177A was being energized and that the nominal 3V wasn't being blocked by bad, corroded contact surfaces.  This also gave me an opportunity to take out that new U1253B for its first use.  I also got out the U1115A remote logging display to scan for activity in case the status lights were dead but the adapter otherwise working.



Canadian Research Institute is turned up to just over 3V in order to stand in for a pair of AAA cells for the tests.



The pictures don't do the OLED display on the U1253B justice.  It's gorgeous in person; hopefully the longevity issues have been resolved.



Nothing.



And nothing.

No such luck.  With either of them.  So that's two U1177A that have been killed by leaking batteries.  I might pop the plastic shells apart later and see if I can find and repair the damage at board level.  Thankfully it's only U1177As that have been damaged.  All three of the more useful, longer range, iOS compatible, much more expensive U1117As power up and have intact batteries on visual inspection.

I've also got plenty of AA, AAA, and 9V batteries on hand so that saves having to go on a shopping spree.  Considering what I just spent on the truck, that is a good thing, but given the age of some of these, I might set the first replacement cycle six months out from now instead of a full year.  I might also pick up another U1117A to replace one of the dead ones if I can't fix either up at board level if I need to bump a shopping cart up for free shipping given the longer range and iOS compatibility those have over the U1177A.  Still, I'm not happy about this happening at all.

I'm going to go through the rest of the handheld equipment either tonight or tomorrow.  In the meantime, a friend and I are going to grab a bite to eat and take the truck out for a nice evening cruise to road test the repairs the shop did on it today.

[TERRA Operative]

Anyone know how to see what file system is formatted on a floppy disk in MS DOS?

I may have a bad/marginal disk, or it may be formatted in something other than a standard 1.44Mb FAT file system..

FAT-12; but better check the the (TE)manufacturer forum/(news)group/discussions.
BTW, did you get your FD-505? 

I do have a fully rebuilt 5.25" Teac FD-55BV, and even managed to find an unused new-in-original-plastic 3.5" Mitsumi D353M30 FDD, the latter of which I was able to read the disk. Just gotta figure out what format  the disk is. 
Does Win10 not like FAT-12 for some reason?

I'd try the command 'file' from linux (as in file /dev/whatever_the_floppy), or just try to mount it with linux, it recognizes a lot of file systems automatically.

I'll have to see what version of Linux I can run on a Dual-CPU Pentium 3 Dell Precision 410 workstation.

[Cerebus]

This was both entertaining, and informative.



Do the Knipex pliers win?

[vk6zgo]

In case anyone is unaware, this is what is happening in London at the minute. I feel for those poor people affected and hope that everyone is safe and sound. If only the blonde buffoon hadn't reduced the fire cover when he should have been increasing it eh
[video]

Finally got some time to look at the footage you posted. Truly horrific. I've never lost everything in a fire and hope I never do. It's hard to imagine how the people who used to live in those burned out shells are feeling at the moment.

When I look at how little people's gardens protected them from the fire, it also makes me think about my situation...



I live in the apartment marked by the red dot at the end of the building. If the forest that my bedroom looks out towards ever caught fire, it's game over and probably so quickly I wouldn't be able to save more than my passport, my daughter and our skins.

I'm hearing reports of yet another devastating fire in the Dagenham area of East London, where a field fire has spread and caused the evacuation of 5 streets and some houses have been lost in this fire as well, Cerebus might well know more, its his neck of the woods is that.

Welcome to our nightmare!

[cyclin_al]

Cheap (65$) Tek p6046 differential probe on ebay. Working order and with all accessories. I would go for it, but already have one.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185500027746

... and it is already sold 

[cyclin_al]

<snip>

I think to a large extent, is just pure pot luck, I've had some old Every Ready D cells that have been installed for over 20 years and not leaked, likewise Duracell for around 10 years with no bother at all, YMMV.

Not luck. Two issues: Fakes and removal of mercury
Fakes issue is obvious
Hg was added to re-combine gases. Removed bcause it's toxic initial repalcemnts din't work well. Current ones OK
So very old batteries are OK genuine current ones OK. Fakes and ones from several years ago likely not OK.

