If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's that cyclists, pedestrians and drivers are all cunts
Yup.
I carefully taught my daughter that they are all out to kill you, and will succeed if you give them enough chances.
Glider pilots are wonderfully benign by comparison; they are willing to learn from anyone where the lift is at the moment, and they are taught the etiquette of sharing bubbles of hot air.
*puts hand up to ear* "WHAAAAAAAT?!?"
mnem
thump.
Just today I'm coming up my road and there is a kid on a bicycle going in my direction in the middle of the road. I slowed and figured he would hear my approach. Nope. I had to come almost to a complete stop and decided I had no choice but to lay on the horn. Only then did he turn around and realize I was there and moved over. And then I saw that the jerk had earbuds on.
What the... hell model of car have you got, then? I thought Volvo was supposed to be a premium brand, and they can't even fit tweeters to all doors and channels Mine even has mid range and tweeters, woofer at the bottom, mid range in the middle and tweeters right at the top by the door latch. Only 4 pop rivets hold your woofer, did you get any distortion / vibration of the speaker chassis on deep bass as a result of tahat or are your speakers slightly smaller than most, mine had 6 rivets to secure it to the door skin. I should think you certainly notice the extra top end now?
This was, as noted, the bottom rung of the quality ladder. There were several equipment levels available above this; my older cars on the same platformdodid indeed have tweeters, also as noted. Buying a used car you can't be too picky with things like this; I was happy to get the 4WD, large Diesel, semi-leather upholstery version, with hitch and OEM roof rack bars, for a very good price, with a known service record.
The top end is indeed noticeable now!
I put Alpine 3-way splits in my car, made a huge difference to the audio quality.
I spend like 2.5 hours a day in the car commuting in and out of Tokyo, so I wanted some good audio to help me endure the idiots on the road.That is the same logic as I applied when I ordered my car, which was at the time a company car. I would often spend upwards of 6 hours at a time in it, so I wanted some good audio and for the times I'd be hanging about in it stuck in jams on the motorways or on site, I also specced the car with a DVD player and TV tuner with surround sound system. Now of course I still get to enjoy all those creature comforts as I brought the car when I retired That was my plan all along
Then I received also today an envelope from Sweden, got RIFA caps to replace the one in the HP scope PSU, and also a set of lovely Hirshcmannnlong grabbers. Sadly the rfd one got broken during transport, sad.... the hard plastic hand piece is badly cracked at the base of the grabber, but still holding together somehow and still works, smoothly at that. It's still perfectly functional. Tried to bend it back into shape / straighten it, no joy, it wants to stay bent, ah well... maybe at least I could fill the gap/crack with super glue ? And maybe add a layer of two of red heat shrink tubing to restore thye electrical insulation ? because having my fingers right on that crack with HV inside the crack does not appeal to me very much, I must confess..
So I replaced that RIFA. PSU board was easy and quickly to remove from the scope. Paid extra attention to plastic rod operating the mains switch, since you said it could break easily... got lucky, it came out and back on, with no drama
UK weather report said that there is high chance of thunderstorms for the southeast and the first lightening strike has just been recorded at Stratford St Andrew in Suffolk and another near Ashford in Kent, but the main storm is currently still over in Belgium, so will we get a storm or not?
https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=0.00;ts=0;z=6;y=49.9066;x=3.5287;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;
Are thunderstorms that rare in the UK? Damn near once or sometimes twice a week here in the Summer.
OK past midnight, I gave the board one last try before calling it a day and moving on...
... I increased the load even more, to see if the chip would switch to full frequency and what would become of the ripple. Found a beefy 15W 15R resistor. That increased the load to 600mA or so.
Ripple plummeted !
So much so that the fixed x10 Agilent probe that came with the scope, was attenuating a tad too much to zoom on the ripple.
So I replaced it with my usual Tek x1 / x10 probes. Of course doing that limits the B/W to 6 MHz or something, but still good enough to see all the crap coming out of the regulator... no shortage of that for sure.
