What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[Mr.B]

I bought some vintage patent metal prints!
I got the 67.5cm x 48cm versions. They will pimp up my "lab"/office

Those are neat. Definitely good decor for the lab.

They are not just neat... They are a fantastic addition to the lab.

The whole collection of the small ones will set me back more than USD2200.
It is going to have to wait...

[bitseeker]

Thanks for the behind-the-scenes look, blueskull. Never realized things were still such a pain with credit cards in China (including being grandfathered into the mess).

[Cubdriver]

I snagged a 3430A (complete with HP badge and apparently both feet & tilting bail) for about $35 shipped

Aha! I figured it might have been you. Lucky I convinced myself not to go for it. Congrats! I look forward to seeing it all nice and clean.

Well, it arrived today, and is complete and in decent physical condition, with both feet and the tilting bail.  And, as shown in the listing, it does power up.  Unfortunately, it does NOT display any measurement when volts are fed to its input jacks.  If the input polarity is reversed, the '+' indicator goes out, but the '-' does not light...  Time to dig out the manual and attempt to shoot some trouble...

-Pat

[VK5RC]

I have a soft and warmly glowing spot for the 3430A - my first Nixie!

[bitseeker]

Time to dig out the manual and attempt to shoot some trouble...

Bummer it isn't fully operational. However, having all the bits and live tubes is a good place to be. I look forward to the 3430A repair thread!

[neo]

Time to dig out the manual and attempt to shoot some trouble...

Bummer it isn't fully operational. However, having all the bits and live tubes is a good place to be. I look forward to the 3430A repair thread!

Me too, i love anything nixie tube. Just ignore my wallet's screamin' and hollerin' when i see those pictures.

[W2NAP]

I have spent way too  much this last couple weeks.

ton of commercial two way radio stuff, also got some stuff to hopefully get this old school 1990s server going to play around with and just now bought a crystal tester kit (one trx-bench just put together)

[tablatronix]

One of these super cheap programmable smd resistor boards, the 3d printed base is a nice touch.
Impressive for the price.

[alm]

So basically a knock-off of Gerry Sweeney's design?

[tablatronix]

So basically a knock-off of Gerry Sweeney's design?

I wouldn't call it a knockoff, similar concept but not copied.

[bitseeker]

Yes, Gerry Sweeney's board "inspired" a lot of production of the bare PCB style of decade resistance and capacitance modules in China. This is the first time I've seen one with an enclosure like that.

[tautech]

Steel beams.........I've got some sheds to build.
Got them real cheap even though there were 20+ watchers, no one else bid. 



Gotta get the home now and welded how I need them.

[Muttley Snickers]

Forget the shed and knock up a big bridge instead, then I could visit more often.   

[tautech]

Forget the shed and knock up a big bridge instead, then I could visit more often.   

Then you Ockers would eat me out of house and home and probably buy all my stock too......now you don't want to piss off Charles at Trio do you. 

Remember Muttley, there's 'er indoors that can shoot and I wouldn't want you to put yourself at risk.
I'd have to leave a sign on the gate when she's out and it's safe to visit. 

[djos]

Got a Sensibo Sky today to replace the old Pod (existing customer upgrade deal) - it's definitely an improvement over the old pod system and it no longer requires expensive CR123A Lithium batteries.

[Gixy]

@Tablatronix,
Hi,
Do you have a link to the seller?

[BU508A]

@Tablatronix,
Hi,
Do you have a link to the seller?

I'm not Tablatronix but I think you can find all you want here:
https://gerrysweeney.com/seven-decade-programmable-resistor-a-low-cost-solution/

[julianhigginson]

*: This regulation gives me big trouble even till now. My Alipay account is connected to my mom's card since at the time I first shopped online I was 17, so I have to use my mom's card. Now, since my Taobao account uses my name, and my Alipay account uses my mom's name, I can't pass real name verification, so I can't sell things on Taobao. Taobao doesn't allow Alipay rebinding, so my Taobao account will be stuck at this condition forever. Now, I can start a fresh new account, but then I lose all transaction records (I have a perfect credit and transaction record), and the perks (such as instant refund, higher trust level and other perks) it provides me. What's funny is after moved to US, and my Alipay has been associated with my Wells Fargo card (as well as a Chinese card, both under my name), it still shows my mom's name on account owner section, and I still can't pass real name verification.

daaaaamn.... well, that's one way to stop account farming and reputation transfer!

Probably a good idea for you to start a 2nd account and use it for small things just to build it up, till it's eventually good enough to jump over to.

[deflicted]

*: This is not a good thing, IMHO. Nowadays Chinese consumers scam sellers very often. Usually someone will threat to leave a negative feedback in order to get partial or even full refund, or someone will buy silicon lottery kind of things (overclockable CPUs, LCDs, etc.) and bin the best and return the rest, which is unfair to other buyers as well as the seller. Recently there is a trend that people buying high end GPUs in bulk, mining for 7 days, and return them, so they make 7 days worth of free mining income, and then order another batch.

"Nature abhors a vacuum." --Aristotle

If there's any possible means of running a scam, someone will discover it and try it. If it turns out to be successful, then you'll get a million copycats doing it. 

[canibalimao]

It's a shame to see that kind of "activities" growing.
Portuguese people also like to scam ebay/AliExpress sellers saying that the items never arrived or "finding" some deffects to get the money back an keeping the items (stuff under 50$ isn't worth returning and sellers usually give partial or full refund without asking for the item). And then I see some guys questioning about the limitation that some sellers have when selling stuff to Portugal...
Even Italian guys are refusing to sell stuff to us 

[cdev]

I wonder why we cannot use a standard sigrok-compatible logic analyzer for USB? I vaguely remember trying to, a few years ago but I don't remember succeeding.

So it must not have been possible. 


IC.

 

Quote from: blueskull on Yesterday at 17:41:12

A USB analyzer. My wallet hurts, but I just happen to need one to continue debugging the bloody Blackfin+ USB controller. Writing a USB driver stack with a device which has cryptic datasheet is painful.

>

[alm]

For starters, most cheap logic analyzers do not support differential signals, so you would need a transceiver to convert the levels. Secondly, few Logic analyzers would have the sampling rate and depth to sample USB 2.0 high-speed. Even the Intronix Logic Port can only do 500 MS/s, which is too slow for a 480 MHz signal. Does Sigrok support any logic analyzers that go above 1 GS/s? Plus as far as I know Sigrok only has protocol decoders for low level USB protocols at low and full speed.

[aargee]

Obviously found the problem and spat the offending chip out. Neat.

[Towger]

mcHF 'Chinese' case from ebay.

[FrankBuss]

A Fluke 8842A:



I needed a good 5 digits multimeter for my 0.1% precision sum circuits I'm going to build (and probably sell) for Euroracks, so the last EEVblog video was just in time. No need to spend thousands of euros for a modern instrument, if this has the same or better spec.

Unfortunately, as Dave promised, because of his video, probably it was double the usual price (EUR 275), but it has the optional AC measurement unit, and the GPIB module as well, which will be very useful in combination with the Raspberry Pi Voltnuts platform later for creating characteristics curves, or automatic calibration with a simple Python script (for a +/-10V bipolar multichannel fast 16 bit ADC/DAC module I plan build). And it was calibrated, so I think the price is fair. Tested with a DMMCheck r3 from voltagestandard.com. The Fluke is probably more accurate than the voltage tester.

The case looks a bit brownish, but that's ok, same as with my vintage C64 computers. Maybe I'll use some retro-bright for it, too