Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) : Discussion and Group Therapy Thread

[Zenith]

If you you don't need low level I/O

I am wondering if there is something to cover the hole... a low level I/O gizmo for TC PCs.

There were cards for desktop PCs, doing various low level functions. They were mainly aimed at "industrial" PCs, that is pretty conservatively rated desktop M/Bs in an ultra tough rack mounting case. As I recall they were expensive. If such a thing was available for PCIe, you'd have to fit it in the TC case, that's if it has a PCIe slot. If it does, it's probably intended for something specific.

Then of course, there's the PC104 embedded scene, which I gather is quite expensive, even second hand.

I've come across codges using the parallel port, which often exists on TCs but is rarely brought out. Then there could be some sort of gizmo which attaches by USB.

It's not something that crossed the mind of TC/laptop designers and it's easy with an SBC.

[Robert]

Loads of USB I/O
Professional but not too expensive
https://www.mccdaq.com/data-acquisition/digital-IO

Hobby
https://www.active-robots.com/controlle ... oards.html
https://www.audon.co.uk/usb_digital/usbpio.html

I dislike RPi Not being able to get a datasheet on the processor is a big red flag for a start.

[25 CPS]

I'm here now. It's taken some time, the main reason being that I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago so I've been taking things slowly and haven't been doing a whole lot lately.

I did pick up a second HP 16C the other day so I can have a 15C + 16C pair on my bench at work as well as the bench at home.

Welcome to our new home, have a look around and get a feel for it. Nice to see you over here at last and glad you're getting back to normal again, and I'm jelly of your 15C and 16C , .

I'm just getting into HP calculators and in the space of a just a few short weeks, I've gone from not having any HP calcs, to now owning 7 and an eighth incoming, 10Bii ,10Bii+ 2 x 17Bii, 17Bii+ 32Sii, 12C platinum and incoming 1986 original USA 12C and plenty of Commodores and others.

It's been a rough few weeks. Beyond the accident itself, dealing with the insurance company has been difficult at best of times. That has been a stamina and motivation sapping experience. I'm otherwise fine but dealing with that completely knocks the wind out of my sails.

That's an extensive collection of business/financial calculators. I have a USA 12C that I picked up locally for not much money a couple of years ago to finish out the full Voyageur series even though it's the one I use the least often. I found a person selling a 28C about a year ago and saw they were also selling one of the same folding book style business calculators (19B? I've forgotten the model number) so I ended up with that after a bit of back and forth thinking about whether to pass it by or arrange a discount on both. The lady selling them accepted a combined deal on both of them so I ended up buying it. I figured I'd kick myself later if I passed up on a complete, in box calculator if I decided later that I wanted one.

The 32SII is a special one to me. Of the Hewlett-Packard calculators I own, it's the only one I bought new. I wanted to buy a 48GX when those were a current product but I didn't have the money to back then and it's still on my list now. I've got two other calculators on their way but one of them's untested so fingers crossed it still works. That one cleared customs this morning so hopefully it'll arrive in the next day or so intact and ready to test out.

[Zucca]

Loads of USB I/O
Professional but not too expensive
https://www.mccdaq.com/data-acquisition/digital-IO

Hobby
https://www.active-robots.com/controlle ... oards.html
https://www.audon.co.uk/usb_digital/usbpio.html

Like water in the desert... thanks Rob!

[bd139]

Interesting discussion.

Worth pointing out that most of the problems with automation are because people started at the solution and worked down to the problem.

1. buy a raspberry pi
2. find a problem to solve with it
3. profit!

The correct way to solve a problem results in the correct hardware. That invariably never results in anything from the Raspberry Poo foundation unless you're after ignorant kinship or a circlejerk.

Worth considering the Chinese PLCs for light weight automation as well. < £30 will get you a decent amount of totally autonomous isolated digital and analogue IO which from a hardware perspective is quite robust. Also clips on a DIN rail and will run off a cheap SMPS.

[tautech]

One of the reasons I hate deciduous trees, they down right messy fucks !
Neighbor over the road 'prettied up' his roadside with them darn messy fuckers for which their leaves get blown all over our place each fall/autumn. Thanks but I can make enough mess around here without any help from others !

We deliberately chose this location because it has three big reds and a corner lot. We knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into; we just consider it the price of having our home right in the middle of a fresh O2 factory.

*inhales deeply* AHHHHHHHH!!!

mnem
*pats slowly shrinking fat-dwagon belly with some small measure of satisfaction*


Chortle.png
Besides; it's not like I can't use the exercise.

