Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I have never used a soldering iron that needed firmware.
I'm usually a KISS sort of person, but my irons that automatically go into sleep mode and then shut themselves off if idle long enough certainly help ease my mind. Especially so after we returned from vacation one time and I discovered I had left my FX-888D on for 10ish days.
For anyone who watches Big Clive enough you might remember that he talked about doing the same thing. I watched that video about a month before I pulled the same dumbass mistake.
Now all of the heat producing stuff on the electronics bench is hooked to one circuit that shuts off at bedtime, when we leave the house, etc. But even with all of that I highly recommend buying good quality soldering irons. I hesitate to think what would have happened if I had left a bargain basement Chinese iron on for 10 days while we were gone.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
shit themselves off if idle long enough
I knew laziness was bad, but causing loss of bowel control? That's something else.
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@Benjamin-Hall that's what happens to your autocorrect when you curse as much as I do. It always errs on the side of obscenities.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I hesitate to think what would have happened if I had left a bargain basement Chinese iron on for 10 days while we were gone.
You'd have had a hell of a time convincing the insurance company that your house burning down was an honest mistake?
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@Polygeekery All the other irons I've used have the heater and temperature sensor separate from the tip. The Wellers at work have a 1/4" circle of contact between the tip and heater. The ts100 (and hakko t12) has the heater bonded into the tip, and the heater is wired with thermocouple wire, so the temperature stability is far superior. Add the boost mode on the iron os firmware, and I spend a lot less time adjusting settings for the workpiece.
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@Circuitsoft fair. And that is one of my gripes with the FX-888D irons. By looking at the display you would think that the iron is good to go in 10-15 seconds, but it takes another 10-15 seconds for the tip to reach equilibrium with the heater element and thermocouple and actually be good to go.
My Weller also has the heater and thermocouple in the handle, but I think they have thermally coupled the tip much better and that there are some tricks in the firmware because it keeps heating for a bit after the display shows you have reached temperature. The other thing I like about the Weller is that it is not a simple bang-bang heating control. It has a four bar display to show how much wattage it is outputting to the tip. Sitting at idle it flicks on one bar very occasionally. Start working on a ground plane and it will keep all four bars cranked on and actually start intentionally (at least I think it is intentional) overshooting your set temp. It is kind of like it automatically turns on a boost like you are partial to, but does it automatically.
But it is also a ~$600 soldering station versus a ~$80 TS100.
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TS100/Pinecil also have proportional control, and depending on the display mode you choose, you can get either power percentage or a bargraph in the display on the iron.
Biggest downside is that, while you can get a burn-proof silicone XT60-to-barrel cable for the TS100, it's only 18" long. No longer options available. I'm still planning to build my own (at some point) but finding good wire is actually hard.
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The two irons I like (respectively) as much, and better-than, the TS100, are the Weller WTCPT, and Metcal.
The ancient Weller does temperature regulation with a piece of iron in the back-end of the tip forged to set the curie temperature at 650, 750, or 850F, and stamped with a 6, 7, or 8 to specify which it is. In the handle of the iron, there's a switch connected to an AlNiCo magnet near the tip.
When you put a tip in, the magnet attracts it pulling the switch closed. As the tip approaches the "set" temperature, the little bit of iron loses its magnetic properties, releasing the magnet, and turning the switch off. As it cools, the magnetic properties return, and the magnet attracts it, turning on the switch again.
Metcal works both similarly, and very differently. The iron tip is forged to have the curie temperature at your desired soldering temperature, but instead of a magnet, the base injects 75W of 10MHz RF down the line to the iron. Any parts of the tip below the curie temperature inductively heat, and any parts above the curie temperature reflect the RF energy. So, if you touch a very fine tip to a ground plane, it'll dump 75W into just the part of the tip that has heat drawn away from it, allowing you to effectively heat large thermal blocks without needing a huge tip.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Those strips are mildly heat sensitive so you really need a temperature controlled iron to solder them. Trying to use a "dumb" soldering iron would just destroy the solder pads. A butane soldering iron would probably just burn the entire strip all to hell.
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Somewhere here I posted about my issues with Google Home products being absolutely fucking worthless sometimes. I ask them to turn a light on or off and it turns one on or off across the house in a completely different room. I will tell it to start a timer and it might start one in another room, or multiple rooms or it will tell me that it started it and then not do that. A timer goes off and I tell it to clear the timer and fuck only knows what might happen, but not what I want it to.
So I have had numerous chats and phone calls with their support people, including one where I told them I was probably just going to run it all through my wood chipper.
I had another one this afternoon. I set a timer, it goes off, I tell it to clear the timer and other devices respond and the timer keeps going off. So I tip the stupid fucking thing forward and yank the cord out to stop the timer.
