I confused the tiny dolphin somehow. My Flipper Zero either ran out of battery power, or maybe actually didn’t, and seemed to refuse to fully boot up or charge. The charge status claimed both charged and empty, and “Limited to 3.8 volts”. Strange. I thought I’d have to go in there and disconnect the battery to reset it but it was easier than that!
I found the reset instructions and they’re kinda amusing:
1) Plug in the USB charger, go to Settings / Power / Power Off
2) confirm with the sad looking dolphin that you want to power off. A very Windows 95-esque “It’s now safe to unplug” screen comes up.
3) reconnect the USB charger
4) Hold the back button (20-30 sec?)
Bam, it lit right back up and resumed normal operation. The battery seems perfectly fine.
I’m not really sure what confused the device in the first place, but it just required a silly little dance to get it back.
This WAS a rubber stick on cushion. These are often found as feet on electronic equipment. I actually don’t know why it was ever in there.
It didn’t stop there and ran all the way down the chassis. The first sign of trouble was that I went to pull the scope out of its housing and it just stayed stuck, but then came out with a big SCHLORP sound.
I’ve begun ripping these rubber cushions off my older electronic gear and replacing them with sticky back felt feet if necessary. I wonder if there are silicone rubber equivalents? The silicone rubber keypad on this oscilloscope still works fine despite being made in the early 1990s but that superfluous cushion had to go before. I’m glad I got it before it oozed right out the holes in the back.
As nasty as this would be I’d rather soak in that substance than the contents of the Tesla Dumpster Pool
I just got a Flipper Zero and it allows for saving and replaying the magic from infrared remotes. I had a preservation target in mind, just in case –
Primeview monitors… they’re fancy, expensive, have great color rendition and can match your on-set lighting for film and TV very well, and they use an akwardly hard to obtain remote that’s, well, uh, hard to come by and awkward. I dunno. It has a lot of buttons that probably never get used by the Primeview monitor and it looks like it was originally intended to be the generic remote for some other kind of TV with a digital broadcast and radio tuner (!). Anyway, here’s all the buttons, use whichever ones you need. 🙂
I don’t really know what that file format is but it looks fairly straightforward and may be usable for LIRC and other configurable infrared remote control systems.
As I started to get down into the buttons at the bottom of the remote, I noticed the RGB LED light strips on my workbench starting to cycle between colors. Aha, wehave a bizarre match! I remember that the Favorite channel button was one of them.
First, these three pictures of early stage tri-color foaming wax
Yeah— so I did the config all wrong for this server. Virtual host declarations aren’t in the files they should logically be in and things overlap and I just accidentally found some way to get a horribly blank directory listing to load instead of this page! Very weird, I think I just need to make a backup copy and rewrite the stuff. My apologies if you catch things broken as I’m doing it.
Pictures from The Cloud:
This is the top of the tower elevator and the inside of the tower top hut on Transtower. The lower level is really weird and basically was built by and for Gumby.
My brother sends me regular updates on this kitty named Luna being a cutie peets.
A newborn car wash? I think it’s a Mark VII system.Hurgusburgus The ham shack as seen in “Akiba’s Trip”Rainbow jugsUseful memeMrow
So I made a previous silly post about this Weston 622 milliammeter… It’s pretty interesting. Inside that removable plug, sealed in place with beeswax, are some kind of heating element and one side of a thermocouple. The other side of the thermocouple is in the meter body. This is actually really similar to the platinum RTD RF power measurement technique that’s the gold standard for average power level measurements on signals that have a varying peak to average power ratio (PAPR). It measures the RMS, “heating value” of the input by….. measuring its heating value! I tested it with DC because that was convenient and the 60+ year old meter agreed with a modern Fluke DMM.
I haven’t come across a ton of info or any original manuals on this meter, but it’s a little different than most I’ve seen when just searching the web or looking at eBay listings (it’s fairly common!). Mine has the thermocouple and heater in an interchangable plug, whereas most have it buried inside the meter case. This suggests that at some point Weston intended it to be used with different detectors. I wonder if there was to be one with 50 ohm coaxial input? A passive thermal RF power meter would be pretty cute!!
