Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Kosmic]

I will use the cloud myself but IaaS and open source only because that’s where the cost benefit is. If you lock yourself into an API it’s game over.

Being provider agnostic is possible but it's a bit more work. At work we use docker and kubernetes to create something like a PaaS to deploy our applications on the cloud, bare metal or on premise automatically. The interesting after effect is that we can now move our workload based on hosting price, to optimise our operation cost. We can even negotiate price with the providers.

[bd139]

     Doesn't anyone get seriously hurt doing that? I don't see any ambulances standing by. 

There are loads there believe me. I think there's at least 5-6 on standby and medical helpers. Lots of broken and dislocated limbs. Don't think anyone has died yet though.

I will use the cloud myself but IaaS and open source only because that’s where the cost benefit is. If you lock yourself into an API it’s game over.

Being provider agnostic is possible but it's a bit more work. At work we use docker and kubernetes to create something like a PaaS to deploy our applications on the cloud, bare metal or on premise automatically. The interesting after effect is that we can now move our workload based on hosting price, to optimise our operation cost. We can even negotiate price with the providers.

Yes that's the best end game. We do something similar at my current gig but with Hashicorp's stack and standard CentOS targets (no docker / LXC). However no cloud as we have a pile of racks in 3 DCs in London due to data security requirements.

The cloud was killed dead for this place by the recent Intel CPU vulnerabilities. You don't want to have to share a node with a bad actor.

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

[Kosmic]

Hey at least you lot don’t roll cheese down hills and try and chase it...

https://youtu.be/6fora0TmtnU

Yes cheese rolling pfff.

Here we grease a pig and try to catch it in mud

https://www.google.com/search?q=catch+the+pig&client=chrome-mobile&prmd=visn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit6sSt_erfAhVm7IMKHd8ODnEQ_AUoAnoECA0QAg&biw=800&bih=1280#imgrc=bb9vVfgBABn78M

[Kosmic]

Random question. Has anyone bought an OCXO off aliexpress? Need one for a (currently) top secret project.

Not ali but ebay. Somthing like that https://www.ebay.com/itm/1-Bliley-NV47A1282-NVG47A1282-10MHz-5V-Sine-Wave-OCXO-Crystal-Oscillator/332416522967?hash=item4d65919ad7:g:tyQAAOSwFEpakpUG:rk:1:pf:0

Surprisingly it's working pretty well. Not sure about long term stability though. Need take some times to monitor it with the 5335a.

So I did a quick test during the night and after a warmup of 5 hours it was monitored for 12 hours by my 5335A. the Bliley OCXO drifted 0.08 Hz. So it seem pretty stable.

I need to resolve my GPIB situation to record some nice curves 

[Specmaster]

Hey at least you lot don’t roll cheese down hills and try and chase it...

https://youtu.be/6fora0TmtnU

Yes cheese rolling pfff.

Here we grease a pig and try to catch it in mud

It looks to be a much safer event than cheese rolling, except for the pig that it is 

[Specmaster]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

You can say that again, I've been searching around looking for bargains and there's none around right now, plenty of stuff if you're prepared to pay stupid money for it though. 

[bd139]

Random question. Has anyone bought an OCXO off aliexpress? Need one for a (currently) top secret project.

Not ali but ebay. Somthing like that https://www.ebay.com/itm/1-Bliley-NV47A1282-NVG47A1282-10MHz-5V-Sine-Wave-OCXO-Crystal-Oscillator/332416522967?hash=item4d65919ad7:g:tyQAAOSwFEpakpUG:rk:1:pf:0

Surprisingly it's working pretty well. Not sure about long term stability though. Need take some times to monitor it with the 5335a.

So I did a quick test during the night and after a warmup of 5 hours it was monitored for 12 hours by my 5335A. the Bliley OCXO drifted 0.08 Hz. So it seem pretty stable.

I need to resolve my GPIB situation to record some nice curves 

That’s pretty good 

I ordered one off aliexpress in the end for a mere £12. Hopefully it’ll do the job.

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

You can say that again, I've been searching around looking for bargains and there's none around right now, plenty of stuff if you're prepared to pay stupid money for it though. 

Yep there’s a lot of stupid money stuff out there but nothing decent that isn’t totally f*cked. I’m tempted to take a risk on one item. It’s been shed stored but the usual bits aren’t rusty.

[tggzzz]

Hey at least you lot don’t roll cheese down hills and try and chase it...

You forgot...



... and I'll let others discover the wonders of dwyle (dwile) flonking.

Remarkably, we let these people vote.

[tggzzz]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

Not just fleabay.

The Peaker Pattinson auction that didn't happen in November is scheduled for January. But they are still taking entries and there's no sign of even a flysheet.