Well fine for you but I don't need another job stemming from across the road. Speaking of such, the fuckwit that planted all these 'purdy' shedding fuckers was out there last fall with his leaf blower carefully blowing all their leaves across the road from his lawn onto the neighbors ! I saw it happen and the neighbor sure told him !
Tries that near our place and he won't know what hit him when we drag out the tractor mounted silorator with the high truck shute and blow a few ton of roadside mowings right over the road onto his place !
Seems to take decades to educate townies.

[mnementh]

How about a HPT630 ???

Slurp....

bd139 won't like it; it's AMD.

mnem
*nix doesn't care.

[Zenith]

Well I realise that this may make me subject to a drumhead court marshall as a disgrace to the uniform, after which my TEA insignia will be are ripped off and I will be drummed out of the service - but I quite like the the Raspberry Pi, with its drawbacks.

I have four; a 4 a 3B and two Zero W. I'm currently using the 3B to feed setup instructions to an ADF 4351 oscillator board with SPI and using a £10 25MHz 8 channel logic analyser to watch what's happening - another crime against decency.

I have other crimes to be taken into consideration. For the past 20 odd years, I've never knowingly bought a new Intel CPU.

[Zucca]

TEA insignia used to be ripped off only if posting interesting, useful and enjoyable off topic material.

No worries, if you like them keep them. If you invite me for dinner at your home, I will be kindly asking to power them off before my ingress.

[bd139]

How about a HPT630 ???

Slurp....

bd139 won't like it; it's AMD.

mnem
*nix doesn't care.

I'll have you know I built an AMD system the other day and quite liked it

[bd139]

Well I realise that this may make me subject to a drumhead court marshall as a disgrace to the uniform, after which my TEA insignia will be are ripped off and I will be drummed out of the service - but I quite like the the Raspberry Pi, with its drawbacks.

I have four; a 4 a 3B and two Zero W. I'm currently using the 3B to feed setup instructions to an ADF 4351 oscillator board with SPI and using a £10 25MHz 8 channel logic analyser to watch what's happening - another crime against decency.

I have other crimes to be taken into consideration. For the past 20 odd years, I've never knowingly bought a new Intel CPU.

I have a couple of problems with the Raspberry Pi which are mostly down to the shoddy hardware and the foundation itself.

It was promoted as an educational device in the UK which caused schools to spend thousands of pounds on the infernal things as education devices. Of course, even with cases on they are not robust or reliable from a hardware or software perspective and what happens is you see stressed out tech teachers fixing problems with the infernal turds rather than actually teaching the kids anything. This is all an upshot of the leveraging of the "BBC Micro ethos" which was about education. But the devices are not comparable at all. Ben and Liz, the foundation owners, are deeply tied to Broadcom and if anyone has ever worked with any of their kit will understand that they are complete fucking bastards of the highest order. Back on the hardware side of things there were serious issues with the earlier models and some of the later ones regarding power distribution causing to brown outs and WDT resets. This happens if you hotplug USB sometimes as well. They blame this on the end users using cheap nasty wall warts to power the units.

I decided I'd lead them down a hole on one thread on their forum showing details on how to reproduce a crash scenario. I was using a very decent 5V 10A meanwell supply at the time. I had a PM3217 set to trigger if there was more than 50mV of supply drop at any point. Hot plugged a USB stick and of course it crashed. Measured the voltage at the board edge. No drop. Measured it at the USB pins: there was a drop. Measured it at the CPU: there was a drop. Reported this on the forum. Got told I was using a shitty power supply. Explained my setup and the test case and that clearly disproved that. The thread was deleted and I was banned from the forum.

An ancient thread on it: https://community.element14.com/product ... unpunished

They still do this to today to protect the fragile ecosystem of educational product and any criticism. Evidenced from when I last bothered to look in 2021. Straight out of the Broadcom playbook. They are the Oracle of the electronics world and Liz Upton's crocodile smile is fakery.

Never use a product or put money into what amounts to a corporate marketing dictatorship set up to sell you crap. You're getting sold a lie.

edit: eevblog post, also explaining later experiments resulting in SD corruption issues: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/rasp ... ed-hardgt/

[Robert]

Well I realise that this may make me subject to a drumhead court marshall as a disgrace to the uniform, after which my TEA insignia will be are ripped off and I will be drummed out of the service - but I quite like the the Raspberry Pi, with its drawbacks.

