Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

New TEA      No prize, just a quiz, what is it?   

Sinclair laptop and a elephant bog roll...?

*clicks on pic*

Phone dialer and a tractor air filter? 

mnem
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week. Stop by the door and get all my best gags on CD...

[mnementh]

I've found it for you, see below. 

mnem

just another day working the HellDesk...

[Cerebus]

Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week. Stop by the door and get all my best gags on CD...

And there was me thinking that they'd be on parchment, or a wax tablet, or stone. 

[mnementh]

I wouldn’t worry about precision there. They are usually specified to -20% +100%. A 5600uF is fine for the 5000uF

Of course and I realize that. But anal me insists we be as close as possible. 

Been there. I’ve untrained myself from that way as it was getting expensive 

Meh. I'd have slapped a couple 2700uF on there so I could keep the leads through-the-PCB short, which is kindof the point of that adapter and all the different hole patterns it supports. Leaving those leads long like that fucks the ESR of the cap right to hell.

mnem
*unplucked*

[mnementh]

Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week. Stop by the door and get all my best gags on CD...

And there was me thinking that they'd be on parchment, or a wax tablet, or stone. 

Only when you put your table up before I get there. You had a good set, BTW... that one guy actually looked up from his drink...

mnem
"Honey, why can't I deposit cash with my phone like I do with checks...?"

[factory]

Well the intermittent display fault has returned to my HP 54615B, trouble is after the second power up, the Hsync/Cal signals don't stay borked for long enough, to see if they are failing at the same time as the display, the signals are correct before the CRT fully warms up and the picture appears. 

Hsync & cal signals measured, before they quickly corrected themselves to 19.72kHz (Hsync) & 1.2kHz (probe cal).


I can't find the "any" key. 


David

Is there warmer than usual?

Our freezer has removable shelves.
Pretty optimal for cooling bigger things.

80Mhz clock and 1/4 slower sync.
How is this clock generated?

A far fetched.
Sort of direct lines out of the machine, says xDevs 54600A schematics.
Pages 22-23/125 there have +5VF_Core, its buddy +5VF_Pad is clipped but component numbers are still present.
Can you show your version of them some cold spray?

I guess it was a little bit warmer when I acquired it (Jan 2021), it hasn't been used much due to this fault, when last used in December, it required about an hour warm up time, before the horizontal display would lock.

Temperature was around 18°C to 23° (depending which crap thermometer I look at) in the workshop when I checked over the weekend. I've no freeze spray ATM and our freezer sleeves are the plumbing, i.e non removable unless you want to destroy it.

Both the HP 54600A & 54654N use a custom IC (Foxy for 54600A & Jackal for 54654N) to provide the H & V Sync signals and the probe cal signal is divided down from the H-Sync by a 74393, the custom IC has a 40MHz clock input, could check this in the future.



I have to thank whoever posted the 54654N CLIP, as the part # of the Jackal IC is the same one used in my 54615B, around it is the 40MHz oscillator & 74393 IC.



David

Dang, I meant fridge, our freezer has drawers and compressor is eating some bottom area.
But freezer would be better, then you can store its stuff into the fridge and "save" energy.

And dang, oscillator idea out of the window.
Single 40MHz crystal is not very easily going to output 30MHz.
54600A schematics has that same thing but I missed it.
The picture seems to be pretty same, Foxy clock line continues to 74F32 OR gate, is it there also?
The edge part is clipped again but seems that the gate is between the crystal and a clock pin.
A last straw maybe.
Or maybe not, unexpected wait state can also do something like that but from where I have no idea.

I have only that 54600A schematics from xDevs, can't find anything else, different names yes but contents no.
(here search of 546 clip had one result, now two)
There I saw a 10MHz crystal with differential drivers of around 1GHz speed and finally outputting 80MHz to Aspen.
That decoration can more easily output only 3/4 freq. but being a source for H-sync of other chip with its own clock is a bit far, if not that unexpected wait state.

Foxy chip seems to be more in control with timings but maybe Jackal still has an easy access to other clock output to check how its freq. is doing when H-sync is wrong.

If you can see that slow sync picture can you figure out if some other parts are also slow?
Like some calculations or widths being wrong.

Maybe your 18-23 temps were just some air flow and indicating that somewhere is a cooler spot.
Big mass spray cooling can be disturbing, you never really know how it really is.
Cool concrete floor and over night storage on it may also be enough.
Then obviously testing without moving it.
And afterwards learning that your delicate test setup was partially disconnected, not much, just a ground here or there.