As a parent I have to deal with kids toys that require batteries.  Current batteries available in the normal supply chain often start leaking as soon as the toy lights start to go dim.  That means that typically one battery is leaking before its mates are even fully discharged.  Not sure if this is a chemistry issue, or inconsistent battery capacity resulting in some in a set getting reverse voltage closer to end of life.

If your current ones are OK, I wonder if the product on your side of the pond is different slightly from what is on this side of the pond?

EDIT: fixed quotes.  Not sure how that went wrong?

[vk6zgo]

Thats exactly as it used to be here as well, the stated aim is to reduce the CO2 and encourage walking or public transport. So you can be CO2 free in an EV and still have the same issues. To rub it in even more, cyclists use the lanes the wrong way, i.e., they will ride against the traffic as seen in my video, also ride on the footpath.

Well in thinking further about it you couldn't install them in NYC anyway. How would you adequately plow the streets after a snowstorm? Those barriers would be a sitting duck and wind up in a snow pile.

It doesn't snow worth a damn in London.
I was there once when the tall blokes got a dusting of snow on their heads, & us more height challenged never saw any of it.

Of course, the place is so big it has its own "mini-climate!".

[tautech]

In case anyone is unaware, this is what is happening in London at the minute. I feel for those poor people affected and hope that everyone is safe and sound. If only the blonde buffoon hadn't reduced the fire cover when he should have been increasing it eh
[video]

Finally got some time to look at the footage you posted. Truly horrific. I've never lost everything in a fire and hope I never do. It's hard to imagine how the people who used to live in those burned out shells are feeling at the moment.

When I look at how little people's gardens protected them from the fire, it also makes me think about my situation...



I live in the apartment marked by the red dot at the end of the building. If the forest that my bedroom looks out towards ever caught fire, it's game over and probably so quickly I wouldn't be able to save more than my passport, my daughter and our skins.

I'm hearing reports of yet another devastating fire in the Dagenham area of East London, where a field fire has spread and caused the evacuation of 5 streets and some houses have been lost in this fire as well, Cerebus might well know more, its his neck of the woods is that.

Welcome to our nightmare!

Black Saturday bushfires ?

It seemed only the Kiwi living there could properly see the dangers of living in a wooded subdivision and felled all the trees on his section for which he got dealt to by the local Shire but he had the last laugh after every other nearby house was burnt to the ground.

[cyclin_al]

Oh those bloody posts do my head in. They installed them on the road with the local hospital which means ambulances take 10x as long to traverse it. On top of that it’s so narrow you can’t get two busses past each other now. Total fail.

What posts are these then, would they be posts to mark out the bleeding cyclists lane from vehicles?

Yep: https://goo.gl/maps/cg187YUyaSTvgEnc6

We have the same bleeding shit here, and like you the Hospital with the A&E dept is on the same road FFS. Ambulances struggle to get through the traffic and to add insult to injury, there are bus stops along the route  and most of those were in layby's, now they are in the road and block the road completely.

It's nice to know that those who design these things carefully think them through and consider the possible worst-case scenarios, isn't it?

 

-Pat

Yes, it must take some effort to always successfully achieve the worst case scenario.

I hate the things also.  And yes, I am a cyclist.  They may help slightly in protecting cyclists in long straight sections, but the spacing is always so tight that anything crossing the cycle path becomes a compressed high-stress conflict zone.  Driveways, intersections and turning lanes all get worse.  As already said, clearing the roadway for emergency vehicles or a breakdown lead to chaos among the posts.

I also drive a truck.  My mirrors are high enough and large enough to extend OVER the posts.  Other cyclists who believe the posts are magical and it is okay to ride right up beside the post may be in for a rude surprise...