I have four; a 4 a 3B and two Zero W. I'm currently using the 3B to feed setup instructions to an ADF 4351 oscillator board with SPI and using a £10 25MHz 8 channel logic analyser to watch what's happening - another crime against decency.

I have other crimes to be taken into consideration. For the past 20 odd years, I've never knowingly bought a new Intel CPU.

I have one too. But it does a specific job, running Lady Heather on a 4.5" touch screen with a Trimble Thunderbolt all in a 1/2 width HP System case. I did consider using a PC104 card but there just wasn't enough space.

[Robert]

Tut Tut BD,
What do you expect calling out a forum owner on bullshit
I've also been banned from a geiger counter forum for calling the owners bullshit. Their loss as far a I'm concerned. (and some other members from commentas I received afterwards).

[bd139]

I wasn't even calling them out on bullshit TBH at the time. I was totally ignorant of the issue being a persistent problem and thought I just had a duff one and was reporting a bug/issue. How dare I!

Only when I went looking I found a several communities of outcasts from the forums all with the same or similar problems.

This is a very pre-Internet ay of handling customer relations: squashing dissent. Doesn't work for dictators too well now. Look at Iran...

[tggzzz]

Interesting discussion.

Worth pointing out that most of the problems with automation are because people started at the solution and worked down to the problem.

1. buy a raspberry pi
2. find a problem to solve with it
3. profit!

The correct way to solve a problem results in the correct hardware. That invariably never results in anything from the Raspberry Poo foundation unless you're after ignorant kinship or a circlejerk.

Worth considering the Chinese PLCs for light weight automation as well. < £30 will get you a decent amount of totally autonomous isolated digital and analogue IO which from a hardware perspective is quite robust. Also clips on a DIN rail and will run off a cheap SMPS.

Don't forget the traditional path to hell:

1. develop understanding of poorly articulated requirements
2. check understanding with a quick-and-dirty mocked up GUI and experimental prototype
3. client says "yes - that's good"
4. client doesn't understand the concept of experimental prototype, and freezes development

I found a good way to trap that out was to ensure the GUI looked like something the client was familiar with. They could understand that a business plan on the back of a napkin wasn't sufficient, so make the experimental prototype look like that - by using the "Napkin Look and Feel".


https://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/#Snapshots

The GUI was functional, but they couldn't confuse it with The Real Thing.

Apart from that, a good way to choose embedded hardware is to start with the "non functional" requirements, e.g. reliability, longevity. That's a problem for some people, since TDD excludes consideration of anything lacking a unit test

[mnementh]

How about a HPT630 ???

Slurp....

bd139 won't like it; it's AMD.

mnem
*nix doesn't care.

I'll have you know I built an AMD system the other day and quite liked it

Give it a week, and they'll be Satan's left testicle sweat again...

mnem
We all know you're platform agnostic a shameless CPU and OS whore, bd...

[Specmaster]

How about a HPT630 ???

Slurp....

bd139 won't like it; it's AMD.

mnem
*nix doesn't care.

I'll have you know I built an AMD system the other day and quite liked it

Nothing wrong with AMD, I've always built my systems with AMD at the heart, in fact all 3 of our windows tower machines are running on AMD, the Intel PC's I have are 2 laptops and the Linux tower, very happy with AMD, does all we need them to do with low thermal impact as well.

[Zenith]

I have a couple of problems with the Raspberry Pi which are mostly down to the shoddy hardware and the foundation itself.

It was promoted as an educational device in the UK which caused schools to spend thousands of pounds on the infernal things as education devices. Of course, even with cases on they are not robust or reliable from a hardware or software perspective and what happens is you see stressed out tech teachers fixing problems with the infernal turds rather than actually teaching the kids anything. This is all an upshot of the leveraging of the "BBC Micro ethos" which was about education. But the devices are not comparable at all. Ben and Liz, the foundation owners, are deeply tied to Broadcom and if anyone has ever worked with any of their kit will understand that they are complete fucking bastards of the highest order. Back on the hardware side of things there were serious issues with the earlier models and some of the later ones regarding power distribution causing to brown outs and WDT resets. This happens if you hotplug USB sometimes as well. They blame this on the end users using cheap nasty wall warts to power the units.

I haven't seen it. I've sported around a ton on these things and have been pleasantly surprised. One was running as an always on torrent box for years. I wouldn't dream of hotplugging one.

It's long struck me that the educational (schools) market for electronics and computers did have special requirements, but was something of a stitch-up between pals.