I have this LED blacklight bulb in a desk lamp at my bench at work and it normally makes my hair glow nicely. In case you’re wondering— it’s thanks to the Iroiro Colors 300 series dyes. Neon Yellow, Neon Red, and Neon Pink are probably the brightest. I’m always tempted to just throw Neon Pink over my whole head because it looks so nice, but I am absolutely incapable of deciding on just one color so I continue to be a rainbow.
Anyway, this is what I get when it’s working:
I don’t turn the blacklight off, so it was just kinda cooking there for over a year. Eventually it became a dark purple light that didn’t make any magic.
New bulbOld bulb
The most noticeable difference is that the encapsulant on the “filament” arrays has darkened right over each emitter.
Old bulb, Well DoneNew bulb, the encapsulant is water clear
I had read a while back that some of the nasty but revolutionary UV-A emitters from Nichia, when they first came on the market, were using a metal TO-18 can with a quartz end window to avoid this.
I wonder how many other LED products may still suffer this degradation? I will say I got a good amount of life out of this $12 bulb so I’m not exactly mad, but I feel like if whoever made the “filaments” had used a better goopus on top of the array, it’d still be working fine.
As for the old bulb, I still like its weird violet glow and might try to scrounge up another weird fixture to put it in like this funky 3d printer-activated flicker lamp. I swear I can also see the HVAC chiller out back cycling in its brightness level.
I used to hate this thing but it’s slowly grown on me
I got a broken MiniDV camera pretty much free for the asking and took a look inside. Well, I’m glad I didn’t go in expecting a successful repair because oh no
Probably 50% of the weight of this thing is tiny screws.
I was intrigued and horrified all at once that a tiny cog belt was visible! See it peeking out there to the left of the rubber pinch roller?
The iris was stuck closed. I’ve seen this failure on a few JVC mini DV cams and had never opened one up to investigate. Upon seeing the mechanism I’m not surprised this happens. It’s a combined aperture and ND filter with two weird thin plastic blades that have stuck together, actuated by a very tiny rotary solenoid.
ND filter in lineFully openThe lens has two moving elements, one to zoom and one to focusThe sensor
So there’s the tape transport, it has only two motors aside from the head scanner. A very small pancake capstan motor is under the side where the pinch roller is; the one standing in the corner controls the load/unload action.
And finally, that tiny cog belt runs between the capstan motor and a pulley that drives the gear idler. The tension is regulated by a spring loaded brake (felt?) under the take-up reel and that’s pretty much it. This isn’t exactly a very sophisticated transport.
I can’t really imagine actually repairing one of these. Everything had to come out to get to the back of the transport and it’s a total mess in there. Wow.
Out of curiosity, I pried apart a laser pointer from Dollar Tree. See that tiny spot next to the blob-top circuit (probably the current regulator/driver)? That’s the laser diode.
I really want a microscope now to see what the heck is going on here!
There’s a lens to focus this into a more, uh, pointer-like beam. I haven’t figured out how to photograph this well yet but the uncollimated output is a wide elongated ellipse of light with pond ripple patterns at the ends.
For some reason I always envisioned the common laser diode to be a bigger object, but no— it’s teeny weeny. Cool.
This *was* a headlight connector and bulb, it all just disintegrated into weird gray ash and burned a few inches back down the wire. Oh gee where have I seen this before?
A glorious meme I stole. Kinda want that dress….