[Cubdriver]

Cheap (65$) Tek p6046 differential probe on ebay. Working order and with all accessories. I would go for it, but already have one.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185500027746

... and it is already sold 

Sorry.     The auction ended this afternoon at 1:00, and I fully expected to be outbid on it; was surprised when no one else took a crack at it and the notification came in from the bay.

-Pat

[Cubdriver]

Oh those bloody posts do my head in. They installed them on the road with the local hospital which means ambulances take 10x as long to traverse it. On top of that it’s so narrow you can’t get two busses past each other now. Total fail.

What posts are these then, would they be posts to mark out the bleeding cyclists lane from vehicles?

Yep: https://goo.gl/maps/cg187YUyaSTvgEnc6

We have the same bleeding shit here, and like you the Hospital with the A&E dept is on the same road FFS. Ambulances struggle to get through the traffic and to add insult to injury, there are bus stops along the route  and most of those were in layby's, now they are in the road and block the road completely.

It's nice to know that those who design these things carefully think them through and consider the possible worst-case scenarios, isn't it?

 

-Pat

Yes, it must take some effort to always successfully achieve the worst case scenario.

I hate the things also.  And yes, I am a cyclist.  They may help slightly in protecting cyclists in long straight sections, but the spacing is always so tight that anything crossing the cycle path becomes a compressed high-stress conflict zone.  Driveways, intersections and turning lanes all get worse.  As already said, clearing the roadway for emergency vehicles or a breakdown lead to chaos among the posts.

I also drive a truck.  My mirrors are high enough and large enough to extend OVER the posts.  Other cyclists who believe the posts are magical and it is okay to ride right up beside the post may be in for a rude surprise...

It never ceases to amaze me how those in power can manage to consistently fuck things up in ways that Stevie Wonder could see coming from a mile away at the witching hour on a moonless night with pea soup fog.  All too many of them seem to have this amazing ability.

-Pat

[mnementh]

WARNING: HP 54621D to 54600A MONITOR HACKAGE MEGA-POST!

And so now, here I am with the results of my little "poke around the 54621D mainboard"...

   

Comparison of monitor cable pinouts of 54621D vs 54645A/54600A. This is the pinout of the J900 connector ribbon cable AT THE MONITOR.

As we can see, they did not repurpose the BRIGHTNESS pins; they just circumvented them, then shunted pin 12 to ground through a 10K resistor. The only video is the ~0.7V P-P signal at pin 11. I drew out the circuit of Q960-961, thinking there might be some mixing going on in there, but nothing I could find coming from anywhere but the MegaZoom ASIC. And I'm guessing that the "additional information" I thought I say on the VSync was just a byproduct of both signals being generated in U411, a Quad OR Gate.

   

This is Q960-Q961 in the video out to J900-Pin 11 on the 54621D. Q961 base goes to the Megazoom IC through a 50Ω resistor. Q960 Emitter goes to J900 pin 11.

@factory: Based on this, I'm guessing your surmise that the only real difference between the two is that 74S03 vs the transistor amplifier on the neck board was dead on... but that makes this a bit of a bastard monitor with that weird HSync frequency.

Yes, of course I tried connecting it to a VGA monitor, but all the ones I have are relatively modern, and while they do see the signal if both HSync and VSync are present, all I get is "Mode Not Supported". Maybe if I had some prehistoric analog unit, or the scan converter Robert was talking about, yeah. Or maybe it would sync, but the video would be out to lunch.

At this point I'm inclined to try and figure out the differences between the two neck boards next. Maybe try and ghetto-fab something just for gits & shiggles. 

mnem
*toddles off to ded*   

   

So this evening I decided to try and fake out one of my monitors to make it sync on this bastard VGA signal by building a pulse with my little PWM generator to mimic the duty cycle and amplitude of the orignal HSync from the 54621D, but at a frequency the monitor might actually try to display. Doubling that frequency got me to this point; good proof of concept but not enough granularity in the adjustment on my little $3 Chinesium generator to actually get it more legible than this.

   

By fiddling with the symmetry on my old ProTek analog function generator, I was able to get the duty cycle low enough that the monitor almost locked onto the signal; well, close enough to get these pics and see what it is actually saying.

