The what am I thread!

Pssst, I have to whisper this: size doesn't matter, it's what you do with it that counts!

Oh I forgot, the bins were from farnel, one friday a few years back they had a clearance sale, I got them for £5 each, and the others were joblots off ebay cheap

Little Ghostman said:

first bench to do is the easy one
View attachment 97752
then the harder one
View attachment 97753

I darnt take a pic of the third!
Then around 450 reels of smd stuff, after that everything else!!
View attachment 97754

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Looks pretty well organized to me as is: what is the problem?

There's no easy way, u need to just sort a little a day. It will get down if u commit to 30min per day.

Finally give things away. I started a concept for SA makers/electronics hobbiests called **broken link removed** because I just had too much components that I would never use.

StudentSA said:

There's no easy way, u need to just sort a little a day. It will get down if u commit to 30min per day.

Finally give things away. I started a concept for SA makers/electronics hobbiests called **broken link removed** because I just had too much components that I would never use.

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Wow that's brilliant! Makes me wish I lived in SA!
LG - it occurs to me, we have freecycle and freegle if you feel like giving stuff away - oh, not to mention the buy/sell/trade forum here on ETO.

I dont mind giving stuff away to people to help them, but as a hoarder the thought of giving everything way...................... I am a 'it might come in handy one day person '.

Some I will sell cheap, maybe make kits and for stuff like the caps for nikolai he can have free. I found 45 FPGA's but they are not on boards, first job get tidy, get organized then decide what I dont need and take it from there. Urgent bench space needed for a sick Oscope thats needs some TLC , if anyone knows of a pretty nurse good with a soldering iron.............. (I am renting not BUYING!)

Little Ghostman said:

I dont mind giving stuff away to people to help them, but as a hoarder the thought of giving everything way...................... I am a 'it might come in handy one day person '.

Some I will sell cheap, maybe make kits and for stuff like the caps for nikolai he can have free. I found 45 FPGA's but they are not on boards, first job get tidy, get organized then decide what I dont need and take it from there. Urgent bench space needed for a sick Oscope thats needs some TLC , if anyone knows of a pretty nurse good with a soldering iron.............. (I am renting not BUYING!)

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What scope and how unwell?

I didn't know until I checked just now that you could re-program FPGA's. Any idea what you might use them for? Be interesting to see a project with one in it, develop.
Oscope - name of a program which uses your PC's sound card as an (audio) oscilloscope!
Renting/buying - have you considered hire purchase?

spec said:

What scope and how unwell?

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Its my little gould scope that smokes when turned on, I havnt got around to sorting it yet. its not a great scope but its small and portable, so if I can I would like to save it as its handy to carry about.

Gould 400

throbscottle said:

I didn't know until I checked just now that you could re-program FPGA's. Any idea what you might use them for? Be interesting to see a project with one in it, develop.
Oscope - name of a program which uses your PC's sound card as an (audio) oscilloscope!
Renting/buying - have you considered hire purchase?

Click to expand...

These are new old stock never used before, I found them in anti static trays, started my clear out

I have reels of through hole resistors that I am chopping into tens and 100's I will make some cheap kits up for newcomers so they dont have to buy silly money ones from ebay

throbscottle said:

I didn't know until I checked just now that you could re-program FPGA's. Any idea what you might use them for? Be interesting to see a project with one in it, develop.
Oscope - name of a program which uses your PC's sound card as an (audio) oscilloscope!
Renting/buying - have you considered hire purchase?

Click to expand...

For some reason, people now think the FPGA is as simple as throwing a little code together and bingo bango your off to the races. This is due much in part to YouTube and the Arduino which has given many people the belief that electronics engineering is easy (There was a recent post on this forum as prime example). FPGA is not hard, but it is quite unlike Arduino as you really need digital design fundamental knowledge, learning the tool is easy, but logic design requires a little bit of study. Anyways to answer your question:

(Text taken from https://www.fpga4fun.com/FPGAinfo1.html )

What are FPGAs?
FPGAs are programmable digital logic chips. What that means is that you can program them to do almost any digital function.

Here's the general workflow when working with FPGAs:

• You use a computer to describe a "logic function" that you want. You might draw a schematic, or create a text file describing the function, doesn't matter.
• You compile the "logic function" on your computer, using a software provided by the FPGA vendor. That creates a binary file that can be downloaded into the FPGA.
• You connect a cable from your computer to the FPGA, and download the binary file to the FPGA.
• That's it! Your FPGA behaves according to your "logic function".

There are also analog counter parts to FPGA called FPAA, field programmable analog array. These are usually based on switched capacitor technology (So you need to learn the cap to resistor equivalent circuits) see image below:
A company called Anadigm is one such maker of FPAA ( I recently purchased a eval board around $199.0) devices.

Switched Capacitor


Well, I probably gave more info than anyone cares about, so I'm signing off

What he said ^^
The toolchains are massive and the learning curve is steep. And if you've got to solder all eight-zillion pins to a board before you can get started...

That really is quite a hoard you've got there, and a nice workshop. It certainly gives me drawer envy!

Little Ghostman said:

Its my little gould scope that smokes when turned on, I havnt got around to sorting it yet. its not a great scope but its small and portable, so if I can I would like to save it as its handy to carry about.

Gould 400

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If it is like the Gould scope I had, the smoke will be coming from the EHT generator. If that is the case, there seems to be a design flaw in that high voltage components and the terminals are simply too close together. I dismantled the inverter and completely rebuilt it. I also had to replace a 1 nF 15Kv capacitor which was arcing badly. After that, the inverter was fine. It was a sine wave resonant Royer type running at around 10Khz. I think the EHT was 12KV to 15KV, with around -1.5KV on the cathode of the tube. This allowed the X & Y plates to be driven directly by long-tailed pairs with an average voltage of about 30V.

spec

spec said:

If it is like the Gould scope I had, the smoke will be coming from the EHT generator. If that is the case, there seems to be a design flaw in that high voltage components and the terminals are simply too close together. I dismantled the inverter and completely rebuilt it. I also had to replace a 1 nF 15Kv capacitor which was arcing badly. After that, the inverter was fine. It was a sine wave resonant Royer type running at around 10Khz. I think the EHT was 12KV to 15KV, with around -1.5KV on the cathode of the tube. This allowed the X & Y plates to be driven directly by long-tailed pairs with an average voltage of about 30V.

spec

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Deep joy! why couldnt you just of said it was PSU smoothing cap!! Why did you have to go and make a happy kid cry???