Yep there’s a lot of stupid money stuff out there but nothing decent that isn’t totally f*cked. I’m tempted to take a risk on one item. It’s been shed stored but the usual bits aren’t rusty.

That's because you are a cheapskate looking for something good that is totally undervalued A real addict^(TM) would buy something that was "suboptimal" merely for the extended pleasure of restoring it.

Don't forget the PP stuff is stored in a barn under hessian sacking, so lotsa rusty old stock there

[med6753]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

You can say that again, I've been searching around looking for bargains and there's none around right now, plenty of stuff if you're prepared to pay stupid money for it though. 

I've got a bid on something right now and I'm the only bidder. Not gonna say what it is! 

Auction ends tomorrow morning and I'll betcha it will be sniped from under my nose.   

[Kosmic]

I've got a bid on something right now and I'm the only bidder. Not gonna say what it is! 

Auction ends tomorrow morning and I'll betcha it will be sniped from under my nose. 

I only bid at the last second now with gixen (app proposed by mnem). Its working pretty well. I was able to snipe the Keithley 619 with that tool.

[mnementh]

What was developed commercially was so far from what we call FDM now as to be a completely different product. Numerous products, all suffering from the "SONY trying to own it" disease, each entirely devised as closed ecosystem. All different idiotic mechanisms to try and make 3DPrinting work like conventional printing where you had to buy your supplies from the printer manufacturer, only this time lock out the cartridge cloners for good.

Shocking that nobody could make it commercially viable with the same "consumable supplies that cost more by weight than gold" business model as inkjet printing.    FDM as we know it using off-the-shelf actuators, global-standardized filament sizes and formulas and platform-independent generic controllers was entirely devised by the hobbyist market.

What we really need now is a tertiary product that can directly print molds for metal-casting. I've already done lost PLA at my local Hackspace; while it is theoretically "amateur-able", there really needs to be something more straightforward and single-step to a usable mold, and so things like proper sprue and vent sizing/location can be part of the prep software and safe defaults preprogrammed.

Would be a total game-changer, even if you could only get down to like .4mm layer height, with something the size of a Tornado you could do real, usable machinable castings in a usable framework of time & assache. Many applications could STILL be usable roughcast.  We have small, cheap inductive kilns that can do a couple pints of non-ferrous metals on a benchtop already.

mnem
ZZZzzzZZZzzz...

Stratasys owned and exploited the patent. They still sell FDM printers today, so it seems to have earned them enough money to keep the technology on board. How about something like the link below for casting? I think that more than one manufacturer is doing something similar.

https://www.machinablewax.com/product.php?product=52

"Industrially viable" is not the same as "Commercially viable"; as in "Can you sell it to the public." Maybe I should have used different phrasing; but there certainly is a helluva difference between what you can sell to Heavy Industry, Aviation and Military contractors vs what you can sell even to the iCrowd.

Naahh..."lost wax" is functionally the same as "lost PLA". It's the old-school "pack it in green sand" foundry work stage we need to get rid of. Maybe some fusion of existing "3DP concrete" and "Sodium Silicate-CO2 Molding" processes... but that would probably be almost as messy as conventional foundry work, and pretty low precision.

mnem
*Off to lunch widda in-laws*

[bd139]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

Not just fleabay.

The Peaker Pattinson auction that didn't happen in November is scheduled for January. But they are still taking entries and there's no sign of even a flysheet.

Yep there’s a lot of stupid money stuff out there but nothing decent that isn’t totally f*cked. I’m tempted to take a risk on one item. It’s been shed stored but the usual bits aren’t rusty.

That's because you are a cheapskate looking for something good that is totally undervalued A real addict^(TM) would buy something that was "suboptimal" merely for the extended pleasure of restoring it.

Don't forget the PP stuff is stored in a barn under hessian sacking, so lotsa rusty old stock there

Yeah I was hoping to jump on that PP auction too. Very annoying.

As for the cheap skate, yes. The objective of my game is to “collect slack” which as defined by the subgenius movement is “something for nothing”. Ergo I don’t want a headache on my hands. While I quite like restoring stuff I am also slightly OCD about originality and I know not to hurt myself too hard in that space or it’ll cause Mr Grey Matter some problems. The Fluke 8012A I did the display on is a fine example. It was restore to its original glory but hides an unholy hell. I’m lurking for a dead 801x series now which has s good bezel and display but everything else is shafted just so I can get an original one out of it.

The item in question I am looking at is a rather nice one if it works and solves a whole class of problems I have at the moment which is the important bit. For me it has to be useful and cheap

I've got a bid on something right now and I'm the only bidder. Not gonna say what it is! 

Auction ends tomorrow morning and I'll betcha it will be sniped from under my nose. 