Now that I know why this scope became a monitor PCB donor, I'm actually even more pissed off than I was before at those fucking g'rillas... 

mnem

[cyclin_al]

This was both entertaining, and informative.



Do the Knipex pliers win?

Yes, Knipex wins if you compare the ratio of force to cut the sample nail and the force at failure.  You have a reasonable margin and are unlikely to ever break the Knipex in normal use.

Milwaukee was pretty good too.  The pliers from 1970 were very strong, but the force of use on the sample nail was approaching the force of failure, leaving not so much margin.

EDIT:  We need to stop!  My tool boxes are getting loaded up with various sets of very nice pliers.  That leaves not a lot left in the budget for TEA  (though I tell SWMBO that the pliers are part of the house repairs and are saving money by not hiring contractors, it still means I have no money left)

[cyclin_al]

Cheap (65$) Tek p6046 differential probe on ebay. Working order and with all accessories. I would go for it, but already have one.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185500027746

... and it is already sold 

Sorry.     The auction ended this afternoon at 1:00, and I fully expected to be outbid on it; was surprised when no one else took a crack at it and the notification came in from the bay.

-Pat

Good to see it went to a good home.  No offence taken!  Honestly, there is no possible chance I would have seen it by 1:00 in the applicable time zone, so I would have missed it anyway.

[med6753]

This was both entertaining, and informative.



Do the Knipex pliers win?

How so? Regardless of the total destructive force required to break them which one still at least still had some function? But we can't have that, can we? Oh no....never. 

So my contention is that none of them won. They all broke. 

[mansaxel]

The consensus across the board at the shop, myself, some friends in transportation engineering and a couple of car guys I've shown the pictures to is that it was most likely defective, and that it was waiting to break the next time the truck hit a pothole the wrong way.

Some time in 2007, IIRC, the Volvo P2 platform got control arms from cast steel having had alloy (Al+Mg?) arms before; and I've swapped both kinds, so know the kind of part intimately. Whatever snaps one of those must be a lot of violence -- unless it's defective.  I concur on the "defective" guess.

[mansaxel]

Not long afterwards I saw this car, and sniggered!

It's an Audi. No-one is surprised.

Having just covered around 7000km of European roads, and having a puny 410 km left to get home, I have now formed an opinion on motorway drivers in several countries.

It's a well established fact that in Germany, and Sweden, BMW and Audi drivers sort of gang-thug-assertive-but-still-nervously expect everyone to move when they come. Mercedes drivers are much more relaxed; they know you'll move.

In France, the rôle of the bully is taken by Peugeot drivers. They are much more aggressive while not more competent than all the other brands. Citroën drivers (both "DS" and normal) are the kindest, and Renault drivers are like Volvos in Sweden or VW in Germany; they're so many that they're all over the spectrum.

All Belgian drivers are thugs, and more so if they're driving a premium car. Rude and assertive driving. I give those number plates on an Audi wide berth. It's going to be needed.

Italians are generally reasonably good, and mostly kind. Unless you're being a prick.

All these are stellar and very competent compared to the average US driver. Though.

[mansaxel]

I'll have to see what version of Linux I can run on a Dual-CPU Pentium 3 Dell Precision 410 workstation.

Anything that still ships a 32-bit compile. I assume. The kernel has only gotten faster. It's the graphical shit that is getting slower. No problem running the latest code on really old machines, unless you insist on GUI's for people with more CPU than taste.

If I run a Linux desktop today, I'm only going to use the stock GUI setup as a stopgap measure until I've migrated into my prefered window manager, which is Fluxbox. On the BSDs I usually don't bother, but stick with twm. It's there, and it manages windows. And, it ran snappy on SparcStation 4's in the 90s, so it of course is going to scream on PIII.

[AVGresponding]

34401A. £250. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/374184377229

Would buy it but I’ve already got a really nice one

Oops, might have accidentality hit the buy button. 

