Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tautech]

Reorgansied some TE today. It's now on a shelf and connected to a power strip. Much better than the floor where some had been.

Top left, WTF is that ? 

[Cerebus]

Another one
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Agilent-multimeter-U1241AN/265068611383?  £200 when a new U2141B is only $220 

I've seen several Agilent handheld DMMs priced like that recently. My suspicion is that the unknowing associate cachet with the HPAK names and price accordingly. Whereas those of us in the know may prize HPAK bench instruments and have a bench/cupboard-of-doom/box-room full of them, but we HPAK lovers have Fluke handheld DMMs.

[Cerebus]

Reorgansied some TE today. It's now on a shelf and connected to a power strip. Much better than the floor where some had been.

Top left, WTF is that ? 

Syncro test set? (Guess)

[Robert763]

Reorgansied some TE today. It's now on a shelf and connected to a power strip. Much better than the floor where some had been.

Top left, WTF is that ? 

Syncro test set? (Guess)

It's a Smiths synchro test set will indicate tha angle of of an input signal or generate a  signal. The dial has two pointers one 0-360 degrees per revolution  and the other every 10 degress. It will also run at a rate set by the 10 turn pot at top left. This is important for testing things like heading indicators. Will work with 110V or 26V reference systems and has a 10:1 output on the rear. It this case "synchro" is a 400Hz angulat transmission / instrumentation system manly used on aircraft. One standard is ARINC 407.

[bd139]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

[mansaxel]

Another one
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Agilent-multimeter-U1241AN/265068611383?  £200 when a new U2141B is only $220 

I've seen several Agilent handheld DMMs priced like that recently. My suspicion is that the unknowing associate cachet with the HPAK names and price accordingly. Whereas those of us in the know may prize HPAK bench instruments and have a bench/cupboard-of-doom/box-room full of them, but we HPAK lovers have Fluke handheld DMMs.

I have both. The 974A shares duties with my MetraHit 25, but yes, I fit your description in that I have more Fluke DMMs than any other brand. As of today I have a total of 5 Flukes, one each of 110, 123, 8022B, and not one but two 8060A; the second one I won just 5 minutes ago;  sniped myself into 315SEK plus domestic shipping for a good-looking 8060A, an AVO Multiminor, and a worthless Hung Chang toy.

My wife and I will celebrate 15 years soon. You all see that I'm gathering presents, right? She'll love the Multiminor. Also sniped an alleged-working first-model TI30 (red LED display) with pouch and manual for ~160SEK. She once (as in 10+ years ago) said that TI is the only calculator for her. I remember. And to paraphrase mnem; "I try to get her".

[Robert763]

The twin pointer dials are very "Smiths". they also used them on some phase angle voltmeters. There was one big 19" 5U one that had two of the dials to show I & Q voltages among other things. Trouble is that they were dedicated to specfic test rigs. They also had lots of weird minature relays that are unobtainium.

[mnementh]

   Know what you need now med...? A 454. 

I had the opportunity yesterday but declined. He had a "semi" working 454 plus two duff units for another $50 USD. Decided against it. For now. 

Know thyself. 

mnem
*3D-print-illating*

[mnementh]

we were coming out of walmart last evening after our normal saturday visit to the family restaurant.

swmbo said.  "hey.....whats wrong with your bumper?"  sure enough.  the gap between the drivers side rear end cap and the rear panel was about an inch wider than on the passenger's side.  shit.  looked really hard and could see a mark on the plastic step cover where something had whacked it. (it looked like it had been that way a while, but there was no real visible damage).

remembered how easy it was to fix a bumper on my 1968 volkswagen beetle and decided to at least investigate.

so my fat ass was under the truck early this morning.  what a cluster fuck.  bumpers are not just a piece of metal these days.  this one is made up of two big honeycomb plastic end caps, a big plastic step cover, and a long stamped steel plate.  getting it apart is a mystery of hidden or unreachable clips, bolts, and snaps.  just getting the step cover off took an hour.  (after i found the final clip hidden behind the license plate).  after another 30 minutes when the steel plate was finally off i could see a slight bend where the horizontal and vertical pieces were spot welded together.  spend 30 minutes carefully bending, hammering, and prying the damn thing back into what looked like the right shape.  45 minutes later it was back together and it passed inspection by the little woman.   the drivers side gap is still about a 3/16 inch too wide but you really have to run back and forth comparing the port and starboard sides to notice it.

oh......and it was raining the whole time.  but the truck was backed about a foot into the open garage door.

makes me wish for the days of gluing finger stock back in hp8569b rotors.

almost as painful....but not quite.  (working on automotive bullshit puts me in a mood).

Yer givin' me bad PTSD flashbacks of patching my PT Cruiser up after hitting a cat the size of a middleweight dog...

mnem
Fixers gotta fix...

[nixiefreqq]

hey robert

are those flukes 8920's or 22's.

you guys really gotta' stop posting these pics.

now i am on the hunt for fluke rf meters.

[mnementh]

   Reorganised some TE today. It's now on a shelf and connected to a power strip. Much better than the floor where some had been.

Ahhh... so you have Huey and Louie. Dewy's the blue one; we all know where he is. 

mnem

[mnementh]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

Yeah... I've got one of their LUMIX DMC-TS20 snappy cams; I only got it cuz $15 at the thrift and I was curious. I kept it cuz ruggedized/waterproof to 10 meters. OTOH, it has horrible noise in low-light conditions... so what the fuck good is it underwater or out in the rain...?

mnem
Things that make you go "Hmmmmm...."