I only bid at the last second now with gixen (app proposed by mnem). Its working pretty well. I was able to snipe the Keithley 619 with that tool.

I find that sniping now is rarely worth it.  I usually just put what I’m willing to pay in about 4 seconds before end and then come here and whinge about losing it 

[Kosmic]

I find that sniping now is rarely worth it.  I usually just put what I’m willing to pay in about 4 seconds before end and then come here and whinge about losing it 

Yes if you remember about the auction that's fine.

I missed some good deals just because I forgot to bid

[bd139]

I’ve done that numerous times 

[mnementh]

People being so willingly locked into cloud type environments is a worrying development.

History rhymes: there was a precursor to the cloud...

Those of us with a long memory remember (remote) timesharing environments, single vendor machines and programming by the priesthood.

A major reason for the rapid rise of the IBM PC ecosystem is that users were able to prise their data out of the hands of the vendors and control it themselves.

  LOL... you use the term "control" VERY loosely here. Say what you want about the white labcoat priesthood; your data was kept secure... even against YOU if need be.

IT is recycling cold poop in 5 year or even shorter cycles, often with new buzzwords attached nobody really knows or dares asking the meaning of. There's no way people are going to remember lessons from the computer equivalent of the Rhyacian Period.

  ³. I couldn't have said it more succinctly myself.  Those who feed off the MBA crowd have adopted their ecology in order to be more efficient predators.

mnem
*Okay... gotta go before the wife breaks her foot off in my ass*

[Specmaster]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

Not just fleabay.

The Peaker Pattinson auction that didn't happen in November is scheduled for January. But they are still taking entries and there's no sign of even a flysheet.

Yep there’s a lot of stupid money stuff out there but nothing decent that isn’t totally f*cked. I’m tempted to take a risk on one item. It’s been shed stored but the usual bits aren’t rusty.

That's because you are a cheapskate looking for something good that is totally undervalued A real addict^(TM) would buy something that was "suboptimal" merely for the extended pleasure of restoring it.B

Don't forget the PP stuff is stored in a barn under hessian sacking, so lotsa rusty old stock there

I can't agree with the PP stuff, my first go at tipping my toe in one of their auctions netted me a rather lovely Fluke PM3390B that had lived inside a rather nice and cosy lab all of its life and I even got to pick it up from that lab in Cambridge 

[Specmaster]

I've got a bid on something right now and I'm the only bidder. Not gonna say what it is! 

Auction ends tomorrow morning and I'll betcha it will be sniped from under my nose. 

I only bid at the last second now with gixen (app proposed by mnem). Its working pretty well. I was able to snipe the Keithley 619 with that tool.

Yep, that gixen is your friend, or should I say was, it seems that too many of us are now using it that we actually bidding against other 

[Kosmic]

If someone is looking for triax cables I found some really cheap on eBay :

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Trompeter-8-triaxial-patch-TEI-14949-Pomona-2970-triple-banana/292499964015?_trkparms=aid=111001&algo=REC.SEED&ao=1&asc=20160908105057&meid=5ed96f15e2c84212bf0abb8b13373573&pid=100675&rk=5&rkt=15&sd=182601013782&itm=292499964015&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci:804dfb01-174f-11e9-b42c-74dbd18015f3%7Cparentrq:48060f1d1680ab6b9af77ffcfff5bc4e%7Ciid:1&redirect=mobile

8 feets for 10$. Who said triax was expensive 

Connectors need to be changed though.

[tggzzz]

Back on TEA .... ebay is DEAD I tell you. Totall flipping DEAD. It is depressing as I've got an empty credit card and a lot of bored!

Not just fleabay.

The Peaker Pattinson auction that didn't happen in November is scheduled for January. But they are still taking entries and there's no sign of even a flysheet.

Yep there’s a lot of stupid money stuff out there but nothing decent that isn’t totally f*cked. I’m tempted to take a risk on one item. It’s been shed stored but the usual bits aren’t rusty.

That's because you are a cheapskate looking for something good that is totally undervalued A real addict^(TM) would buy something that was "suboptimal" merely for the extended pleasure of restoring it.B

Don't forget the PP stuff is stored in a barn under hessian sacking, so lotsa rusty old stock there

I can't agree with the PP stuff, my first go at tipping my toe in one of their auctions netted me a rather lovely Fluke PM3390B that had lived inside a rather nice and cosy lab all of its life and I even got to pick it up from that lab in Cambridge 

Oh, I've got lots of stuff from them, including from their barn in Aunby.

Getting stuff stored at client sites is preferable, particularly if the stuff has been stored for many months in their open barn.