David

I don't understand...... just the other day you people were saying that these went for silly crazy high stupid prices.... and now they go for half price ?! 

Hardly complaining, of course.... just finding it very difficult to understand the market, it's a Mach 5 roller coaster 

So, knowing that, I guess when I am in the market for one, I will just wait until they are half price like here...

It's mainland europe where the prices are silly, as informed by Ice-Tea. Here in the UK the last two I've seen sold went for £208 and £250 respectively.

[AVGresponding]

Continuing with the Keysight U1177A that had the leaked batteries in it, I decided to do a bench test to see if it was truly dead when a cleanup and new cells failed to bring it back to life.  In the process, I discovered that another U1177A had leaked cells in it.  Today just isn't my day.



The Keysight one at the top was the DOA one that came with the U1231A multimeter, the one with the battery cover off is the one I just discovered went bad and the one on the right is good.



This time it's GP instead of Duracell.

I cleaned up the second one as well and decided to approach bench testing both of them using an external power supply clipped on to the battery compartment terminals along with a multimeter clipped onto the terminals in order to be confident that each U1177A was being energized and that the nominal 3V wasn't being blocked by bad, corroded contact surfaces.  This also gave me an opportunity to take out that new U1253B for its first use.  I also got out the U1115A remote logging display to scan for activity in case the status lights were dead but the adapter otherwise working.



Canadian Research Institute is turned up to just over 3V in order to stand in for a pair of AAA cells for the tests.



The pictures don't do the OLED display on the U1253B justice.  It's gorgeous in person; hopefully the longevity issues have been resolved.



Nothing.



And nothing.

No such luck.  With either of them.  So that's two U1177A that have been killed by leaking batteries.  I might pop the plastic shells apart later and see if I can find and repair the damage at board level.  Thankfully it's only U1177As that have been damaged.  All three of the more useful, longer range, iOS compatible, much more expensive U1117As power up and have intact batteries on visual inspection.

I've also got plenty of AA, AAA, and 9V batteries on hand so that saves having to go on a shopping spree.  Considering what I just spent on the truck, that is a good thing, but given the age of some of these, I might set the first replacement cycle six months out from now instead of a full year.  I might also pick up another U1117A to replace one of the dead ones if I can't fix either up at board level if I need to bump a shopping cart up for free shipping given the longer range and iOS compatibility those have over the U1177A.  Still, I'm not happy about this happening at all.

I'm going to go through the rest of the handheld equipment either tonight or tomorrow.  In the meantime, a friend and I are going to grab a bite to eat and take the truck out for a nice evening cruise to road test the repairs the shop did on it today.

It's just a big no-no to use primary cells in anything you value nowadays; even new and on the shelf these things are ludicrously incontinent.

Almost everything battery powered that I have now uses rechargeable cells or batteries, one way or another, and I don't leave primary cells in anything; I have a couple of 3DP storage boxes, for AA's and AAA's.

[Zoli]

Cheap (65$) Tek p6046 differential probe on ebay. Working order and with all accessories. I would go for it, but already have one.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185500027746

... and it is already sold 

Sorry.     The auction ended this afternoon at 1:00, and I fully expected to be outbid on it; was surprised when no one else took a crack at it and the notification came in from the bay.

-Pat

No shipping to Canada; otherwise you've seen my 2s bidding

[Saskia]

@Terra Operative AFAIK there is no more floppy disk driver in W10 x64.

[BU508A]

Recently in Australia:

[Robert763]

This was both entertaining, and informative.



Do the Knipex pliers win?

How so? Regardless of the total destructive force required to break them which one still at least still had some function? But we can't have that, can we? Oh no....never. 

So my contention is that none of them won. They all broke. 

Before anyone gets on an "USA is Best" rant, note that the Milwaukee pliers are marked Solingen, that's GERMANY 

Of course they all broke, it was a test to destruction. Knipex had lowest cutting force. and best (my subjective opinion) finish.
More practically I'd like to know the weights of the various pliers. It's a significant factor if using them a lot.