Anyway, what's the obviously better SBC choice?

I decided I'd lead them down a hole on one thread on their forum showing details on how to reproduce a crash scenario. I was using a very decent 5V 10A meanwell supply at the time. I had a PM3217 set to trigger if there was more than 50mV of supply drop at any point. Hot plugged a USB stick and of course it crashed. Measured the voltage at the board edge. No drop. Measured it at the USB pins: there was a drop. Measured it at the CPU: there was a drop. Reported this on the forum. Got told I was using a shitty power supply. Explained my setup and the test case and that clearly disproved that. The thread was deleted and I was banned from the forum.

An ancient thread on it: https://community.element14.com/product ... unpunished

They still do this to today to protect the fragile ecosystem of educational product and any criticism. Evidenced from when I last bothered to look in 2021. Straight out of the Broadcom playbook. They are the Oracle of the electronics world and Liz Upton's crocodile smile is fakery.

Never use a product or put money into what amounts to a corporate marketing dictatorship set up to sell you crap. You're getting sold a lie.

edit: eevblog post, also explaining later experiments resulting in SD corruption issues: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/rasp ... ed-hardgt/

There's wicked side to you. RMAing those three 1N4007s to CPC to make them jump through the hoops.

It all seems like railing against the Model T Ford for being a crap piece of engineering. It probably was, but a lot of people thought it value for money.

Nonetheless, there's something suspicious about any organisation that has to deflect criticism.

[Robert]

Interesting that Eben Upton went from a "volunteer" at the foundation (according to Liz) to CEO at RPi trading (RPI Ltd)...
RPi Ltd had £144 million in revenue last year but the foundation is stil asking for public donations.
The Charity had approx £110M income and £100M expenditure. It spent £90M on raising funds and £11M on charitable activities.

https://register-of-charities.charityco ... y-overview
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... 1/officers

[bd139]

Robert followed the money and found the answer. Wise man

Edit: Also to note he was technical director at BCM so there's the commercial tie...

[bd139]

It's long struck me that the educational (schools) market for electronics and computers did have special requirements, but was something of a stitch-up between pals.

Well actually the thing is that there aren't any special requirements at all. Not one. What happened was people kept selling special requirements to the education authorities and government as a great idea leveraging the early days of computing. Computing is 100% commoditised now and they should just deploy what is required to run the software that is needed which is, much to my disdain, mostly Windows + MS Office. On top of that you can build other tools. Teach programming? Add software. Music? Add software. GIS/Geo? Add software. CAD? Add software. Lectures/conferences? Zoom/Teams etc. Need IO? Buy a box.

Anyway, what's the obviously better SBC choice?

My point is that is starting at the solution. Define the problem first. An SBC is rarely the correct answer unless you're in an early product development phase or have a very low volume product. And you're quite frankly insane if you're picking the most shonky of products out there. Agilent/Keysight had a reasonable approach when they used embedded CE and were dumping it slowly for Linux; the scopes had a board with the MCU on it.

To point out, education is a very high volume industry which means you need to pick commodity items to drive costs down and ensure that the hardware, software and staff are fungible.

There's wicked side to you. RMAing those three 1N4007s to CPC to make them jump through the hoops.

That's how you drive process improvements. Turn bad processes into a cost centre.

It all seems like railing against the Model T Ford for being a crap piece of engineering. It probably was, but a lot of people thought it value for money.

I think that's a bad analogy. The Model T Ford was not entering a commoditised market. The Raspberry Pi is.

The value proposition is terrible versus a second hand desktop PC or a dedicated solution to the problem you are solving with it. Especially where the Raspberry Pi is compared with desktop computers in the education market. Which is my fundamental objection.

Nonetheless, there's something suspicious about any organisation that has to deflect criticism.

Robert found it. They are a cash grab disguised as a charity.

[mnementh]

Soooo... Satan's right testicle sweat then...?

mnem

[25 CPS]

I really hope they slid that package behind the blue bin on the left to hide it after taking that picture otherwise it's an F-minus-minus for the delivery company.

I'm going to be seriously upset if that package is missing by the time I get home from work.

[25 CPS]

I just got home and luckily the package was still there. The overgrowing cedar tree in front of the porch just earned itself a major reprieve since it does a good job of blocking the porch from view from the street. Unboxing once I get dinner in the oven.

[Zucca]

My family end of year balance in 2022 is kind of red, okay we bought a new car.... but oh well I need to make money with all my equipment now....
She does not want to work.