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1
Dodgy Technology / Re: Solar Freakin' floating panels
« Last post by oxcart on Today at 02:25:11 pm »
Not the same plant though, India != Indonesia.
I'm aware of that, for  what i could find i think there's some country mixup, because the only solar freakin' floatin' plant by Masdar is in Indonesia https://masdar.ae/en/renewables/our-projects?&technology=Floating%20Solar%20PV
2
Test Equipment / DMM that beeps short and long in Diode Mode?
« Last post by dreico33 on Today at 02:15:58 pm »
Hellow guys, glad to be here.
I am looking for a DMM that does that , Beeps Short if the component is  ok beeps  long when is not.

What you would suggest me, i am on budget so i can  not afford too many $$.

Thank you very much.
3
Altium Designer / Re: ALTIUM Creating a pattern between unions
« Last post by tszaboo on Today at 02:12:44 pm »
You can do this easily if you assign them into rooms. Easiest is to use channel design. And then you arrange 1 channel, make the room nice rectangular, and then arrange rooms next to each other.
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/creating-multi-channel-design#displaying-the-designators-on-the-pcb
Unions is not really the right way to do this. You have to go higher in the hierarchy.
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Beginners / Continuity vs Ohms
« Last post by DannnyG on Today at 02:12:39 pm »
I recently watched a YouTube video where the technician was checking the output +&- (supposed to be dc) on a treadmill controller board.  (Board is not plugged in) He got .4 ohms and said that it was a direct short.  I'm using a treadmill board to practice using my multimeter because I retired a while back and got hooked on diddling with electronics.  I have no idea if it works or not and dont care at this point. Ive tested my board on the ohms setting of my MM and also got .4 ohms.  I set my MM to the continuity tone setting which also reads ohms and it gave no tone and OL?  I moved over to the ac input +&- and measured 345 ohms on the MM Ohms setting and 345 Ohms on the tone setting and got a tone.  Why am I confused about that?  Thanks for patience.
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Repair / Newly aqcuired Tektronix 2225
« Last post by vferdman on Today at 02:09:11 pm »
Hello, there. My first post here. I have been into electronics since my childhood in 1970's Ukraine where I assembled and tested many a radio receiver with my friends and generally geeked on solid state electronics while my dad had a side gig repairing tube TVs of soviet manufacture. In 1980 my family and I, as a teenager moved to USA where I graduated from university with a BSEE and have worked in US electronics industrial environments for many years until I began working more in software/firmware signal processing industry. I "grew up" on the likes of side button Fluke meters such as 8060A and Tektronix scopes, of which I have seen and worked with all ranges from simple desktop models to large cart beasts with plug-in modules and Polaroid camera attachments. I am no stranger to analog electronics and measurement equipment. I was in the labs when things were beginning to go digital and "Digital" was one of the names of our computer systems. In fact many of my friends worked at Digital at one time or another.

So, recently, after watching Dave's awesome video about Tektronix 2225 scope I have decided to try one. I do some vintage audio equipment restoration as a side thing. Old receivers and such. I have an old HP 1220A scope that still works enough for my purposes, but after watching the video about Tek 2225 I felt nostalgic for the old Textronix look and feel I learned my scope skills on. So I found one on eBay for about $150 shipped in very good shape. Yes, the days of $50 scopes are kind of gone and I really wanted the 2225 for some reason, not sure why. Probably because of Dave's video. In any case, I got it and it is in very good cosmetic shape, though very dusty inside. Things looked ok, but the usual noise on the trace, which I guess is very common to these scopes. Also, channel 2 had problems with trace stability. It would be ok one minute and then start floating off screen in vertical direction until it was gone and I couldn't get it back. After opening it up and gentle percussion of the socketed opamp chips I realized that the CH2 chip responded to percussion with a chopstick. So I pulled it and cleaned the contacts of the socket and re-inserted it and problem was solved. Very stable trace now and does not respond to chopstick tapping. Great. Now I am on to replacing the safety caps, of which there are only two I can see and both are Y 2200 pF. I checked the voltage rails and they look ok with only slightly out of spec on ripple in some. I ordered some new electrolytic caps to replace on the power supply and voltage rails. Hopefully will get this puppy operating properly. As of now it works ok besides the noisy traces that sometimes straighten out and become perfectly smooth. The screen is in great shape, no burnout (I have seen burnt out screens in labs!), bright and crisp. The scope is surprisingly light and the knobs do not have that amazing Tektronix heavy duty clicking feel. It seems to be a budget machine, but a very well designed and built one. Mine is made in England.

Anyway, I just wanted to write my first post and share my experience of obtaining a vintage piece of equipment that brigs memories of youth to me. Thank you for a wonderful forum and a great place to "hang out" for my electronic fun.

--
Vladimir
6
General Technical Chat / Re: Does anyone make good SSDs any more?
« Last post by madires on Today at 02:08:56 pm »
WD and SanDisk, today the same company for SSD production. Currently being sued for having produced external SSDs under both brand names which suddenly bricked and wiped the data on them. Also a scandal with critical firmware updates being needed for the SA510 line of WD branded internal drives.