Yes, I know I (probably) could have cleared it from the touchscreen, but I was annoyed and it has been a stressful day.
I tip it back up later and the screen is broken. It was never handled rough enough that I would think that the screen should have broken.
So I start on chat and end up on an hour long phone call. I was polite and courteous but went through a laundry list of issues I have had with their POS products.
They are replacing everything with the most current hardware revisions, for free. Nearly $2,000 worth of shit.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Nearly $2,000 worth of shit.
$2000 worth of shit is still shit.
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As part of this they sent me an email that I am to respond to with all of the serial numbers of all of the stuff.
So I can just look in the Google Home app, right? Right?
Of fucking course I can't. No one would ever need to access stuff like that. There's no sense in displaying that on the "Device Information" screen in the app. What purpose could that ever serve?
So I just had to go around and take pictures of the bottom of all of this shit, with zoom cranked up so that the ~ 1.5mm tall font is mostly legible. Thankfully they've picked up a little dirt on the rubberized plastic that I could rub into the characters to make them stand out compared to their white on white lack of contrast.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
take pictures of the bottom of all of this shit, with zoom cranked up
That's the only way I can read any of those serial numbers. On the plus side, I can toss those images in a folder and know where to find the serial number in the future...
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I am still annoyed so I send them an email basically saying that they might want to add the serial number to the device information screen in the app because this is a pain in the ass and asking them if I can just send them the pictures so I don't have to try to type all of this crap out.
"Don't worry about the serial numbers. We can look up your order information and get it from there. If you are at the same address you can just send us a picture of the Nest Hub Max with the broken screen and you can ignore the rest of the information we requested."
Now you fucking tell me.
I get it though. They sent out the same boilerplate email that they send to everyone else and most of them haven't been on a far-too-long phone call and already given all of this information.
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While looking for the earlier gif I found one that lots of us could (over)use on the forums:
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Nearly $2,000 worth of shit.
$2000 worth of shit is still shit.
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@dcon said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
That's the only way I can read any of those serial numbers.
When cell phones started including forward-facing cameras (selfie cams) I thought it was really dumb and something just for the narcissistic.
Then one day I needed to get a serial number off a piece of equipment that was in a wall mounted rack and would have required shutting down a network and unhooking and hooking back up a fuckton of cabling and then I remembered the dumb as fuck selfie cam and
.Yeah, I dig the sooper-genius selfie cam now. Lots of manufacturers put their serial numbers in locations that are nearly inaccessible when racked.
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This morning I drop the kids off at school and come home to take a quick shower. I queue up some music through Google Assistant and enjoy my shower. When I am done I am about to head to the bedroom to finish getting dressed.
"Okay Google, move music to bedroom Nest."I am walking out of the bathroom when it replies:
"Okay, moving music to (mother-in-law's name) bedroom Nest."
Oh fuck! Well, that's not good.
"No Google, don't fucking do that, stop playback, don't move music, stop everything!!"I never followed up with her as to whether or not she got the delight of being surprised by Ozzy Osbourne's album 'Ozzmosis' playing at 90% volume at 9:15am today but if she did I am certain that she will bring it up at some point.
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A friend is looking over a place for his business and sends me a message that there's a ton of capacitors there, new old stock, asks me if I want any of them.
"Maybe. What kind of capacitors? Can you send me a photo of any of them?"
I think I'm good. I don't work with anything that needs, or could even use, capacitors with those specs. You can tell this by the fact that I am still alive.
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@Polygeekery with a peak rating of 130 kJ, yeah. That's a bit more than I'd like to deal with. Plus, who has a 11.3 kV source to feed the suckers.
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@Benjamin-Hall That would probably be the "bacon"-setting for a defibrillator.
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@Rhywden in that it would cook bacon crispy? Or that's enough juice to turn the bacon back into a pig? Frankenpig.
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@Rhywden said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall That would probably be the "bacon"-setting for a defibrillator.
Going to do some ballpark numbers based on sketchy internet research.
Assume R_human ~ 50 kOhm.
I(max) ~ V_C/R_human ~ 0.225 A.
tau ~ 1/RC = 9.8 ms, so time to total discharge (~10 tau) = 98 ms.tau = RC = 102s. Much better.
Power delivered (average, E/(10tau)):1326 kW127W. If I haven't screwed up somewhere. Edit: which I did. Oops. FixedThat's...higher than I want near me. For a bit longer than I'd like.
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@Polygeekery: you mean, you didn't even wonder about how large a spark you could produce with those, even for a second?
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@Zerosquare I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't curious about that. But with my track record...
