What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[TSCOLAN]

Got a Knight series 600 tube tester, after a cap and a carbon resistor replacement, switch cleaning, it now seems working good !

I still have to "calibrate" it.

[mansaxel]

A Fluke 8020B. 20€ plus domestic shipping.
Pic from sellers ad:

It's going to need a good cleaning, and then it'll spend the rest of its life looking up to its bigger brother the 8060A.

You can never have enough multimeters.

8022B arrived, in condition as described, and is for all practical purposes spot on where I can test it -- so far have done OK against reference Ω, and tests to "makes sense" for VAC and VDC. mA still not tested.

[All Seeing Eye]

I buy a thermal camera T2search.

[AlexJackson]

Didn't buy anything today... Latest purchase was something off ebay that was local enough we tried arranging a local pickup (we are 5.6 miles, 9km apart), but had issues with ebay's messaging. So in short to make his shipping deadline, and he was going out of town for a bit so he had to ship it. That was January 4th when it arrived across the state. Stayed there until yesterday at one sorting office only to make its way further north to another sorting facility.

All for a $9 purchase. 12 days, 157 miles /252.6km and its still nowhere in sight, keeping this trend looking like I'll get it 29 more days after traveling 480 miles, 41 days.... for a small box of 26 ICs from a guy that lives less than 5 miles away.

The other IC lot is sitting in Atlanta still.. I don't want to talk about that one too.

So, I bought waiting an ungodly long time... ... Originally I intended to buy some ICs for a project that is now indefinitely on hold. Sorry about the rant.

[IDEngineer]

The other IC lot is sitting in Atlanta still.. I don't want to talk about that one too.... Sorry about the rant.

I can relate. Mid-December I found a NOS motherboard for my new Win7 workstation build. The seller is in Virginia. We agreed on price, and he shipped it Priority 2-Day the same day. He sent me the USPS tracking number. I would have it in two business days. Online tracking confirmed it was "in the system".

And there it sat.

Stuck in a distribution center in Virginia.

For three weeks.

Meanwhile I had ordered all of the other components. I started to worry that their warranties might run out before I got a chance to even test them.

I filed a formal complaint with the USPS. Got a phone call the same day, so I can't fault their response time! The story was that a combination of Christmas time shipping and COVID-19 absences meant shipping containers were parked in rows in storage areas, with nobody to unload and process them. He estimated it would be mid-January at best for Priority packages. Standard shipping wasn't expected to process until sometime in February. I would receive notification when it started moving again.

Nothing else happened for many days, then I got a message. Not that it had finally started moving, but that it had been delivered! Sure enough, there it was in the mailbox. I've since assembled the system and it's working fine so far.

So yeah, I can definitely relate to shipping delays. Even when you spend extra money for Priority shipping.

[Ground_Loop]

New ADS 200 arrived today.

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[iainwhite]

New EEvblog Brymen BM786 arrived to join the family . . . [attach=1]

[Mr. Scram]

New EEvblog Brymen BM786 arrived to join the family . . . [attach=1]

It's unfortunate the graphics style and colours are slightly mismatched. The new DMM looks good and chonky though. How is the autohold feature?

[McBryce]

A few 74LS257 and 258, because when you're fixing TTL devices, no matter how many 74 series types you have in your stock, the one that failed is the one you don't have.

McBryce.

[richnormand]

That is so true!
Although finding proper ecl replacements for a proper non-kluge repair is also up there.

[IDEngineer]

On that note: I finally got tired of Rubing together various series-parallel networks of the resistor values I had on hand. Instead I treated myself to a full selection of those sample kits from DigiKey. Each one includes five samples of every 1% value in a given order of magnitude. I have every 1% value from 10R to 1M plus a few outside those ranges that have become necessary over time. Every new order I refresh the values I've consumed. There are a few I keep in 100's since they're used so often. This has made a WORLD of difference in breadboarding convenience.

To a limited extent I've done the same with capacitors. The problem there is the wide variety of dielectrics makes it impractical to have every value of every type.

Obviously this isn't practical for IC's and discrete semiconductors. But it's been a huge time saver and convenience multiplier. Like my Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun, I only wish I hadn't waited so long.

[rfclown]

Got a Knight series 600 tube tester, after a cap and a carbon resistor replacement, switch cleaning, it now seems working good !

I still have to "calibrate" it.

Seeing the pictures makes me want one. I've never designed with tubes, and I have no reason to have a tester, but it brings back memories of going to the store to test them. I have a Philco radio that was my grandmothers, so I could justify buying one by saying that I could test the tubes.

[BU508A]

Got a Knight series 600 tube tester, after a cap and a carbon resistor replacement, switch cleaning, it now seems working good !

I still have to "calibrate" it.