And this one:
SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design and Manufacturing Flaws, Says Data Recovery Firm: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sandisk-extreme-pro-failures-are-due-to-design-flaw

So far all manufacturers had/have some issues. It's quite similar to things we have seen for classic spinning disks. Some product families are great, some need a firmware update, and some are junk. If your data is important to you make backups!

BTW, when buying an SSD make sure to buy from a reputable seller to reduce the risk of getting a counterfeit.
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Test Equipment / Re: Magnova oscilloscope
« Last post by 2N3055 on Today at 01:56:14 pm »
I doubt that resolution is going to be 14 digits...

There are off-the shelf DDS chip solutions that have 48bit tuning word. That is 281,474976710656e12 to you ...
A 35,5271367880050092936E-9 Hz resolution on 10MHz signal.
There is no technical reason why tuning word cannot 64 bit..
If it actually was that easy, then the low cost AWGs would be way more accurate than they are (and I have tested a whole bunch of these). Creating a single sine wave is relatively easy but when you throw different (arbitrary) waveforms, modulation and low jitter into the mix, things become way more complex. But that is beside the point I wanted to make about having proper function generator specifications.

How convenient is that your comment consists of part of my post you chose to ignore and not copy.  :-DD

And I told you before.
You error is that you are searching for AWG with NCO that will have accurate round (not fractional) divisions of external clock.

In your example if you slave an AWG to 10 Mhz Clock IN (to make it long term stable) and then use one channel of AWG as 10MHz reference for DUT and measurements, and other channel at 1Hz,
my two AWG i have here will hold that 1s edge within 3.4ps RMS (25ps P-P) and 6 ps RMS (48ps P-P) of 10MHz edge from CH1.  And that is at edge of what I can measure. It might as well be better.

It is about learning how to create results with what you have, not searching for equipment to fulfill your way of thinking.
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1L of Iso for 8 bucks, wow I should have ordered that, too!!
I also ordered same test leads and grabbers can't go wrong for that price.

I had planned to buy some better gear but thought I would have a play with the cheaper stuff before spending a fortune.   :-\
I also needed the IPA because I now feel dirty after buying UNI-T and OWON products, a litre bottle for each one I expect.   ::)

I also wanted to take full advantage of their free shipping on orders over $50, it's something that one doesn't really consider until you have to pay it.   :o
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Microcontrollers / Re: Memory model for Microcontrollers
« Last post by MK14 on Today at 01:50:21 pm »
I disagree, but my opinion is colored by my own experience, and having specialized in parallel and distributed computing (in HPC, simulations and such).

When you can separate the logical tasks for each core, the end result can be much simpler than the same functionality running on a single core.
The key difference is understanding and using the various mechanisms one can use for communications (and passing data) between the cores, and how to separate the "jobs" effectively.

In other words, you do need to learn/know more programming techniques, but it is worth it in the end.  Message passing, message queues and mailboxes, are extremely common, and very often used in systems programming especially in low-level graphics interfaces.  Inter-core interrupts (where code in one core causes an interrupt in a designated other core or all other cores) are also useful, but more for synchronization than data/message passing.  RPis use a mailbox interface for communicating between the VC and the ARM core, for example.  If you care to learn by a combination of learning the background idea/theory and then experiment, I assure you can get the hang of it quick.

It does require some experience to design the separation between logical workloads in a parallel/multi-core system effectively, though.
If we look at historical precedents, the first parallelization primitives in programming languages revolved around parallelizing loops and such, which really isn't that useful in real life; we just had to learn the better ways, eventually.

I don't think there are any right or wrong answers as such.  It is like many engineering things, whereby there are millions of different ways of skinning a cat.

A period of time, after I posted, what you quoted.  I partly changed my mind, because some real-time tasks, would actually benefit from the separation (partly like how you describe), but I was thinking more on the lines of.  One of the CPUs could have any intensive interrupt handling sections, with the corresponding timing jitter, and increases in maximum latency.
But the other core, could have few or no interrupts, and hence be able to have rather deterministic timings and progress through what it is supposed to do.

I see your point, which is a very good one.  Which (if I understood it correctly), is saying that splitting real life software tasks/jobs (presumably in some but not all cases), between different CPUs (or threads), can be a useful way of breaking/partitioning down a task, into efficiently sized 'chunks' for software developers, to handle.

Because single core performance (barring possible future developments/inventions, e.g. Quantum computers, although that would be more like a huge number of tiny cores, acting in parallel), is unlikely to speed up that much, because of laws of physics limitations, such as the speed of light and limits as to how small, low capacitance and fast, real life producible integrated circuits, can develop into.
Also, that tends to use disproportionately much more power, than lower frequency solutions.

Whereas, having an ever increasing number of cores, in the same processor package, for CPUs or graphics cards.  Tends to be cost, size and power efficient.  So could well be the way forward.

But there could be barriers, such as Amdahl law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
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Check out what I have scored on ebay - 35617EBS Dosimeter  https://www.ebay.com/itm/186416162087 there is one more for 228USD.  Zero information in the internet but inside it is the same K617 with additional bias board.  Cant figure out yet on which output this bias is applied and how.
They symptoms are the same as in my previous K617 - high input current 250fA with zero check disabled slowly going down to zero for 20-30 min.

Nice score!
Seems to be a very special 617.
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