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
A friend is looking over a place for his business and sends me a message that there's a ton of capacitors there, new old stock, asks me if I want any of them.
"Maybe. What kind of capacitors? Can you send me a photo of any of them?"I think I'm good. I don't work with anything that needs, or could even use, capacitors with those specs. You can tell this by the fact that I am still alive.
Wrong decision. You could be building a superweapon right now, instead you're reading this.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
A friend is looking over a place for his business and sends me a message that there's a ton of capacitors there, new old stock, asks me if I want any of them.
"Maybe. What kind of capacitors? Can you send me a photo of any of them?"I think I'm good. I don't work with anything that needs, or could even use, capacitors with those specs. You can tell this by the fact that I am still alive.
Send them to this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGhhdPgXG8
Sadly somebody else might have already sent a batch like that because he's stopped publishing new videos for a while now (he has had similar year-long interruptions though, so might also be drowning in work).
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@JBert if you go to Tech Ingredients YouTube channel and sort videos by oldest, some of their first videos made were on lasers and IIRC they used some capacitors similar to those. Possibly smaller and lower spec, but still some big honking bastards that would give you quite the tingle if you completed the circuit with your body. I recall him putting a lot of precautions in place to prevent that occurring.
Can you even imagine the discharge resistor you would need for those things?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Rhywden said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall That would probably be the "bacon"-setting for a defibrillator.
Going to do some ballpark numbers based on sketchy internet research.
Assume R_human ~ 50 kOhm.
I(max) ~ V_C/R_human ~ 0.225 A.
tau ~ 1/RC = 9.8 ms, so time to total discharge (~10 tau) = 98 ms.tau = RC = 102s. Much better.
Power delivered (average, E/(10tau)):1326 kW127W. If I haven't screwed up somewhere. Edit: which I did. Oops. FixedThat's...higher than I want near me. For a bit longer than I'd like.
I did a rougher estimate - 4.1 Joule per Kelvin per gram of water. So this would bring ~300 grams of water from 0 °C to the boiling point.
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@Rhywden Yeah. Well into the "ouch!" range.
Reminds me of the stories a friend who worked with the local utility company told about pigeons (and other birds) and power lines. They were fine sitting on a line...as long as they didn't bridge two of them or the wind didn't push the lines too close together. You've heard of popcorn chicken....well....yeah.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
pigeons ... You've heard of popcorn
chickensquab....well....yeah.
Only if it's young. Technically, if it's able to fly onto a power line, it's too old to be called squab. But 
.
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@JBert said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
A friend is looking over a place for his business and sends me a message that there's a ton of capacitors there, new old stock, asks me if I want any of them.
"Maybe. What kind of capacitors? Can you send me a photo of any of them?"I think I'm good. I don't work with anything that needs, or could even use, capacitors with those specs. You can tell this by the fact that I am still alive.
Send them to this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGhhdPgXG8
Sadly somebody else might have already sent a batch like that because he's stopped publishing new videos for a while now (he has had similar year-long interruptions though, so might also be drowning in work).
Maybe this guy?
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I don't work with anything that needs, or could even use, capacitors with those specs.
Never Railgunner, are we? And here I thought you were a proper firearm enthusiast.
For shame!
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The other night I noticed something odd about the new house that perfectly explains how the previous owner did not quite know what he was doing when he did projects around the house.
Every single outdoor outlet is GFCI. Every. Single. One of them.
~15 outdoor outlets. Every one of them is a GFCI outlet but there are only 3 or 4 different circuits that they are on.
Every single outlet in the garages and kitchens and bathrooms and elsewhere that mandates a GFCI protected outlet, is a GFCI outlet. All of them.
For those who may now know, this is really dumb because every outlet that is downstream from a GFCI outlet is protected by the upstream GFCI outlet. You only need one at the start of the circuit that needs protection.
I only hope that there is not too much tomfuckery with how the circuits are run or else when an outlet or light goes dead it could be lots of fun trying to find the appropriate GFCI to reset. Working in the kitchen is going to be run. Blenders and mixers and the like will sometimes trip a GFCI when you turn them off. I have always assumed that was a result of some back EMF but I really don't know. I just know that it happens.
On the bright side, if I can figure out the wiring I could probably eliminate 30-40 of these fucking things and sell them on craigslist and make some money or end up murdered and having my organs harvested or something. Craigslist is a crapshoot.
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@Polygeekery As you're ripping all of them out, make sure the descendants are downstream of the GFCI and not just downstream of the outlet itself. Although almost all GFCI outlets have two sets of terminals (the bottom set are protected), many old outlets have two sets as well -- one for each receptacle, so one side can be switched and the other always-on. Some contractors hook both cables to the top set because of this, necessitating each outlet have its own protection.