Old PC CGA lowres H-sync was 15.7kHz, maybe that kind of a monitor accepts a bit too slow stuff.
I also remember a VHS copy protection system where sync was intentionally out of sync.
Since recording needed precise timing it didn't like that out of sync stuff but TV wasn't picky, and had no problems.
So old video monitor can also be almost ready made picture maker but finding its separated sync signals can be less easy.
And then it probably fails when H-sync is correcting its act.

Maybe, finally, easiest is to do a general purpose MCU controlled double frame buffer thingy that can read anything it can see and transform it to what ever is needed.
CGA to VGA converters are generally accepting 14.5kHz H-sync but auto scan sync polarities are hazy and none seem to accept old MDA or HGC frequencies.

See the Agilent 54645N CLIP on archive.org, posted by BD139 a few weeks back, when Vince bought his HP MSO, be warned it is a mass of jumbled up pages.

Actually you're pretty good with the 54645 scope on service information. There are two documents of interest:

Firstly the user and service manual (module level) is here:

https://xdevs.com/doc/HP_Agilent_Keysight/HP%2054645A,%2054645D%20User%20&%20Service.pdf

Now here's the good one, the CLIP (component level information package) is here. All 300Mb of it 

https://archive.org/details/HP54645NCLIPImgs

As mentioned in the thread I bounced the parts for reasonable money on their own. Yours is profitable on that front even if it's knackered. In the end I sold the good plastics, the knobs, motherboard (£25 even though it was broken), display assemly and power supply separately and made 2.5x what I paid for it 

If it works the only maintenance risk is the Dallas RAM module and the RIFAs in the power supply board really. They are top notch bits of engineering.

David

The rest of the Jackal section from the CLIP images attached below, 40MHz clock is the standalone oscillator module, Dot-CLK seems to be an output going to the COMBO-PAL (prog array logic) IC shown in the thumbnails above.

And yes if I adjusted the appropriate hold control on the CRT board, I could get it to slow the horizontal roll enough to see the picture, but it was very unstable and would quickly drift back to a fast roll. Picture taken in January last year.


David

[mnementh]

Intermittent fault in the crystal or one of the SMD caps around it? Maybe a little tap-tap mode troubleshooting?

Might be a good excuse to play around with one of those cheap Low-Z probes:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg3621622/#msg3621622


mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Well eBay user test-equip might be one to avoid. Ordered part on 1st July. No banana yet. Item still in transit so realistically RM have probably lost it at this point. Raised a dispute. No reply for over 1.5 days and then uploaded proof of postage and said “can you check with your local depot. Hope it will arrive soon”. Well fuck no I can’t check because it’s impossible to get hold of anyone, it’s not my problem until it’s signed for and quite frankly hope is not what I paid for. Grr.

This is the infernal ROM.

I think RM are no better than any of the other couriers, but they can be far more expensive to boot as well. It seems that nobody these days have real people to speak to when things go wrong, it's either voice mail or an email system in place for all enquiries, a pox on all of them.

[tggzzz]

New TEA      No prize, just a quiz, what is it?   

Sinclair laptop and a elephant bog roll...?

*clicks on pic*

Phone dialer and a tractor air filter? 

mnem
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week. Stop by the door and get all my best gags on CD...

Co 57, Ga 67, Tc 99, In 111, I 123, I 131, Xe133, Tl 201, and a thick walled container.

It is for measuring radioactive nucleotides used for medical imaging.

[mnementh]

So... not good for mixing smoothees then...?

mnem
but... WILL IT BLEND...?!?

[Robert763]

New TEA
No prize, just a quiz, what is it?

The units on the display give away the basic functionality.

Edit: Oh, and if that's not in need of repair and actually has a sample in it, it's fairly hot. (125 mCi)

That photo is from the ebay listing and not the one I got.
Packing was awful. Bubble wrap on two items in an oversize box. The cylindrical unit weighs 30lbs. 

Fortunatly it survived and does not have any contamination.

@Vince, its not a scale, its a Capintec CRC-15R Dose Calibrator.  Basically a very high accuracy gamma radiaion detector calibrated to indicate the activity of radioactive sources. You do however need to know what the isotope is. The detector is a high pressure ionisation chamber (the cylindrical bit) with a center well for the sample. The pressure in the chamber is 175 PSI. It covers 9 decades of measurement.

[Robert763]

New TEA      No prize, just a quiz, what is it?   

Sinclair laptop and a elephant bog roll...?

*clicks on pic*

Phone dialer and a tractor air filter? 

mnem
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week. Stop by the door and get all my best gags on CD...