Seeing the pictures makes me want one. I've never designed with tubes, and I have no reason to have a tester, but it brings back memories of going to the store to test them. I have a Philco radio that was my grandmothers, so I could justify buying one by saying that I could test the tubes.

If you are interested in testing tubes and want a proper tube tester, then I recommend to have a look at the RoeTest from Helmut Weigl.

Link: http://roehrentest.de/EnglishInfo.html

Sounds like a fun project. 

[McBryce]

Got a Knight series 600 tube tester, after a cap and a carbon resistor replacement, switch cleaning, it now seems working good !

I still have to "calibrate" it.

Seeing the pictures makes me want one. I've never designed with tubes, and I have no reason to have a tester, but it brings back memories of going to the store to test them. I have a Philco radio that was my grandmothers, so I could justify buying one by saying that I could test the tubes.

If you are interested in testing tubes and want a proper tube tester, then I recommend to have a look at the RoeTest from Helmut Weigl.

Link: http://roehrentest.de/EnglishInfo.html

Sounds like a fun project. 

It looks extremely interesting, but definitely not a minor project!

McBryce.

[elador]

keithley 2100 for parts missing the front panel measurements are inaccurate
looks like its missing its main board metal shield plastic on off extender and maybe other stuff?? also im not sure if it has the cover itself i guess ill find out soon
price 40 euro plus the same for shipping
what was i thinking? good question..

[BU508A]

Bought today a MASTECH MS8911 on ebay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283341251476

Arrived today. Looking good so far. 
Pictures will follow this evening.

[blueskull]

Not yet, but I will walk to the nearest hospital, minimum contact, and order a COVID19 test tomorrow.

Someone living in the same apartment building which a few of my coworkers rent at was taken to quarantine.

One of them works in the same lab with me. It is a small lab with limited ventilation, and the lab is small enough to only cover the two of us. FML.

It just happened an hour ago, and so far there has been no news covering this. Hope the guy being taken away tests negative.

[exe]

Someone living in the same apartment building which a few of my coworkers rent at was taken to quarantine.

May I ask how this happened? Did the police come and arrested him, or he was ill and ambulance took him?

[IDEngineer]

May I ask how this happened? Did the police come and arrested him, or he was ill and ambulance took him?

I was wondering the same thing. "...being taken away..." sounded pretty ominous.

[blueskull]

May I ask how this happened? Did the police come and arrested him, or he was ill and ambulance took him?

From the picture I was sent, I saw there are cops guarding the building, and ambulance doctors went in to the building.

The SOP here is if someone was found to be linked to a case, his building will be temporarily locked down until his test report comes out.

If it comes out positive, everyone goes to quarantine, if not, everyone is released on spot. That's why there are cops to guard the building while he was being transferred by the ambulance.

[ledtester]

Spotted these in my local surplus store.

Ganged variacs -- what are they used for???

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[rsjsouza]

The variacs are for multi phase systems.

[AlexJackson]

One of my latest purchases has arrived. 6 days late. Got a score of old ICs off an ebay "estate sale". Lots of mid-late 70s vintage. Also had a 8080 cpu in the mix too with a lot of other related peripherals. I haven't checked any of these 8000 family chips (i could only read one in the original listing picture) but a few of the other logic chips checked good. Almost 200 ICs total. Spent 30 including shipping. Mainly bought them to play with since I used to have hundreds of ICs before I had to purge (long story, but it happened when I was a teen. I'm over 40 now).

[blueskull]

Update: The closest online appointment is tomorrow afternoon, and I went there anyways today to see if I can get an offline appointment and essentially jump the queue.

The doctors sent me home, stating if it were necessary for me to get a test, the doctors would have came to me, not the other way around.

So I guess I will have to test tomorrow. The doctors are very confident I will come back negative, but I just wanted to be absolutely sure.

As for my coworker, the guy in his building being taken was not tested positive, but the person the guy contacted was, so everyone in the guy's floor was put into a 7 day quarantine with 3 tests in between, and other floor occupants were put into a 3 day quarantine with 2 tests.

I was considered beyond tertiary, and was not asked to be quarantined, but I just wanted to play safe and asked for and was granted a solo office until my test report comes back.

Update 2: the guy in that building was CONFIRMED with recent foreign travel history. FML. Now I'm really worried.

Update 3: Confirmed female, from Kenya DR Congo, living on the 16th floor. My colleagues live on the 23rd and 8th floor.

[mansaxel]

Ganged variacs -- what are they used for???

My highschool auditorium had a large three-phase model of that for lights; installed in the early 70s, IIRC. Absolutely hum-free dimming, and a wonderfully smooth curve. I used to point this out to the thyristor dimmer fanboys, saying that there was a method of not contaminating my sound system...