Recent Posts

1

General Technical Chat / Re: $20,000 dollars of software or licences on a thumbdrive ?

« Last post by Infraviolet on Today at 10:28:32 pm »

"Thumbdrives, especially modern ones, are 99% crap"
And I swear they get worse year by year, I've USB sticks from the 2010s still perfectly working despite enough gigabytes copied on/deleted/replaced to cover the capacity several times, versus drives from the last few years which die before they're even full once.

2

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: How is a motor run capacitor sized?

« Last post by johansen on Today at 10:26:17 pm »

OTOH, if you can get the exact replacement for $30, that might be the way to go.

you can get a film cap which would last forever for that price.

3

Programming / Re: Angle wrapping in code, "easy" problem, need to double check

« Last post by ejeffrey on Today at 10:25:49 pm »

For floating point the % operator isn't defined and you need to use fmodf and friends.  They broadly work the same way.  One trap is that negative zero is an allowed result which may need to be special cased if you want to ensure that the result is always non negative and strictly less than 360. 

4

Test Equipment / Re: Heads up on MicSig Probe

« Last post by KungFuJosh on Today at 10:24:30 pm »

That's a decent deal. I have the same probe, but I got it 6 years ago for $115. That's almost $150 now, right? lol

5

Security / Re: Microsoft repackages apps with a telemetry .NET wrapper

« Last post by Infraviolet on Today at 10:23:41 pm »

"Actually you can..."
There might be a simpler way, Windows locked away inside a VM, with some very strict firewalling of any potential telemetry which was trying to escape the VM performed by a trustworthy Linux host OS. That would be a solution for anyone needing to run a program on Windows which wasn;t Wine compatible (unfortunately not that great a fraction of Windows exe programs are Wine compatible, I'm lucky with the few legacy Windows programs I use).

6

Security / Re: Microsoft repackages apps with a telemetry .NET wrapper

« Last post by bd139 on Today at 10:18:56 pm »

From an EU point of view (GDPR) the rules for telemetry are quite clear. Telemetry can't be forced upon the user, i.e. the application has to run also when users deny the collection of telemetry data. Users have to be informed about all the details (what, why, how long stored, and so on).

And yet you cannot use Windows without telemetry.

Actually you can. If you have Windows 2021 LTSC IoT Enterprise Edition with a specific carefully configured GPO, the blessing of three wizards, cast some runes upon a dead chicken, you will get no telemetry until the next time you run windows update.

7

PCB/EDA/CAD / Re: JLCPCB alters soldermask without any notice

« Last post by Infraviolet on Today at 10:17:32 pm »

I had an issue once where JLC cut out a milled slot in a weird way such that it was at an angle to what my gerber specified. I was using the confirm-before-production option, but the gerber I confirmed for was correct, so this error got introduced after my review and confirmation and it wasn't known by me until the boards showed up. JLC had a quality complaint facility in their website, I sent them a photo of the PCB slot that arrived vs what it looked like in my original gerber and they gave a refund (money off next order) on those boards from among a larger order. With luck you might be able to get that from them for this soldermask ****-up.

8

Other Equipment & Products / Re: T12 STM32 V2.1S Soldering Station Controller - schematic etc.

« Last post by floobydust on Today at 10:16:54 pm »

I thought the 245 thermocouple has 2 junctions and thus too much output for the usual T12 op-amp configuration.

9

Test Equipment / Re: Agilent 4338B adjustment program

« Last post by TheDefpom on Today at 10:16:52 pm »

yeah me too, I just purchased a broken unit (not in my hands yet so it may not even need it).

10

Test Equipment / Re: New Zoyi multimeter+oscilloscopes - ZT-70xS, up to 50MHz/250MSps (nov 2022)

« Last post by Vapor8 on Today at 10:16:32 pm »

I did some tests with the Zoyi and some other meters I have access to. The AD780 was trimmed to give a 2.5000V output on the (old) HP desktop meter. The film capacitors were measured with an Agilent 4294A impedance analyser at 10KHz. The table shows that my 703S gives the results closest to the ones by the more advanced equipment. Yet most of the meters tested do well enough for most situations. Even the 10$ T7 component tester gives great results!

Would you mind sharing what version firmware the Zoyi 703S used in your testing has? Thanks!