Co 57, Ga 67, Tc 99, In 111, I 123, I 131, Xe133, Tl 201, and a thick walled container.

It is for measuring radioactive nucleotides used for medical imaging.

Yep, dose calibrator for 0.01uCi to 8 Ci of gamma emitting isotopes.

[bd139]

Well I got pissed off with this bloody 465B ROM not arriving so I scraped the entire contents of the state chart out of the manual via apple wonderful image ML shit into a file (suck on that windows lamers), checked it against the service manual contents and here we go:

Code: [Select]

10000 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 0111 ok
10001 1110 1110 1110 1110 1110 1110 0110 1110 ok
... snip ...
01110 1101 1101 1101 1101 1101 0101 1101 1101 ok
01111 1101 1101 1101 1101 1101 0101 1101 1101 ok

This was then sorted and post processed with shell + awk into a binary map that resembles the ROM contents. It's a 256x4 ROM aka 74S287 as I think someone specified earlier when I was moaning about it.

Code: [Select]

00000000 1101
00000001 1101
... snip
11111110 1101
11111111 1110

Now what to blow it to. Well what have I got floating around. I have some ancient PIC16F84's and an ICSP so that'll have to do.

Work very much in progress. I haven't written any PIC assembly for about 20 years  .. this will be post processed with the LUT...

Code: [Select]

; fuck you test-equip

start
        movlw 0xf
        movwf TRISA, 0 ;porta = address
        movlw 0x0
        movwf TRISB, 0 ;portb = data
againmofo
        andwf PORTA,0xff
        call iamrom
        movwf PORTB
        goto againmofo

iamrom     
        addwf pc
        ; AWKSTART
        retlw b'00001101'
        retlw b'00001101'
        ...
        retlw b'00001101'
        ; AWKEND
end

More coming soon. Probably just in time for them to find the bastard thing.

I may just buy a shit arduino mini and a couple of 74S287's and try building out a programmer rig for them. It feels like it might be less painful than actually getting the PIC programmer to work on the mac.

[mansaxel]

mnem
Still 10x the car as my Mk1 Capri, tho.

Which motor mnem ?

The little Cologne V4; what were they, a 1500...? 1300...? Ghahhh.     Can you believe I scratch-built headers for that fuxxoring little automotive backbirth? I thought it'd be just like my Cologne-V6 Spitfire project, only more room to work. Well that part was true... every time I'd swing a wrench, my elbow would go through some newly discovered rust spot. 

mnem
"The gift that keeps on giving..."

"Ford is a company that builds cars in order for Opel to not be the worst brand around."

[mnementh]

Shopping Prime Day... so far, the only thing that really caught my attention was the Kindle for Kids and this: GrubHub free for a year. We don't order takeout often, but especially for my day off, more choices is a nice thing.

https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-Legend-Internal-Gaming-ALEG-840-512GCS/dp/B09H8R24SL

ADATA 500GB/1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs - $35 & $85 with $10 off coupon

https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-SU760-512GB-Internal-ASU760SS-512GT-C/dp/B07TDW86SQ/

ADATA 500GB SATA SSD w/SDRAM cache - $35 with $10 off coupon (good to wake up older laptop or PC; ADATA is known decent "B" brand)

Still looking...

mnem

[bd139]

Oh god don't buy Adata. I know someone who just ate about 30% failure rate in 12 months with those bloody things.

[Specmaster]

Strewth, its bloody 33^oC here in my lab, I'm giving up and going downstairs to grab a long cold drink of milk, switch the TV on and watch some Wheeler Dealers or something while sitting in the direct line of a fan.

I hope it's a lot cooler for this Friday, I'm going to RAF Fairford for the RIAT air show and watch a limited flying display and the remaining arriving aircraft from all over the world. I'm not looking forward to sitting out in this heat all day-long 

[Specmaster]

Shopping Prime Day... so far, the only thing that really caught my attention was the Kindle for Kids and this: GrubHub free for a year. We don't order takeout often, but especially for my day off, more choices is a nice thing.

https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-Legend-Internal-Gaming-ALEG-840-512GCS/dp/B09H8R24SL

ADATA 500GB/1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs - $35 & $85 with $10 off coupon

https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-SU760-512GB-Internal-ASU760SS-512GT-C/dp/B07TDW86SQ/

ADATA 500GB SATA SSD - $35 with $10 off coupon (good to wake up older laptop or PC; make usable quick again)

Still looking...

mnem

Samsung seem to be a good bet, as to Prime Day, I grabbed myself another 100ft stretchy hose pipe and a heavy-duty, padded folding camping chair, sick to death of the cheapos, after a couple of uses, they just slowly fold up on themselves. I'm just hoping that it arrives on Thursday as promised so I can take it with me Friday to the RIAT show (Royal International Air Tattoo).