Ripple as you can see is now only 1mVpp... if you conveniently omit the bursts that contain huge spikes. If you count the spikes then it's more like 5mVpp, which is still very good for a switching anything, especially a cheap one eh ?
So I tried to measure frequency... saying "try" because the waveform looks so noisy, there is no saw tooth to look at any more, it's just noise.... but well, you gotta measure something so....
If I measure between two big bursts, the packets that feature the huge spikes, then I get 100kHz. If I then zoom in to look at the smaller oscillations in between two bursts, then I get 900kHz.. spot on the theoretical switching frequency that we calculated, so that's quite nice. So assuming that's not just luck / coincidence, then that means that all these spiky bursts are at LOWER frequency that the switching frequency ?! How can that be possible ?! I mean of course I am OK having high frequency parasitic oscillations, but LOWER than the commanded frequency... no I don't quite get it.
So that means instead maybe that the chip at 600mA still is running at 100kHz not 900kHz, and that the 900kHz oscillations we see are just a coincidence... it's nothing to do with the 900kHz we set with that resistor.
Lots of fun.
OK taking everything apart and clearing the bench, more component sorting on the agenda tomorrow...
EDIT : tried to add averaging to clean the signal a bit but no joy : the deep memory of the Megazoom makes it a no go : adding even a tiny amount of averaging, like 4 8 or 16, slows down the redrawing tremendously !
With my modest Combiscope and ancient TDS, short memory so I can add LOTS of averaging to clean stuff up really well, with little to no impact on the trace responsiveness. That's great.
So for me at least that's one big problem with the Megazoom, so I am not getting rid of my Combiscope and TDS anytime soon.
Would be nice if the Megazoom allowed you (does it ? Didn't find it in the manual), to disable the deep memory in this particular case.
Also another scenario where the deep memory hurts is refresh rate when trying to find a runt pulse or something. You don't need silly high time resolution to find it, but rather high refresh rates.
I understand the modern scopes allow you to set yourself the trade-off between sampling speed and memory depth which is the best of both worls I guess. The merger between the older scopes, and the Megazoom revolution.
So yeah, I love the Megazoom but I will keep my other scopes as well, I want BOTH !
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
mnem
Stupid question for the gang.
If a water electro-valve spec is 24VAC, can I use VDC to control it?
If yes at whatvoltageDC current?
Yes I am a little embarrassed to ask....
No, it would not be a "simple" affair to go over to a 3 phase system. Yes, 3 phase does get distributed out to many locations for businesses and for load balancing. For example.....while my road has no businesses close by 3 phase is available. But it's eventually distributed to side streets as shown. One HV line. Single phase. The cost to retrofit all those areas would be prohibitive.
UK weather report said that there is high chance of thunderstorms for the southeast and the first lightening strike has just been recorded at Stratford St Andrew in Suffolk and another near Ashford in Kent, but the main storm is currently still over in Belgium, so will we get a storm or not?
https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=0.00;ts=0;z=6;y=49.9066;x=3.5287;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;
Are thunderstorms that rare in the UK? Damn near once or sometimes twice a week here in the Summer.
Fairly rare, a handful over the summer perhaps. We've had two or three here in my bit of London since the beginning of the year. Depends where you are, when I lived on the south coast they were fairly common, but almost all seemed to happen out to sea.
No, it would not be a "simple" affair to go over to a 3 phase system. Yes, 3 phase does get distributed out to many locations for businesses and for load balancing. For example.....while my road has no businesses close by 3 phase is available. But it's eventually distributed to side streets as shown. One HV line. Single phase. The cost to retrofit all those areas would be prohibitive.
Solar PV panels, batteries, three good inverters (Victron energy quattro) in star configuration.... and wualllla 380VAC three phase where you want, and I am pretty sure the business case is still much better than hanging big ass trafos on wood poles + power lines in the pampa.
I always look up at the flying trafos on wood poles and those things do not inspire confidence.
Coming from Europe, homes and the grid in USA have something in common: if you are good with karate you can damage them pretty badly.
OK, who fitted the idiot magnet to my car?
