Saw this picture on Twitter and well, it’s distinctly output being generated by a Digital Alert Systems / Monroe DASHECK.. I mean.. DASDEC…
wait just a minute here
Nah, there’s nothing evil about these things though, they don’t sacrifice children and they certainly aren’t in any way possessed….
Really though, this makes me wonder, I’ve known for quite a while that these things are basically just a Linux box. They have a fair amount of obfuscation because the they sell a bunch of extra options and are making at least a token effort to keep the IPAWS server keys hidden…. however it appears that they use VLC for some reason? Funky.
I’ve always wondered what the AM and FM radio cards in these things are. A nice feature they offer is the ability to go back in there and get a recording of the AM / FM monitor sources as an incoming alert was picked off them. That’s also present in the current versions of the Sage Digital Endec but the Monroe will give you one for each source, while the Sage actually only monitors one audio source at a time (the first to go active steals it and the rest are not monitored).
I dunno, EAS is just horribly cursed, and my idea of Heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they *love* me.
Me, a couple nights ago: “my hair is really faded, I wonder which colors to dye it next?”
To answer my own question: yes
Also I discovered this is the most useless hair bleach, at least on me – it doesn’t even try to lift any part of my hair that wasn’t already bleached with the nice Wella or Quick Blue stuff, or is already naturally graying. (How much gray do I have now? I hate to say I don’t even know.)
You’ve seen “Legally Blonde”. Now, this Summer, from ‘thanks I hate it’ Productions comes AWKWARDLY BLONDE
Ever seen a TV live truck on scene? Well, if you have, chances are you’ve noticed a thing on top that looks like the top of Crow T. Robot’s head on a tall extendable mast.
What you’re looking at is a foldable microwave dish that can be used to send video from a live shot back to a fixed receiver site that forwards it to the TV studio. At the bottom of it is a remote controlled pair of big chonky motors that let you, standing on the ground, pan or tilt the dish to get it lined up with the receive site so the station can see your live shot coming in.
One of ours got stuck in the up position so I needed to pull it apart and fix it and I intended to take some more pictures of the apparatus as it’s kinda cute – it has two big Bodine gear motors driving worm screw drives via little drive chains, and has limit switch cam assemblies to keep you from going past safe travel limits on the thing.
I found the issue pretty soon after figuring out how to open the weird chassis of the dish motor, which opened vaguely like a milk carton – a hinged milk carton made of sheet metal. I’ve never seen anything quite like that and have to give them points for originality, though, if you had to get in there and the dish was stuck in a position other than straight up, you’d have to disassemble the entire shebang from the sides and take the dish off and everything and eww.
Thankfully, this was stuck straight up, and Tina caught a couple pictures of me working on it after I got it open:
But then the gloop went off.
See, what happened was one of the motor brushes got stuck in the brush holder and wouldn’t advance as it wore down a little, which caused the motor to stop working open circuit. I pulled it apart and managed to get this picture before I realized….. whoops, the armature of the motor and its pressed on bearing were the only thing holding the gloop in. You can see the brush on the right still wedged back in the holder where it can’t actually touch the commutator:
The gloop I refer to is a particularly foul, stinky, sticky, syrupy sort of gear oil, almost all the way up to being a grease in viscosity, but just low enough in viscosity to allow it to make a huge mess in short order. This is the second time I’ve run into it on Bodine motors – there’s no externally visible sign of it having an oil filled gearbox, no fill/drain screw or plug, nothing. You just get a terrible surprise if you dare separate the motor from the gearbox. GLOOOOP.
A fair amount escaped and got all over everything, but there was certainly enough left in the gearbox immersing its guts that I don’t feel I need to disassemble the whole thing and try to refill it. Nah, it’s just a learning experience… AGAIN…. BEWARE THE GLOOP.
Otherwise it will get the song stuck in your head. That song never leaves…. not that it ever has to.
Just when you least expect it, what’s basically a portable scalar network analyzer starts talking to you in THIS FONT and you start disbelieving your own eyes:
What even is this font?Wonder if that’s from that Microsoft core fonts package that they made freely available years ago then pretended they didn’tOh by the way the antenna is …. Uh. It’s… not?
Root cause of that scary looking reflect plot was revealed by a quick walk up the stairs to the roof to be an almost completely disintegrated piece of LMR-400. My coworker assured me it worked perfectly fine five years ago……..
This is several kilobucks worth of hardware that was misapplied to create a special filter that…. nothing would pass. See if you can spot the issue!
Our IT director dropped a non working Wyse serial terminal on my bench. I don’t think he expected me to tear it open and try to fix it, I think it has an open diode or bad cap in the +5v supply. It’s gonna be the serial console for a Linux machine if I can get it glowing.
Which looks sillier to an uninitiated observer, the results of this butt-dial Google search or my mess of a DMR radio codeplug?
In other news, buzzard puke alert! Changing the “Radio IP Address” field in Motorola TRBO CPS is not how you change the repeater’s Ethernet IP, it’s just how you get it to throw blank error messages with no explanation. Well that’s a solid block of fnord.