[med6753]

Beautiful sunny day today, but it is cold. -3 C but no wind so it's bearable. Good day to get the Honda Civic out of hibernation and drive it. Just for the shear joy of it. Why? Because it has a manual gearbox. I'm one of the very few American drivers who hate automatic gearboxes although I have owned several and the daily driver Honda CR-V is a 5 speed automatic. A sad fact is that the majority of American drivers have no idea how to drive a manual gearbox. If they see a car with 3 pedals they panic. I've even run into folks my age who always drove cars with automatics. It is a skill that's rapidly disappearing.

The automatic gearbox in the CR-V and me have an uneasy truce. I tolerate it but dislike it. Always seems to be in the wrong gear at the wrong time and want's to shift into overdrive as soon as possible for economy but makes the engine lug. It just begs for a 6 speed manual gear box but it's not even available. And that's a sad fact too. Most American cars are not available with a manual gear box except some performance cars and small SUV's.

The Civic is back in hibernation until I feel the need to break out again and drive a real car rather than an appliance.   

[0culus]

Beautiful sunny day today, but it is cold. -3 C but no wind so it's bearable. Good day to get the Honda Civic out of hibernation and drive it. Just for the shear joy of it. Why? Because it has a manual gearbox. I'm one of the very few American drivers who hate automatic gearboxes although I have owned several and the daily driver Honda CR-V is a 5 speed automatic. A sad fact is that the majority of American drivers have no idea how to drive a manual gearbox. If they see a car with 3 pedals they panic. I've even run into folks my age who always drove cars with automatics. It is a skill that's rapidly disappearing.

The automatic gearbox in the CR-V and me have an uneasy truce. I tolerate it but dislike it. Always seems to be in the wrong gear at the wrong time and want's to shift into overdrive as soon as possible for economy but makes the engine lug. It just begs for a 6 speed manual gear box but it's not even available. And that's a sad fact too. Most American cars are not available with a manual gear box except some performance cars and small SUV's.

The Civic is back in hibernation until I feel the need to break out again and drive a real car rather than an appliance.   

I've been strongly considering getting one of those sporty Subaru sedans. They can be had with a manual. You know the other advantage is that would be car thieves probably can't drive a manual either! 

[Specmaster]

After years of driving around London and sitting in more than my share of traffic jams for a living, I've opted for an automatic car and this is now my 3rd, the first was around 50 years ago. I used to arrive home when I was spending most of my time driving around London, with a very sore and aching left foot and leg through operating the clutch so much. Sometimes the traffic was so bad that it was almost impossible to pull away smoothly due to the clutch warping as a result of heat build up.

After years of campaigning to be allowed automatics for those working in London and being denied, I was finally granted my wish a few years before retiring. My current car also has the ability of being able to change gears manually with the "clutch" being automatic and I love it. Gear changes are so smooth and the only way you know a gear has been changed is by either looking at the dash instrument cluster or looking at the rev counter to see when the revs change.

Funny thing is though, that I can still get better MPG figures by driving in the manual mode than in automatic mode despite not having a heavy right foot. 

[med6753]

Beautiful sunny day today, but it is cold. -3 C but no wind so it's bearable. Good day to get the Honda Civic out of hibernation and drive it. Just for the shear joy of it. Why? Because it has a manual gearbox. I'm one of the very few American drivers who hate automatic gearboxes although I have owned several and the daily driver Honda CR-V is a 5 speed automatic. A sad fact is that the majority of American drivers have no idea how to drive a manual gearbox. If they see a car with 3 pedals they panic. I've even run into folks my age who always drove cars with automatics. It is a skill that's rapidly disappearing.

The automatic gearbox in the CR-V and me have an uneasy truce. I tolerate it but dislike it. Always seems to be in the wrong gear at the wrong time and want's to shift into overdrive as soon as possible for economy but makes the engine lug. It just begs for a 6 speed manual gear box but it's not even available. And that's a sad fact too. Most American cars are not available with a manual gear box except some performance cars and small SUV's.

The Civic is back in hibernation until I feel the need to break out again and drive a real car rather than an appliance.   

I've been strongly considering getting one of those sporty Subaru sedans. They can be had with a manual. You know the other advantage is that would be car thieves probably can't drive a manual either! 

I've heard of that happening, more than once. Car jacker goes to steal a car and suddenly realizes it's a manual gearbox and can't move it. I've even heard of auto mechanics who can't drive one and get the "old guy" to pull it into the bay for them. 

And here's another. When the Civic was still my primary driver I went to a hotel that had valet parking. I had to ask the kid if he could drive a manual and luckily his answer was yes. 

[bd139]

Mines a manual. Drive in and out of London all the time. Only problem is I can’t run in a straight line now because my left leg is bigger than the right