[bd139]

Strewth, its bloody 33^oC here in my lab, I'm giving up and going downstairs to grab a long cold drink of milk, switch the TV on and watch some Wheeler Dealers or something while sitting in the direct line of a fan.

I hope it's a lot cooler for this Friday, I'm going to RAF Fairford for the RIAT air show and watch a limited flying display and the remaining arriving aircraft from all over the world. I'm not looking forward to sitting out in this heat all day-long 

A bearable 23 in mine.

Fingers crossed for the display. If it's above 30 on Sunday I'm skipping the radio rally. Don't fancy it 

Samsung seem to be a good bet, as to Prime Day, I grabbed myself another 100ft stretchy hose pipe and a heavy-duty, padded folding camping chair, sick to death of the cheapos, after a couple of uses, they just slowly fold up on themselves. I'm just hoping that it arrives on Thursday as promised so I can take it with me Friday to the RIAT show (Royal International Air Tattoo).

Always Samsung!

No luck with Prime Day. Nothing I needed. I did buy a used Nikon Z 35 mm f/1.8 lens earlier but the bastard seller cancelled it and returned the money as apparently they sold the stock in their shop and forgot to delist it from their web site 

[mnementh]

Oh god don't buy Adata. I know someone who just ate about 30% failure rate in 12 months with those bloody things.

since when...? I've literally been using their flash memory for decades. Still have one of their 120GB SSDs in my old HP tablet.

mnem
 

[bd139]

Oh god don't buy Adata. I know someone who just ate about 30% failure rate in 12 months with those bloody things.

since when...? I've literally been using their flash memory for decades. Still have one of their 120GB SSDs in my old HP tablet.

mnem
 

Last 18 months. I'll find out which devices he had. They are in corp laptops.

I suspect vendors are cheaping out due to the shortages at the moment.

Edit: pinged him on WhatsApp. Legend 740 apparently. Bought in December 2021.

Edit 2: he didn't buy them. His IT guy "got them somewhere cheap" so I'm suspect about the claims entirely. Ignore this! 

[mansaxel]

Depends which V4. The Taunus V4 went from 1.2 to 1.7 litres. The Essex V4 was either 1.7 or 2.0 litres. I've no idea without researching, what might have been fitted to US market Capris.

Considering the shoehorning that Triumph had to do to fit the 2.0 litre straight six into the Spitfire chassis to make the GT6, it's no surprise that only someone of supreme pig-headed stubbornness would attempt to do it with a V6 lump.   

These were the engines where one tops up the fuel and refills the oil tank.

Ending up behind it on the Autobahn is an exercise in blue smoke.

The V6 IIRC was the worst.

[tggzzz]

Strewth, its bloody 33^oC here in my lab, I'm giving up and going downstairs to grab a long cold drink of milk, switch the TV on and watch some Wheeler Dealers or something while sitting in the direct line of a fan.

I hope it's a lot cooler for this Friday, I'm going to RAF Fairford for the RIAT air show and watch a limited flying display and the remaining arriving aircraft from all over the world. I'm not looking forward to sitting out in this heat all day-long 

Take a (folding) bike to get from one end of the runway to the other!

[mansaxel]

But, nothing beats the sound of a supercharger.

The current tractor has a 5cyl TDi engine, and the turbo whine when it starts to make more power at a steady rpm (cruise control, meet uphill) is very, very addictive.

[mnementh]

Oh god don't buy Adata. I know someone who just ate about 30% failure rate in 12 months with those bloody things.

since when...? I've literally been using their flash memory for decades. Still have one of their 120GB SSDs in my old HP tablet.

mnem
 

Last 18 months. I'll find out which devices he had. They are in corp laptops.

I suspect vendors are cheaping out due to the shortages at the moment.

Edit: pinged him on WhatsApp. Legend 740 apparently. Bought in December 2021.

Edit 2: he didn't buy them. His IT guy "got them somewhere cheap" so I'm suspect about the claims entirely. Ignore this! 

I shopped Samsung; nothing out right now is more than a few percent off according to the last 6 months on PCPartPicker. 

Guess I'll get to be the guinea pig here; I bought one of the SATA SSDs  (SU760 Ultimate - ASU760SS-512GT-C) to wake up the PowerMac a little.   

mnem
$35 is a pretty small gamble.