What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[McBryce]

My first EEVBlog product arrived this week, an EEVBlog 121GW. Overall I'm pretty impressed with the meter, however one negative thing does stand out (mainly because Dave always makes such a big thing of it in his reviews of other meters): The continuity buzzer is painfully slow to react. So much so, that the meter is definitely not suitable for reverse engineering, when you want to slide the probe across the pins of a chip to find a connection.

Surely this could have been improved?

McBryce.

[Ground_Loop]

My new and very nice set of BK kelvin leads arrived. Nice addition to the DM6500.

[ChristofferB]

A couple of Cremat charge sensitive preamplifiers for nuclear spectroscopy!

Litterally just in/out/power pins

CR-110 (1.4 mV/femtocoulombs!!) For PIN diodes and the like.


CR-113 (1.3 mV/picocoulomb) for proportional counters and PMTs

They're super neat!

[SeanB]

Old disk drives make great music instruments.

Now, if you could fit the required HP scanjet into the case as well it would be a portable Floppotron.....

[beanflying]

Brought a small Granite Surface plate and a small XY table for my drill seems how my Winter Holidays options are now NIL thankyou Plague so I may as well spend the $ .....

Table looks better than the average swill but I will take a close measure up on the new plate 

[dl6lr]

Bought one of the cheap chinese desoldering stations ZD-915 with pump in it, as I have no pressured air for my old Weller in the house. Surprisingly all mains cables were isolated, in good shape and ground wire was present. Seems to work quite well.

[duckduck]

Bought one of the cheap chinese desoldering stations ZD-915 with pump in it, as I have no pressured air for my old Weller in the house. Surprisingly all mains cables were isolated, in good shape and ground wire was present. Seems to work quite well.

Make sure to check out this thread: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/zd-915-(ss-331)-conversion-to-24v-and-other-tweaks/

[armandine2]

following Ben Eater's small hand tool recommendations, I have been getting cheap and not so cheap strippers to complete the trio of cutter, pliers and stripper.

One arrived today - Brand: Dorman - made in China. The right size but lacks a quality feel and return spring, blacking is a bit patchy.

[Miyuki]

  Need to hack into some SPI and I2C hope this thing will work
What a time we live in. It cost almost nothing

[beanflying]

idle hands are the devil’s tools

During a 90 minutes of on hold waiting for a plague jab appointment I seem to have evilbayed AGAIN 

Added a set of Indexing Collet holders and a full set of collets to suit. For any Aussies in 'need' of a collet set very good price ex Melbourne here eBay auction: #163451787031 sub $130 delivered with evilbay plus discounts and way better than ex China.

[Red Squirrel]

Not today but I recently bought 40 acres of offgrid land.   Goal is to eventually build a homestead, maybe move there.    Took the pic today.  Not exactly electronics related but figured I'd share.



A bit more electronics related, very recently also bought a 3kw inverter which came in today. It's from Amazon so it's a big gamble, I'll have to put it through some stress testing.



I kind of need a 24v power supply to drive it, so I also bought 4 golf cart batteries:



The charge controller I have can do 12 or 24 volt so will just be switching everything to 24v.  Might rewire the solar panels so they're in series, but I might be ok with them as is.

It may seem ass backwards but the inverter and batteries will be for my shed as the current solar system is kind of just thrown together on the floor not even properly wired.  This new one will be properly wired in a nice cabinet on the wall with a small sub panel and designed to also act as backup power for the house once I run a feed to a separate panel inside the house too.   The old system will be going in the black box below which is a portable system which I'll bring to the off grid property.   Basically to charge power tools, chainsaw etc when I'll be working there.  Once I actually have something built then I may swap the systems around or at least the inverters.  So in a way putting that inverter in the shed will be a good way to test it and if it works well I might even just buy another.  They have good reviews, but kinda have to take that with grain of salt on Amazon.

With all this spending lately I can't afford a haircut.    :p

[shakalnokturn]

A Burster Resistomat 2318 milliohmmeter.
Due to poor packing and old plastics it arrived with a shattered front frame.

I don't have much experience with Kelvin clip measurements but noticed that rotating one clip 180° gives about 3mΩ difference on the measurement.
Do any milli / micro ohmmeters do this automatically allowing for zero adjustments with current injection and voltage measurement "diagonal" or "parallel" WRT the clips and average out both while actually measuring a conductor?
(If that makes any sense?)

[DC1MC]

I can proudly say I have 504 original Agilent products. and most of them are very bright 

[PaulAm]

The other day I pulled the trigger on a Flue 8100A nixie dmm.  Paid too much but if you're going to use a bench meter I'll go for the cool factor.  No doubt it's another repair project.

Unrelated to that, I just bought a pallet of used solar cells with the aim of eventually going off-grid (If you connect to the utility, they will tell you the maximum amount of power you can connect and they now charge you for every watt that crosses their meter!)  That's a long term project but the panels were about a third the price of new ones and I couldn't pass them up.  The real money will be in the batteries, inverters and control electronics.

[mansaxel]

The other day I pulled the trigger on a Flue 8100A nixie dmm.  Paid too much but if you're going to use a bench meter I'll go for the cool factor.  No doubt it's another repair project.