[nixiefreqq]

isn't that the bastard who killed john wayne?

(guess he must be a pretty good actor for me to still hate him after all these years)

[Ice-Tea]

I'm deeply confused. I had a Schlumberger 7150 up for auction, ending today. People were bidding on it. Now it's gone from the shop but not bought? No email, no cancellation confirmation, just... gone.

[mnementh]

   

On the Printer Tonight: A Deceptively Simple Filter Grille.

This simple filter screen was quite difficult to produce, as there appears to be some limit to the number of polys the free version of Frustion360 will handle; or maybe it's a deliberate RAM access limitation...    I couldn't work with the whole design due to the huge number of tiny holes; I had to make 1/4 of the part to be able to create the pattern of holes and manipulate anything... More here if you're interested.

mnem

[factory]

Another one
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Agilent-multimeter-U1241AN/265068611383?  £200 when a new U2141B is only $220 

Seems a lot for an old meter, what exactly does the U1241AN do that other versions don't. Had a quick look RS have got the U1241B at £276 including VAT (no stock though). Not that I'm interested in them, they don't have HP on the front. 

David

[factory]

I'm deeply confused. I had a Schlumberger 7150 up for auction, ending today. People were bidding on it. Now it's gone from the shop but not bought? No email, no cancellation confirmation, just... gone.

The servers are overloaded with all the crap from last weekends £1 final value fee listing offer, took over an hour for the payment icon to appear for something I won, also got the server fail message a few times tonight.

David

[Ice-Tea]

Oh.. well, that's... good, then?

Seriously, they take a 10% cut but can't make the servers work? 

[BU508A]

Some days ago I've bought 5x 10 of these LED DC voltmeters which can measure from 0V to 100V.

As promised yesterday on discord I played around a little bit with them.
Here are some pictures of them. I tried to compare the brightness and colours of the displays but I think I need a better camera than the one in my Sony Xperia Z3. 
I have powered the displays with 5V but they can do the range from 4V up to 40V.

The displays are coming with three wires, yellow, red and black.

black:  GND
red:     4 ... 40V
yellow: input, 0 ... 100V DC against GND

Ok, let's start with the pictures.
Front and back of the disply. I think the trimpot is for adjusting the meter but I haven't tested this yet.
The holes are good for M2 screws.


Comparison of the displays. The green one is the brightest, followed by the blue one and then white, red, yellow.
The order of the colours is from left to right: white, blue, green, yellow, red
White is looking much nicer with the naked eye than on the pictures.
I tried different settings with the camera and these are the best results I got.



The colours in detail


Here are now the measurements. I started at 0V and went on with these points: 1V, 5V, 10V, 25V, 50V, 75V, 98.71V, 100V.
At 98.71V the first display (green) reached the 99.9V
The BM235 on the left is showing the supply voltage of 5V and the 121GW is showing the input voltage.
All displays are connected in parallel.



As you can see, they need a bit of tweaking which I hope can be done with the trimpot on the backside.
Besides that, they are nice little displays and they are having a resolution on 10mV in the range of 0 to 10V and then they are switching automatically to the 100mV resolution in the 10 to 100V range. No leading zeros.
All in all not that bad for 1 EUR per piece.

Which brings me to my last point:
If somebody of you is interested in playing around with these little buggers, send me a PM.
I'll give away 3 batches with five different colours. Price per batch 5 EUR plus shipping (EU + UK).
First come, first serve. 

Thank you for watching.

[Robert763]

hey robert

are those flukes 8920's or 22's.

you guys really gotta' stop posting these pics.

now i am on the hunt for fluke rf meters.

That's a silly question, one of each of course. I've also got a HP 3400 and a 3403C

[mnementh]

isn't that the bastard who killed john wayne?

(guess he must be a pretty good actor for me to still hate him after all these years)

Well fudge... that one was short & sweet. I'll look for something that isn't dingle-locked.

0K... that doesn't seem to exist. Try this: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/film-yes-i-killed-john-wayne-1151233.html

mnem
 

[factory]

Some days ago I've bought 5x 10 of these LED DC voltmeters which can measure from 0V to 100V.

As promised yesterday on discord I played around a little bit with them.
Here are some pictures of them. I tried to compare the brightness and colours of the displays but I think I need a better camera than the one in my Sony Xperia Z3. 
I have powered the displays with 5V but they can do the range from 4V up to 40V.

The displays are coming with three wires, yellow, red and black.

snip...

They've really got the component count down, with the usual unmarked microcontroller. I wonder if there is a resistor value that can be changed to reduce the brightness so that the LED's last longer, don't think BigClive on youtube has done a video on those and he loves finding cheap stuff from China to take apart & reverse engineer.

David

[factory]

damn you and your beautiful hp3400a.

now you have me looking for one to keep my hp400e company.

Shouldn't be too hard to find one or two or more for your collection  , I've got three that have been repaired using parts from a fourth (had blown thermocouple & transformer replacement bodge).
Also acquired an early one last year with the larger chopper block assembly, that is still in the repair queue.

BD may recognise one of these and he was right, it needed a fair bit of work to fix (broken power socket, meter peeling and PSU problems).


David

[Saskia]

for the amusement of our English speaking friends ...

as in English for runaways ...
There are a few typical german phrases missing ...

"Now leave the church in the village" (Now that's going too far ...)
One has seen horses throw up in front of the pharmacy

Newest invention: McBarf (shop for dog food ...)

[Specmaster]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

What is the ISO set at?