Author Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread  (Read 14550396 times)

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Offline 0culus

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51000 on: February 29, 2020, 02:08:30 am »
Sometimes "Jammy Git" is a relative term.  :-DD I scored an HP 85052A 3.5mm calibration kit for considerably under 2 kilobucks. the previous owner made up the floppy disk to work with 8510C; the kit has the original cal constant tape as well. Seriously, though, scoring one of these complete for under 5k is an accomplishment unto itself.

...unfortunately actually getting the VNA to go with it is going to be a while due to other finance considerations, but at least now I have a nice cal kit so don't have to worry about finding a VNA that has one.  :-+
 
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Online Kosmic

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51001 on: February 29, 2020, 02:33:01 am »
Sometimes "Jammy Git" is a relative term.  :-DD I scored an HP 85052A 3.5mm calibration kit for considerably under 2 kilobucks. the previous owner made up the floppy disk to work with 8510C; the kit has the original cal constant tape as well. Seriously, though, scoring one of these complete for under 5k is an accomplishment unto itself.

...unfortunately actually getting the VNA to go with it is going to be a while due to other finance considerations, but at least now I have a nice cal kit so don't have to worry about finding a VNA that has one.  :-+

Look really nice with the wood box and all !  :-+
 
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Online Kosmic

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51002 on: February 29, 2020, 03:58:47 am »
My new prototype of the Jim Williams pulse generator. This time in a proper enclosure.





Was previously reaching 965ps on the breadboard. Now with smd components (minus the pcb ;D) and properly mounted, I get 290ps on a 50\$\Omega\$ load.



Just for fun, through my cheap Chinese 500Mhz probe. It's actually not that bad (687ps is around 509Mhz).

« Last Edit: February 29, 2020, 04:17:51 am by Kosmic »
 
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Offline 0culus

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51003 on: February 29, 2020, 04:16:36 am »
Nice results, Kosmic! There's another hack you can try to further reduce inductance of the whole setup. The case of the transistor is connected to collector (check me on that) and you can snip the lead off and use the case directly. Here's a pic of my last prototype done Manhattan style on a copper board.
 
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Online Kosmic

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51004 on: February 29, 2020, 04:21:49 am »
Nice results, Kosmic! There's another hack you can try to further reduce inductance of the whole setup. The case of the transistor is connected to collector (check me on that) and you can snip the lead off and use the case directly. Here's a pic of my last prototype done Manhattan style on a copper board.

Yes you told me that previously. In my case was easier to not use the case since I use the pin to mount C1. Just to be sure I added a joint between the case and the pin.
 

Offline bitseekerTopic starter

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51005 on: February 29, 2020, 07:04:21 am »
The corona virus hysteria was cranked up a notch in North America today. The conference I was supposed to attend this month in San Francisco was cancelled and the company I work for just decided to cancel all travelling of their employees. On top of that if I leave the country (for vacation ?) I need to work from home for 2 weeks before returning to the office  :o

I'm scare to catch a common cold now!

I got a similar email at work today, too. If you come back from a "hot spot", then it's two-week self-quarantine before returning to work.

And then there's the stock market. Oof! What a week.
« Last Edit: February 29, 2020, 07:06:07 am by bitseeker »
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Online beanflying

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51006 on: February 29, 2020, 09:08:39 am »
The US stock market was due for a correction so pick your excuse and the speculators love a crisis to make a $  :horse: Not to mention what spooked it in the first place. Miracle @ 1600 :palm:

Fresh air and Sunshine after re aligning my Laser and testing it. I have a bunch of 6mm Acrylic to cut next week so the poor little 40W needs all the tweakage it can. 4.5mm Acrylic Router Template test cut.

Only 10 more corners to do .....

BTW Do I need to get out of Bed early tomorrow for Discord or can I  :=\ ?
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Offline tautech

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51007 on: February 29, 2020, 09:11:49 am »
BTW Do I need to get out of Bed early tomorrow for Discord or can I  :=\ ?
Get your sorry arse up Bean....and limeys too !  :horse:

12 hrs to Discord reminder !
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Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51008 on: February 29, 2020, 09:52:28 am »
I'll be there.  :-+
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Online AVGresponding

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51009 on: February 29, 2020, 11:13:06 am »
I'll be there, if I'm not too heavily wankered and/or playing FFIX (which makes me lose track of time).
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51010 on: February 29, 2020, 11:18:27 am »
I will be there this week without having to disappear periodically  >:D
 

Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51011 on: February 29, 2020, 11:20:17 am »
I will be there this week without having to disappear periodically  >:D

Yep, order in Chinese or something. No cooking.  :-DD
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51012 on: February 29, 2020, 11:29:11 am »
My eldest is cooking lasagne today so should be ok  :-DD
 

Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51013 on: February 29, 2020, 11:30:26 am »
Famous last words.  :P :-DD
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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51014 on: February 29, 2020, 11:57:39 am »
I should be there as well again this week, and maybe even with a microphone if I can find it in time, in the meantime I have so eBay sales to wrap and dispatch.
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Online Wolfgang

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51015 on: February 29, 2020, 12:00:16 pm »
Well done ! Without SMD, it does not get a lot better than that.
 

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51016 on: February 29, 2020, 12:25:10 pm »
Well...

The 7150 was easier to fix than I expected...

When I disassembled it to inspect the LEDs, I discovered that one of the pins that connect the display panel to the main board was bent out of shape and not connecting.
So, I (very) gently coaxed it back into shape, reconnected everything, and gave it a burl:

Tadaa!

The offending pin sits on its own, shunned by other pins:

Perhaps that's why it was missed, who knows?

Anyway, since it now works, and I quite like the subdued effect (the blue/white LEDs in that video looked really bright and garish to me), it's no longer in the repair queue.

