Category: FAIL

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHVAC

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This post contains large amounts of angry hissing and swearing. You’ve been warned.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I was doing the weekly inspection checklist at the transmitter site when this….. Space Station Toilet….??? went thunk, plunk, and cycled out of Beam On. The display forlornly moaned of a low anode coolant flow alarm. I know the issue is with the flow sensor.

It’s in the middle of all this so I did not try to undertake the replacement single handedly. Look at this glorious mess!!!

those are certainly all pipes ‘n’ stuff. The sensor is in the horizontal block above the centrifugal blower on the bottom

But then my attention was drawn to the fact that it started getting warmer in the room… and it just kept getting warmer. Luckily, it was about 68 outside with a strong Delta Breeze, so I just opened all the doors and started to investigate the attempted thermal runway. On the roof I peeked into one of the large RTU (Roof Top Unit) air conditioners and saw a winter wonderland of ice. Hmm.

Hurrrfdongs

Not good. So why’s this thing icing up? It’s practically brand new! I called the HVAC company we have a service contract with and their dispatcher literally told me she was going to see if anyone felt like helping us out today. (No.)

Time to gather tools and investigate.

Ahhh! Copeland Popsicles!

Definitely a low head pressure situation… but why? Remember, PV=nRT even for insufficient levels of T[emperature], so maybe it’s just running too cold due to low heat input into the system. Let’s open up the other side…

Oh. You know, I don’t think that belt is supposed to be flopping around like a rubbery hula hoop.

Note three things in this photo: 1) motor sheave spinning. 2) fan sheave barely spinning. 3) harder to see but— water flying everywhere including spraying on that poor little ABB drive!

Click, power down, go gather more tools, climb up and down the ladder about a zillion times…

I set the thermostat below to system off / constant fan and properly tensioned the belt, which DerpCo HVAC’s techs do not know how to do… At all… then restore power.

No windy whirly. Just freezy fuckery.

The fan didn’t start. The little ABB drive’s cooling fan wailed, but it just wasn’t coming on. Why? Finally on a whim I twisted the red and green thermostat wires together and it ramped politely up to full blast with no slippage. Guess the thermostat just isn’t letting constant fan be a thing. That’s fine…

This economizer reminds me of that enormous gear Charlie Chaplin gets rolled across.

Slowly but surely, the room temperature started creeping down.

I always wonder if I’d get in trouble for naming and shaming DerpCo HVAC. They’re a large, probably national company, and are far more interested with their prime directives of union busting and bumping out any employees with seniority than they are with providing proper service to their customers. I hate dealing with DerpCo mostly, though they have *one* tech locally who actually knows what they’re doing.

No just take it back

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It’s possible this was an April Fool’s post. But anyway…

Earlier today I posted a scandalous picture of a vacuum tube to Facebook and they immediately deleted my account. I hit the button to request a review and they gave it back… Now I can see that they’re selling ad space to this thing:

Yes, that’s apparently a pepper spray equipped Internet of Turds doorbell

Yeah uh I’ll thank you not to weaponize the Internet of Turds. This needs to be filed right alongside the CellMate dick locker in the IoT Devices That Should Never Have Been Hall of Fame.

In case you’re curious about that CellMate – Click here after preparing yourself to laugh very hard.

What if hhhhhh but HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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Ok just gonna switch out this GatesAir exciter, let’s see, move all the connectors over and hey wait what’s this

the devil’s five tiny sphincters

Wait, why?

The back of the exciter is just a db 9…

*deep breath*

h.

Ok, I’m done….. No wait hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

WHERE DID YOU EVEN FIND A CONNECTOR THIS POWERFULLY CURSED

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Hell it’s like a Phoenix Contact header had a severe case of multiple personality disorder and the adapter was nigh impossible to remove with the exciter in place and thanks I hate it.

hp Instant Ink Tehpwnzriation

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So I’ve known about the HP Instant Ink program for a while and I always hated it. Basically it gives you DRM encumbered ink cartridges as a service, which HP can disable at any time… Yeah uh… No thanks

This requires the printer and/or drivers to phone home to hp all the time, I never really thought of the mechanics of this until I saw someone post this response from Fiorina-Shenzhen, I mean, “hp” support ….

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I don’t even have words to describe how terrible an idea this is and how terrible their product design is if it requires this. And yes… I’m sure that firmware can be exploited rotten for entry and lateral movement upon your network once you fucking DMZ your goddamn inkstortion device. Have I said fuck enough times? No. Fuck this actual shit!!!

Picture somehow related, I’m sure

Brand HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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Oh, I have such a love-hate relationship with some manufacturers.