After months of neglect, I redyed my hair. Interestingly it seems like the blacklight at my workbench has become…. a dim purple light. The UV emission appears to be mostly gone. I’m not surprised as this has always been a common failure mode of uv led emitters. A lot of plastics that are common in other LED carriers will degrade from the UV and begin to absorb it, letting through only the visible blue/violet color, if much at all. The bulb has been on 24/7 pretty much ever since I started doing rainbow hair so it’s given a good service life. It occurs to me that one of my coworkers who just came back to the office today has never seen me with rainbow hair before, and he didn’t say anything about it…… but he suddenly decided he’s now tired of only wearing black clothing! Well then… I’m glad to be bringing more color to the world. :3
There are visible black spots on top of the LED emitters in the “filament” now. I don’t remember if they’re that way on these bulbs new but I’ll compare them when I get a new one. That is assuming I don’t just get some UV LED tape for my workspace where I sit and yell about things like these cursed faders in a JLCooper audio controller.
The “be glad you have a service plan” specialOy, when they said no user serviceable parts they very much meant it
A lot of equipment with motorized faders has pretty similar faders, but these are all weird and look almost like a totally custom bizarro construction. They’re not Alps, Penny & Giles, or Midas, they’re just weird and we kill them every year and change. Uh, okay.
Ok let’s just go in here and replace these bad power supplies
Hmm, weird….. There are three different sets of CPUs and RAM in there!
DDR3(?) ECC ram, makes senseHold up is that. Is that DDR1?! There’s some other bga mounted ram peeking out to the left of that roundboi cooler.
what. WHAT. It left the factory like that. It passed “QUALITY” CONTROL. What.
But somehow it works. Thanks I hate it.
You know what? I never want to see this again and maybe they were doing us a favor by using those crappy screws on the top cover where you have to drill out one or two because they’re galled and the head is made of pure nacho cheeze.
Or, “Why I wanna replace the Carlson LongHaul radios”.
I’m basing the name of this post off incorrectly remembering this glorious scene from the Pop Team Epic anime and thinking it said long strokes, not longs for good strokes, but whatever – I’m keeping it:
Ever just work with a piece of load-bearing hardware that is just asking for the sweet release of the e-waste bin? Yeah, that’s what half the entries on this page are about, but here’s one that, uh, yeah. The Carlson Wireless LongHaul… It’s still on their website as if it were a current product but upon calling their support engineer for assistance he told me what I had already come to suspect, it was abandonware from over a decade ago. The unit is a long range microwave radio designed to carry telephone traffic and look like a TDM (T1?) link, but also IP traffic, which is what we’re using it for.
So let’s check off the Boxes Of Decay:
Flash user interface
User interface via https with REVOKED SECURITY CERTIFICATE
Best I can tell— based on 802.11A wifi hardware
Cursed
Did I mention cursed
The only way to keep these things in service is to have an old version of Flash that hasn’t been expired via logic bomb – Ruffle won’t cut it as it doesn’t support Actionscript 3, though it handles http://aktiv-schaum.kg4cyx.net/ just fine. I’m sure you all missed those goofy Flash shitposts, right? I sure did. It also seems to play my old Fanimutations just fine.
If you have the Ruffle extension loaded: Aligator (unfinished!)
I wish to state here that there are some dumb jokes in there that were very much a bad product of the time and I feel like they don’t age well, but not that I’d want to bury this entirely.
Anyway— on to the weird old hardware.
The board says “Avlia Networking Platform” on it and it looks like maybe an older version of this guy
The wifi card slotted into it is a Wistron-Neweb dual band radio, interestingly.. this unit only supports the 5.8 ghz side but some of the other ones we have in service, inexplicably, support both 2.4 and 5.8, consult your pineal gland
The serial and USB connections are unpopulated and I found no other way into the device…
Well, you can telnet in, but the user/password are unknown. It says it runs FreeBSD.
Finally by some sheer luck I found I had one old system with Flash on it and was able to set these creaky old things up. In the user interface (I can’t be arsed to take a screenshot) it has signal level readings which… uh, it’ll say it’s seeing -38dBm when the radio it’s connected to is unplugged and disconnected, and everything takes like four tries to get it to save and take effect and the Reboot button doesn’t work and
I’m so tired. I’m just so tired. can I just have a couple of Ubiquiti bullets and a nap? Please? Thank you. GAAAAAAABORAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
