the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

@NovaSquirrel you have good taste!
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@bj That feels like something that would work well in a world where currency isn't required, but you can give someone a sign of your appreciation that they did a particularly good job

just because the name feels like it would mean something like that. "plaudit" is the Latin word for "they (sg) praised", after all
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hey @ziphi, we finally got around to doing this like we said 💚

Still love this piece, thank you for giving us permission to get it printed
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@socks red panda with wings sounds cute
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@socks good morning
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@trysdyn is it really a caesar salad if it doesn't come with a salad fork and 23 knives?
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yes thank you ebay for sending that email telling us that our order shipped, some three days after it arrived.

this was shipped *international* by the way
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@rey wouldn't that be difficult purely by dint of being np?
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@noracodes (also apologies if that was too much information. I think we got in infodump mode. we have Opinions about lab equipment and it's one of the things that gets us really rambly)
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@noracodes you're welcome! we also have some experience with other cheap lab equipment if you need any other recommendations (not just about new stuff either, the HP 6525A in the lab is from the 60s, cost us like $200 used, required no repair work at all (HP made really reliable stuff in those days), and we use it all the time)
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@noracodes With all that said I also want to say that it's quite a powerful machine for the price. lots of flexibility and a good bandwidth. it can even output 20 V p-p (10 V to -10 V) into a high-impedance load, which is more than many function generators can (though at such a high output level it has trouble meeting the 1 ns rise and fall time spec that the 350 MHz model has. it meets it fine at low output levels though, where low means about 3-ish volts. it can do 2 ns rise and fall times though!)

oh yes, speaking of that, the fact that you can individually adjust the rising and falling edge times on the pulse waveform is Pretty Nice. Not sure if that's a standard feature on modern function generators (the last one we used was a wavetek, you know the one, with all the physical knobs, in every university lab ever)
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@noracodes the software for defining the arbitrary waveforms, also, is clunky but functional. You'll have to do a lot of computations manually to figure out timings if you need precisely timed waveforms, and figuring out how to use it at all takes trial and error, but it does the job you need it to
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@noracodes Also, the two channels aren't synchronized in certain output modes until you adjust the phase offset setting. If you turn on both channels in pulse mode, they'll be in random phase with respect to each other, until you change the phase setting

it doesn't matter what the phase parameter is set to, you have to *change* it for it to realize "oh crap those were supposed to be synchronized"

synchronization works fine for square waves, but it does not work for pulse mode. we're not sure about other modes, i suspect it wouldn't sync right in arbitrary mode, and there may be weirdness if the two channels are in different modes
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@noracodes so the main thing is, if it's set to 50 Ω load mode when you turn the output on (not if it's set to hi-Z load; you can also set it to other finite load impedances, but we don't know what happens in those cases because we never use them), the output will go high for a significant time (~10s or 100s of μs) before starting to actually output the requested waveform. it will also do this when you turn the output off.

this has blown up the IGBT in a test fixture we were using it with over a dozen times (fortunately it was a relatively cheap one at $5, we'd also trialled some $30 SiC MOSFETs in that design...) because it stayed on too long and saturated the inductor, dumping the entire contents of the capacitor bank into the FET all at once
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@noracodes Not sure how similar the 1000X and 6000X series are, but we use a siglent SDG6032X at work (to be specific, a rebranded one sold as the Teledyne Test Tools T3AFG350) and it works quite well for our purposes, though it has some quirks I could tell you more about, if you want. Some might be dealbreakers (they've caused our coworker some headaches)
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why do people talk about pears being amazing when they're always full of sand
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@Tathar ahah, i'd just recommend listening to it
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@Tathar others have answered for us! it's well worth a listen though if you want to listen to it while working on something sometime
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i am feeling species dysphoric and would like some affirmation if possible
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tails.........
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