Now… I had previously made a vague shitpost while working on a Harris Apex A2X exciter. This would have dated back to, well, when they were Harris Broadcast before the spinoff that left them independent as GatesAir, with another division becoming Imagine Communications

Imagine Communications…. Because they aren’t necessarily ever going to work outside of your vivid imagination

Anyway let’s just get right into YELLING IN BROADCAST ENGINEER. First stop: The Apex M2X oscillator board.

Frequency stability is vital to generating a good solid digital TV broadcast signal. The Apex M2X features a disciplined OCXO (Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator) with several options as to how to ensure proper longterm calibration – it has a GPS receiver, 10 Mhz external reference, and 1 PPS external reference options provided. More on OCXO references here (this describing a more basic, free-running one, without sync inputs). However, the OCXO itself is, uhhhhhhhhhhhh


uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

h.

 

hhhhhhhhhhhhh

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

WHAT DID YOU DO HERE

WHAT IS THIS

WHAT IS ANY OF THIS

WHY

YOU GUYS JUST GLUED A BLOB OF PACKING FOAM OVER THE OSCILLATOR AND A LINEAR VOLTAGE REGULATOR WHY DID YOU DO THIS

LOOK AT THAT BULGING CAPACITOR OF HAPPINESS ALL UP IN THERE OH BABY

I wanted to peel this crap off but I was fairly confident that if this is anything like the antistatic foam that ICs used to come packed in, it may have broken down and corroded parts under it and I’d be faced with irreplaceable parts that went out of availability two years before they sold this exciter crumbling to dust. So I left it alone. It only has to last about another year, if even that. I hope. Did I mention HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH? Because HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So. Let’s move on to the power side.
The power supply is along the left wall of the exciter. On GatesAir’s admission, the power supply pretty much expires and becomes a ticking time bomb after 5 years – power it off and it will never ever start back up again.

But that’s unrelated to, uhhhhh, The Internal UPS Thing Of WEIRDNESS

For unknown reasons they felt the need to give the unit battery backup. It does not fully power it, like, the RF output disappears once it’s on battery. I think all it does is keep the controller with the RTAC data* in memory alive, and keep it from having to entirely run through the several minutes long boot process following a momentary power glitch.

It is, however, FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

On later versions it uses a lithium ion battery which consists of three 18650 cells, but rated at only 1.5 amp hour, which suggests… some 18650s of hilariously low quality. Behind the board is a charging / BMS circuit that steps the battery voltage up to 12V to keep the exciter powered. On earlier versions, they went through all the trouble of building this elaborate charger/step-up board, similarly…..
And then, waaaait for it—–

 


Ok, take a good look at this, and prepare yourself for the description of what you’re actually looking at: someone… went through the trouble of getting a spot welder in house and welding tabs to unmatched dumpshit tier** Energizer retail packed NiMH cells.

Because, uh, only the finest with Brand HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Picture…….. related.

There is another memory backup battery, but I’m guessing that’s mostly just for the realtime clock.

* Sorry, I am not currently in a sufficiently coherent mental state to describe what RTAC does, other than that it is Fucking Magic and if the Fucking Magic doesn’t work, the signal comes out on air as distorted non-decodable dog turd
** only slightly better than Duracell

The Holy HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Grenade

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HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Every now and then the gate operator at my apartment complex either leaves the gate open forever or opens like eight inches and dies so I have to get out and shove it open. This explains why.

Also, hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh*

* just imagine an angy possum hiss

The Silliest Voltmeter Ever…

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The year…. something like 2004.

The transmitter…. Harris Broadcast PowerCD, a funky Inductive Output Tube based system with modular architecture supporting multiple cabinets.

The silliness: much. Much, much silliness. So here’s a hilarious one: this board is right at the power input to each cabinet and watches for power supply phase loss and provides voltage metering outputs. Power in this case is 480v 3 phase delta and the metering circuits on this card measure the voltage between A and B, B and C, and C and A. The measurement circuit is uhhhh the CACA type. 😉

This Got Hot. The resistors’ markings bleached out from the heat!

So, here’s what you’re looking at. The three resistors are 15K ohm 3 watt and are wired in series with R27 (a PTC 0.15 amp polyfuse device) and the sensor coil inside that LEM current sensor.

The LEM LV25-P sensor is a Hall effect current sensor with galvanic isolation. It accepts 0-10mA and puts out a sense voltage proportional to the current input.

The resistors are dissipating 3.84 watts total on each phase, well within their rating. However, this rating was not assuming they’d be piled up like this and crammed on a board stuffed in an unventilated space in the cabinet!

The end result of this was that one of the voltage readings constantly jumped around and caused false alarms to fill the alarm log…. while we were trying to diagnose another issue.

Note the power reading at the top– that was the Other Issue. Ow. Signal go down the hoooooooole.

I’m entirely confused as to why such a roundabout approach was taken to this when a set of isolation amplifiers with one side being powered off a voltage divider or even a small transformer on each phase would have worked with less bill of materials cost and less heat, but uh