Now this is what I want to install in my home before the end of the year:
The orange box "critical loads" is my home .
this is the grid cable coming in my home at the main 200A switch:
and this is the same cable arriving at the main dist panel as already mentioned...
I need some advise on how to connect my new inverter(s) between A and B. I am 99% sold to open up the the bottom at the main switch (red arrow in the pictures), brake the phases/neutral connections there and start my new system there.
But I do not know if I have enough spaces to make the bridges/interconnections properly.
Another idea is to do some surgery on the wall and intercept the main grid cable between the main dist panel and main switch and there install my new system....
I heard in USA the mains panel in BUSINESS/COMMERCIAL/INDUSTRIAL system are way better than what they put in home...
Any of the USA gang can point me to where I can buy some nice stuff to modify my mains?
Now this is what I want to install in my home before the end of the year:
The orange box "critical loads" is my home .
(...)
Seem like a lot of troubles. You are sure you are going to save some money doing this ?
Might be just us, but around here electricity is so cheap it would only make sense to install solar panels if you can't get connected to the grid.
Now this is what I want to install in my home before the end of the year:
The orange box "critical loads" is my home .
(...)
Seem like a lot of troubles. You are sure you are going to save some money doing this ?
Might be just us, but around here electricity is so cheap it would only make sense to install solar panels if you can't get connected to the grid.Remember, it is Zucca your are talking to - he wants absolute reliability and absolute availability on his grid (and anything else he relies on, really). Price is more of a footnote...
Stupid question for the gang.
If a water electro-valve spec is 24VAC, can I use VDC to control it?
If yes at whatvoltageDC current?
Yes I am a little embarrassed to ask....I'm with the Capt.Bullshot here. Basic answer is NO.
Why even try such?
As for someone suggesting that it had been tried with a contactor: I've seen and smelled a control cabinet where someone 'tried' that with around 50 contactors. You could not touch them even at the top plastic around the contacts and it stank like a fire in waiting.
If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's that cyclists, pedestrians and drivers are all cunts
I am not sure of the Canadian and USA differences, but my understanding for the GWN is that those are to be connected together in only one specific location, done by the electricity utility company.
Anything done within the house at or after the main panel shall not have the Earth and Neutral connected together.
Two reasons I can think of:
- no ground loop current
- correct functioning of GFCI protection
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
Amaze youngsters by using an analogue scope to quickly and easily measure the RMS value of wideband noise.
If there's one thing I've learned over the years it's that cyclists, pedestrians and drivers are all cunts
Yup.
I carefully taught my daughter that they are all out to kill you, and will succeed if you give them enough chances.
Glider pilots are wonderfully benign by comparison; they are willing to learn from anyone where the lift is at the moment, and they are taught the etiquette of sharing bubbles of hot air.Back when I tried to learn to fly gliders & court SWMBO at the same time (one guess which one missed out!), some of the older club members recalled learning from wedgetailed eagles!
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
Amaze youngsters by using an analogue scope to quickly and easily measure the RMS value of wideband noise.
At amaze them with an HP 3400A which is even easier
Talking of which I need one of them to measure noise figure on something.
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
Amaze youngsters by using an analogue scope to quickly and easily measure the RMS value of wideband noise.
At amaze them with an HP 3400A which is even easier
Talking of which I need one of them to measure noise figure on something.
OK. Go on. Do that by the end of the week, rather than at some indefinite time in the future
You put a Rifa cap back into the unit!? I hope you got a late date code on that part...............
Naaahhh... you're not wrong. Characterizing noise is one of the areas that, IMO, a good analog scope still excels at and in many ways beats out a DSO. In this scenario, it does the averaging by dint of its inherent nature. You don't need the absolute detail that digitizing gives you; you just want to see where the fuzz is thickest and where it ends.
Amaze youngsters by using an analogue scope to quickly and easily measure the RMS value of wideband noise.
At amaze them with an HP 3400A which is even easier
Talking of which I need one of them to measure noise figure on something.
OK. Go on. Do that by the end of the week, rather than at some indefinite time in the future
Considering I don’t have any analogue oscilloscopes at the moment I shall defer until some indefinite time in the future