Also, I don't know where you live, but
codethe inspectors where I am require each GFCI-required outlet to be independently GFCI itself, regardless of whether or not it's also protected by another GFCI outlet or even by an RCBO at the breaker box.
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@TwelveBaud said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
As you're ripping all of them out,
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We are still several years of "Which goddamn GFCI tripped this time?" before I gain the motivation to tackle that project.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
We are still several years of "Which goddamn GFCI tripped this time?" before I gain the motivation to tackle that project.
The
is strong in this one.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
because every outlet that is downstream from a GFCI outlet is protected by the upstream GFCI outlet
Well, there is a catch: imagine some bad guy TM (e.g. burglar) who just accesses an outdoor outlet in order to shut off the electricity for all your house...
It makes sense to have an independent protection in some cases.
(Of course, not for every outlet.)
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I only hope that there is not too much tomfuckery with how the circuits are run
Different people have different experiences...
My brother asked me to help him remove a lamp.
OK, no problem. Just switch off the electricity for this room at the fuse first.
Hae? It's switched off at the switch.
Are you sure that the installation was done correctly? The switch could operate the neutral conductor (note: not sure about the english technical terms here) instead of the phase.
slightly offended: Do you know who did the installations?
(It was in his home, and it was him to do that)
Oh sorry. I've lived in renetd appartments only, and guess what you might experience there...
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@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Well, there is a catch: imagine some bad guy TM (e.g. burglar) who just accesses an outdoor outlet in order to shut off the electricity for all your house...
It makes sense to have an independent protection in some cases.You'd want the exterior outlets on their own circuit anyway, as they're also more likely to trip the GFCI due to water ingress.
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@dkf said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
You'd want the exterior outlets on their own circuit anyway, as they're also more likely to trip the GFCI
due to water ingressfor no reason whatsoever.FTFY
I hate GFCIs. The number of false positives gets really annoying.
I get that they are a safety item but they still annoy me.
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@Polygeekery Maybe they just get bored from time to time and want some human contact?
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@dkf maybe?
At our old house the outlet that on top of the peninsula was the one most convenient to plug a mixer into. The one below the peninsula overhang was the one that we would plug our kitchen Nest device into. So if you were using the mixer you had to make sure not to go from on at a higher speed to off really quickly or else you would kill most of the outlets in the kitchen and also the music you were listening to. To add to the annoyance the stupid power supply for Nest devices covers the buttons on the GFCI so then you had to reach under the overhang, unplug the Nest device, fumble around until you reset the GFCI and then plug the Nest device back in without accidentally hitting the test button on the GFCI.
The extra special bonus would be if I wasn't listening to music because then I would go to turn the mixer back on, nothing would happen, I would go through the fumbling under the counter only for the mixer to come to life and either start walking off the counter (if I were making some sort of dough) or slop ingredients all over the place (because if a thing doesn't come on of course I would turn it to high because I guess it needed more power to get going?).
To be totally fair it has always just been that one GFCI, but it has been a pain in my ass for over a decade and I will remain bitter for a long time over that one.
The other GFCI in the old kitchen was under the sink for the disposer to plug into and the times that it tripped were freaking fun because it was under and behind the sink so I had to clear stuff out from under the sink (why are the cleaning supplies under a sink always so gross?) and lay down on the floor and contort my arm in behind the sink to unplug the disposer, reset the GFCI and plug it back in, all of this had to be done while entirely unable to see anything that I was doing because the sink base in the old house was constructed in the dumbest way possible.
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@Polygeekery We have a ring circuit in the kitchen (standard setup with UK electrical code) and that's got a dedicated breaker in the cellar. I think the ring circuits cope with power transients a bit better, as we've not had a lot of problems with things like mixers, but I don't really know.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The switch could operate the neutral conductor (note: not sure about the english technical terms here) instead of the phase.
The English (American) terms are neutral and hot (unless it's multi-phase and for some reason you need to specify a particular phase, but I'm not sure why you'd need to do that).
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The switch could operate the neutral conductor (note: not sure about the english technical terms here) instead of the phase.
The English (American) terms are neutral and hot (unless it's multi-phase and for some reason you need to specify a particular phase, but I'm not sure why you'd need to do that).
Well how else am I supposed to plug in my three-phase toaster?
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I hate GFCIs. The number of false positives gets really annoying.
The one in my trailer trips almost every time I unplug something. Someday (
) I'll replace it...
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@dcon said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
my trailer
And here I thought that you lived in a house.
Yeah yeah, I assume you meant a travel trailer or camper.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Yeah yeah, I assume you meant a travel trailer or camper.
A tiny one that can be pulled by a Subaru Outback
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
~15 outdoor outlets.