Thanks to Specmaster for the yt link, it was useful. Someone should show that guy how to edit though   :-X
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Offline Zucca

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51017 on: February 29, 2020, 12:28:12 pm »
@med6753 Why mint is slow. Once there was unix. It worked on really slow CPUs that cost 10x the amount of usual ones and lagged out all the time. Then along came the optimising compilers and stuff and faster CPUs and it became usable and productive. GNU came along and decided that all these tools were closed source and too expensive and built their own from the ground up but couldn't and still can't to this day throw a kernel together that works. Linus came along and threw together a kernel (Linux) and some clever folk glued all the GNU stuff to it. Circa 1998-2002 this was pretty good. It mostly just worked and was fast as the corporations left it alone and the hardware was simple. However GNU liked to do interesting work so they buried more and more features into these tools which eventually made them fat steaming turds.  Then along came Redhat and Freedesktop and decided to try and turn the entire thing into an every day usable desktop for the average user. This went through two major iterations of attempting to cram CORBA into it and adding layers of bloat to the top of Xwindows (Miguel now a Microsoft employee and pouring his fire into .net). Eventually Redhat managed to ship this turd as a desktop product, bought up all the Linux developers and now keeps them huddled away. Eventually someone in a boardroom and a whiteboard at Redhat decided that OSX and .Net was sexy and attempted to cram all that shit into the product. To do this they "standardised" on various bits of nasty which roughly emulated commercial software environments that none of their staff even looked at or understood, hired some LSD popping eejits to do the HCI side of things and kicked this out of the door. Now this was a tangled pile of shit so they thought "hey lets write a tangled pile of shit manager", hired the one guy who failed to produce an audio routing daemon that worked properly for a decade and now we have systemd. Due to marketing share the other religions had to comply with this or lose their food source so along comes Canonical and ships that pile of shit on top of their pile of shit and kicks out a more user friendly version of it "Ubuntu". Now because they were so big and successful they became targets for getting sued by people for shipping commercial software with their distribution so they don't bother and a lot of rough corners exist because they spent so long trying to reinvent another wheel for their brand of religion. So along comes Mint who try and smooth out all the rough corners and to do this they just shovelled more bloated turds on top.

So basically Mint is slow because as an engineering cultural phenomenon and not a cohesive operating system we threw 20 years of quality software engineering away to make something shiny because Apple and self interest by the developers but corporate overlords gave it to clueless tech personalities who just built more layers on top. So really we have a full whack orchestra of people playing with instruments made of mud, straw and shit under it all that no one truly knows how it works other than some guys at Redhat who everyone is now subject to and no one is able to fix the status quo. It's slow because it's bloated and poorly engineered.

You should write a book, when you retire in that isolated place you are dreaming of.
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51018 on: February 29, 2020, 02:26:52 pm »

The offending pin sits on its own, shunned by other pins:


What kind of *&£$%&^% puts a Billy-no-mates pin in isolation like that on a board? It's a design that almost guarantees that you'll fsck up one of these the first time you work on it and waste 2 hours trying to find the problem.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51019 on: February 29, 2020, 02:29:47 pm »
Started electrolytic capacitor replacement on the Tek Type 191 Signal Generator. There are 3 cans in this instrument.

The first one was easy to get to. A single 510uf/50V.

Before.



After.



These are the remaining 2. On left dual 40uf/500V. Access pretty good. On the right a 510uf/50V with bottom access completely inaccessible because of those ceramic strips. Somehow I'll get in there and that can is going to have be pulled and the replacement installed on opposite side. It's gonna be a stinker.

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Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51020 on: February 29, 2020, 02:32:26 pm »

The offending pin sits on its own, shunned by other pins:


What kind of *&£$%&^% puts a Billy-no-mates pin in isolation like that on a board? It's a design that almost guarantees that you'll fsck up one of these the first time you work on it and waste 2 hours trying to find the problem.

Apparently lots of *&$%&^% do it. The Tek 485 vertical board has one single in the middle of the board and is strictly by feel to install.
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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51021 on: February 29, 2020, 02:46:10 pm »
Yeah, as long as you're not a *&£$%&^% engineer, its fine. Thats why it is always advisable to make sure that you can get a service manual before snipping that bargain. When I got my 7150's, I made sure the service manual was obtainable for them, then you're supposed to be ready for these little quirks that could otherwise ruin your day. >:D :popcorn: 
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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51022 on: February 29, 2020, 02:52:31 pm »
The offending pin sits on its own, shunned by other pins:   
What kind of *&£$%&^% puts a Billy-no-mates pin in isolation like that on a board? It's a design that almost guarantees that you'll fsck up one of these the first time you work on it and waste 2 hours trying to find the problem.

My guess would be so that the LED BL system and its entire BOM could be easily deleted to make a less expensive version without retooling; just omit a population step.  :o

Effing bean counters man... They MAKE us do stoopit shit like this.  :palm:

mnem
« Last Edit: February 29, 2020, 02:57:32 pm by mnementh »
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Offline med6753

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51023 on: February 29, 2020, 03:40:30 pm »
More progress on the Type 191. The dual 40uf/500V caps installed. Did a quick power up check and all is well. Now on to the last one which is going to be a PITA.

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Online AVGresponding

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #51024 on: February 29, 2020, 03:46:41 pm »

The offending pin sits on its own, shunned by other pins:


What kind of *&£$%&^% puts a Billy-no-mates pin in isolation like that on a board? It's a design that almost guarantees that you'll fsck up one of these the first time you work on it and waste 2 hours trying to find the problem.

Apparently lots of *&$%&^% do it. The Tek 485 vertical board has one single in the middle of the board and is strictly by feel to install.

Hope there's no HV caps in the vicinity of that...
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