Test Equipment Anonymous

You'd imagine that proper contact cleaner sprays would be very pure and leave no residue, and would have been thoroughly tested with PCBs and electronic components. I don't like the spray and pray approach, especially with RF circuitry. IMHO it's much better and less wasteful to spray a bit into a ...

You'd imagine that proper contact cleaner sprays would be very pure and leave no residue, and would have been thoroughly tested with PCBs and electronic components. I don't like the spray and pray approach, especially with RF circuitry. IMHO it's much better and less wasteful to spray a bit into a ...

... and a LCD digit segment is dark when it shouldn't be. I expect that's a bad connection or driver IC. I've frequently "rejuvenated" LCDs by using IPA to clean the zebrazone connector between the LCD glass and PCB. I'm not sure that would help with a dark segment. As regards degradation...

Normally I'd leave a logic analyser running to capture such rare events. But LAs presume good signal integrity, which isn't the case here. I once had a pig of a problem with my 485: it would take a long time to start up from cold, but would restart quickly. I could do a partial test once every three...

Cubdriver wrote: ↑Fri Jan 09, 2026 10:46 pm

tggzzz wrote: ↑Fri Jan 09, 2026 10:04 pm No, I'm not entirely rational.

Are any of us?

Pleasingly... no.

Congratulations on the repair. Have you considered sending it to one of the groups.io mailing lists? I regard such repairs as being better than crosswords/soduku at staging off dementia. But, unless the equipment has unique qualities, not necessarily entirely rational :) No, I'm not entirely rational.

The bus will be roughly symmetrical viewed end on. If you imagine the bus tilted in the other direction the CoM will be directly above the driver side wheel at the point of toppling. The point where the perpendiculars from the two wheels cross, I estimate to be slightly above the radiator cap. The ...

You'd expect the angle on the bus to be larger in any case, due to compression of the suspension on the loaded side Then maybe the slope was tilted at 28 degrees necessary for the test, but the bus was just on the verge of toppling and was at 35 degrees because the suspension was compressed as you ...

I can't remember the last time serendipity struck me in a grocery. :lol: I always look at the end-of-life produce, because that "forces" me to look at stuff I wouldn't otherwise notice or consider. Recent serendipitous finds include bag of fresh mussels, raw lobster tails, venison haunch,...

Shit like this is why I order my groceries online and have them delivered. I prefer going to the shops and browsing for what is good/new/cheap. Searching online would mean I would stay with repeat purchases, and miss serendipity. Plus the they would also make stupid substitution for the item I real...

Oh, those possibilities are endless

I'd start by asking what happens when a *bot on a pavement meets an old person's buggy coming in the other direction. Or a blind person with long stick or dog.

Daughter has one of those things, minus the giraffe neck. Couldn't you put a hopper full of powder on its arse, so that wherever it goes ends up dirtier. I've long predicted that there will be lots of ways of spoofing such machines, e.g. painting potholes on a road. University cities in June should ...

DPD machine in MK (an Ottobot) won't throw anything. It arrives, you use a PIN to open it, Tough luck if you aren't there, presumably.

https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/peo ... se-4867106

While walking the dog I came across a semi-autonomous paint pot trundling along a lane towards some playing fields. Somewhat like this one in Milton Keynes https://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/07/47/99/7479981_0d13784f.jpg Anyway, this paint pot was indeed GPS controlled. All the operator had to do ...

(I forget the angle). My recollection from school physics or applied maths lessons was 28 degrees. I suspected that was a faulty neuron firing, but it is supported by your link and by the slightly ambiguous: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y1x9HsSIIIs/WJVvrYXHdTI/AAAAAAAAMQE/igE2miFx7yAUtF6ut851_JNxSvaz...

MED6753 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 01, 2026 8:08 pm Tight round about and extra length buses. I fail to see the problem?

So did they, "they" being the system architects (route planners) and implementers (bus drivers)

For anybody who doesn't think computer science has any relevance in the real world, here's the Dining Buses Problem

EC8010 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 29, 2025 10:58 pm But my last job required me to learn how to measure 2fA to a reasonable accuracy, ...

Digital electronics

That's all very sane.

It takes (rare) skill and imagination to ensure a measurement is valid. It takes (mere) money to have more digits.

Last year my daughter suggested that her SO might like to move his car, just in case. He poo-poo-ed the idea, not unreasonably.

That night the silver birch fell into the space where his car had been.

Next time he tells me I'm worrying too much, I'll smile malevolently and remind him

My question to others is: "Have you formally decided on accuracy limits?" If so, how, and why? For me it is a case of how can I get excessive accuracy on a minuscule budget[1]. I use that as a way into the real pleasure for me: understanding all the ingenuity that has been required in met...

I like to see snow fall and change everything. I like to see it on the ground and see little kids who've never seen it before play in it. Then after it's been there for no more than three days, melt and go away. None of the thaw freeze thaw freeze that tggzzz mentioned, with slush and refrozen trea...

Thaw freeze thaw freeze thaw is the usual state of affairs here. Doctors don't need to drum up business in that horrible weather

Colour photographs are notoriously temperature etc sensitive.

I never dared develop b&w negative film; strictly printing.

Takes me back 50 years when I used the one in the big cupboard at the back of the 6th form physics lab. Never done it since. On the floor in that cupboard there were some naked PCBs containing resistors capacitors and transistors. Teachers were quite happy for me to desolder and use the components. ...