Unrelated to that, I just bought a pallet of used solar cells with the aim of eventually going off-grid (If you connect to the utility, they will tell you the maximum amount of power you can connect and they now charge you for every watt that crosses their meter!)  That's a long term project but the panels were about a third the price of new ones and I couldn't pass them up.  The real money will be in the batteries, inverters and control electronics.

Here, the utility is required to swap your meter if you become a "micro-producer". There are tax incentives as long as you stay under 63A mains fuses (this is Real Voltage Land, so that's 3 phases at 400V, i.e ~43KW as three 1-phase loads (most houses here are 3-phase 25A). There are a few other limits like KWh per year and profit limits; once you go past them you're a small business and must deal with VAT et al. If you're a farmer, or like Red Squirrel, own a piece of forest, you already are in small business land; you can't do those only as a ordinary worker/salary person.

[duckduck]

I bought a rack-mount power strip with individual switches. It's a Pyle PDBC70. It cost about USD60. I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised that it was well constructed. I am using it to switch power to my test equipment (and powered speakers) that have power switches on the back. I'm looking at you, Riden RD6006P and Rigol DG1022  I'm also switching a high-voltage power supply -- HP 6209B (to make it more difficult to accidentally switch on) and my soldering iron (to make it easier to ensure that it is off). I also bought some more NiMH 9v batteries so I can remove the potentially leaky alkaline battery from my DER DE-5000 LCR meter.

https://www.pyleaudio.com/sku/PDBC70/15-Amp-Power-Supply-Power-Strip-with-1800VA-Rack-Mountable-9-Outlets

EDIT:

URL above is dead. Here's another:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1011786-REG/pyle_pro_pdbc7019_rack_mountable_power.html

[rsjsouza]

I bought a rack-mount power strip with individual switches. It's a Pyle PDBC70. It cost about USD60.I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised that it was well constructed.

Pretty nice; I have a theory that, for power strips sold in the marketplace, usually the least fancy of all are the best technically speaking.

[AaronLee]

I bought a rack-mount power strip with individual switches. It's a Pyle PDBC70. It cost about USD60.I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised that it was well constructed.

Pretty nice; I have a theory that, for power strips sold in the marketplace, usually the least fancy of all are the best technically speaking.

I don't really care about if my power strips are fancy or not. But functionally those Pyle's look to be much better than mine which have the typical socket and switch all on the top side. I'd much prefer that Pyle design, so I can mount it like that photo and have all my power cables out of the way, and easily see/switch the devices I want to. I can't imagine it costs much more to make a power strip like that either compared to the typical design. Unfortunately, I've never seen Pyle's or anything else of that style here, and not keen on paying an arm and a leg in shipping/customs fees.

[tautech]

20 assorted DSO's. 

[gnavigator1007]

Got a Pace ads200 and the MT-200. Also got a new microscope. Need to rearrange things on the bench, but the new microscope is life-changing for me already. Hoping I like the soldering station. Any ADS200 owners care to share their most loved and used tips? 

[rsjsouza]

Got a Pace ads200 and the MT-200. Also got a new microscope. Need to rearrange things on the bench, but the new microscope is life-changing for me already. Hoping I like the soldering station. Any ADS200 owners care to share their most loved and used tips?

Congratulations. Microscopes and good quality loupes are life changers, especially as we get more *ahem* "seasoned".

[Smoky]

I was looking for a solid frequency counter for basic audio repair. I found these AN/USM 459 (HP 5328A) counters on Craigslist.

They are used but were rebuilt and vacuum sealed from 2013 in foil from the Tobyhanna Army Depot Calibration Center. includes options H99, 10. Oven oscillator, GPIB, and "C" channel (500 MHz). Each comes with extra fuses, extender cards, a power cord, and a printout of the calibration results.







The seller in Columbus, Ohio still has one or two left. I bought two since he's asking $45 each.

https://columbus.craigslist.org/ele/d/galloway-hp-frequency-counter/7352928596.html#

[CJay]

I was looking for a solid frequency counter for basic audio repair. I found these AN/USM 459 (HP 5328A) counters on Craigslist.

They are used but were rebuilt and vacuum sealed from 2013 in foil from the Tobyhanna Army Depot Calibration Center. includes options H99, 10. Oven oscillator, GPIB, and "C" channel (500 MHz). Each comes with extra fuses, extender cards, a power cord, and a printout of the calibration results.







The seller in Columbus, Ohio still has one or two left. I bought two since he's asking $45 each.

https://columbus.craigslist.org/ele/d/galloway-hp-frequency-counter/7352928596.html#

they're worth more than that for the oscillator alone.

[Cubdriver]

My latest evilbay find arrived today.  This popped up last week; I'd NEVER seen one of these so snagged it immediately:


It's a bit smaller and more delicate than the cobalt blue and HP ones, but still quite nice.

-Pat

Edit - had intended to post this in the TEA thread, so for context, here are pics of the Tek and HP mugs I mentioned above:

[armandine2]

possibly due to w2aew's Mrs - I now have another way to write and draw