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

[mnementh]

Here there be dragons!!! Well, dwagon. And, uhhhh.... we're out of coffee...

mnem
Thanks, bitseeker!

[bitseeker]

I see your inline image be workin'.

[mnementh]

I know... what a novel idea; inline images that work.

But uhh... it does the same weird thing with transparent BG .gifs as eevBlog; where it turns the BG black. :shrug:

mnem
*toddles off to discord to snurch some kebab for dinner*

[bitseeker]

Ah, OK. Good to know. I'll look into it.

[Specmaster]

Well this looks a little daunting but I suppose it will become perfectly clear once we have had a bit of time to learn it all, again The smilies are a big step forward but are we restricted to the current selection or is there a way to add our own customised set?

Two of my favourite multimeters, this was me calibrating the 4503 against the 867s after having replaced the memory retention battery and of course clearing away all the resultant contamination that the old battery caused, that was a massive job in its own right. Many discrete parts had creeping corrosion going down the legs which caused bad connections, many caps had also leaked so a complete recap had to be done, but it all came good in the end. Sadly though, I don't use it as much as I really should, why because the bloody power switch is on the back panel which makes it rather difficult to switch on when its in a stack with other equipment on both sites and on top of it. That is a major problem with a lot of equipment of that era.

I used the Brymen 867s as the reference standard to calibrate the 4503 against, as the 867s was the last meter I purchased new and therefore calibrated and both meters have a claimed accuracy of 0.03% so I thought it would a good reference.

[bd139]

Bing bong. Appears to work.

Nice post Specmaster

[Specmaster]

Yeah, its an old one just to test out the new format

[bitseeker]

Well this looks a little daunting but I suppose it will become perfectly clear once we have had a bit of time to learn it all, again

Yep, a bit of a hurdle, but if it works out, we can customize it further.

The smilies are a big step forward but are we restricted to the current selection or is there a way to add our own customised set?

Yes, custom smilies are supported. I'll finally be able to have a happy oscilloscope, not just the old broken one!

[bitseeker]

But uhh... it does the same weird thing with transparent BG .gifs as eevBlog; where it turns the BG black. :shrug:

Good news. It appears that the CSS for the img element that contains thumbnail images has a background color assigned in the default theme. The thumbnail image, itself, is transparent. So, this'll be able to be rectified when making a theme for TEA or hacking the default styles.

[tautech]

Congrats all and thanks for another home/hangout bitseeker ! ....need a thumbs up emoji
This place is not complete without an enabler !

[Specmaster]

This is slowly growing on me, it has the makings of a reasonable home, what does everyone else think about it?

[bd139]

I have run phpBB before. I'm fine as a user as long as I don't have to look after it and I can pretend that it doesn't have the word PHP in it somewhere.

[mnementh]

You'll have to forgive bd139... his pH balance goes off whenever he sees PHP. And he's already annoyed at not being able to go walkies today.

mnem
mornings would be much better if they started later... like in the afternoon.

[bd139]

Right on you smoke emitting bastard

[Specmaster]

That almost made me snort my tea all over the bench.

[Zenith]

I like it because it's the forum format I'm used to. I never took to the groups way of doing things.

With any luck it will avoid the problems of having TEA all bundled into one enormous thread, where it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.

[bitseeker]

I have run phpBB before. I'm fine as a user as long as I don't have to look after it and I can pretend that it doesn't have the word PHP in it somewhere.

I figured I'd set up phpBB first, since it has a pretty good tagging extension, is similar enough in user experience to SMF and others, seems to be able to accomplish more via extensions without resorting to base source manipulation like SMF, and we already know much of what SMF does and doesn't do well.

If we do find that it will work for us, then I'll work on a TEA theme, which will take care of various usability/accessibility issues, give the forum its own identity, and get rid of most of the reminders about it running on PHP ( ).

Also, I was pleasantly surprised that the image inlining worked nicely. That's a relief.

[bd139]

Yeah I will admit it has improved since I last used it.

I am less of a fan of SMF as an end user after using it for several years. It's familiar but so is Covid at this point

[mnementh]

Right on you smoke emitting bastard

We all know how you love it when things emit smoke...

mnem
glad I could oblige...

[mansaxel]

It seems this, superficially, is working.

I'm very much in agreement with BD, I could use this if I never had to bother with its innards.

I will, from very painful experience, add one thing: Don't put any mods that aren't very actively developed in. When in doubt, refrain altogether. Mods are an upgrade nightmare, and upgrades are often required.

We should count on the password database of thing being stolen, as a matter of principle, and therefore I urge everyone to not reuse passwords here. A suitable password generator, for Real Computers:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
#
# 20 to 40-char password. 

case `uname` in
"Linux")
        line=`shuf -i 1-90 -n 1`
        len=`shuf -i 20-40 -n 1`
        ;;
"Darwin")
        line=`jot -r 1 1 90` 
        len=`jot -r 1 20 40` 
        ;;
"FreeBSD")
        line=`jot -r 1 1 90` 
        len=`jot -r 1 20 40` 
        ;;
esac

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=2 2>/dev/null|\
        base64 |\
        tr -cd '[[:alnum:]].-/_,='  |\
        fold -w ${len} -b |\
        sed -n -e "${line}p" 
#
# EOF
#

[Cubdriver]

I built a peninsula for the bench around the time when the crap hit the fan on the EEVblog forum, so I never bothered to post about it. This was needed to get the 524C counter into position to work on it as it's too tall to fit under the upper shelf, and too deep to not fall off if without if I try to balance it on what's left.


The beast, containing around seventy tubes and weighing north of 100 lbs, is now in place and has been brought up on a variac.


No smoke has yet come out, but there's something amiss in the oscillator chain as it's not passing the clock signal through. The internal clock dies along the way through, and an external signal will pass and let it count when it's considerably lower in frequency than it should be, but when cranked up to the desired 1 MHz, it too does not pass. I haven't done too much more troubleshooting (waiting for it to get cooler outside; see note about 70 tubes above), but plan on starting a separate thread once I've made some progress. The random numbers on the display below are what comes up on initial power up as the gates in the decade counters come to life as the tubes heat up and begin conducting.


And for fun, a few pics of the tube heaters.






-Pat

[bitseeker]

I will, from very painful experience, add one thing: Don't put any mods that aren't very actively developed in. When in doubt, refrain altogether. Mods are an upgrade nightmare, and upgrades are often required.

Indeed. Been there before with SMF (for a different forum unrelated to TE).

We should count on the password database of thing being stolen, as a matter of principle, and therefore I urge everyone to not reuse passwords here.

Yep. Not good to reuse passwords across sites in general. And with the way companies sell identities (and associated data), it's good to have a unique email address per site, too, if you can.

[bitseeker]

And for fun, a few pics of the tube heaters.

Nice choobs!

[Specmaster]

Right on you smoke emitting bastard

We all know how you love it when things emit smoke...

mnem
glad I could oblige...

Only when its followed by a nice bang

[bd139]

We should count on the password database of thing being stolen, as a matter of principle, and therefore I urge everyone to not reuse passwords here. A suitable password generator, for Real Computers:

This is good practice anyway. I've worked for enough shit-shows to worry about this scenario. Use a different password for every single thing you sign into. Too much hassle? Get a password manager. Cross platform tool for the job: https://keepass.info/

I'm lazy so I use a combination of macOS Keychain and MacPass.