the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

@zetasyanthis @rey this wasn't a thermal chamber, it's a more specialty piece of eqiupment. it's got a tiny chamber (maybe 1 L in size) on the end of an articulated arm, that can be lowered over a portion of a circuit board and control the temperature of *just* the DUT by blowing hot or cold air on it

it's a fascinating piece of equipment, and it has quite an astonishinig temperature range--from -80 to +225 °C, nominally. ours doesn't quite reach the low end of that
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@zetasyanthis @rey still doesn't work completely right but it does the job. it's older than we are, so i'm just glad the refrigeration system is still working--i'm pretty sure it's insulated with asbestos so we don't really want to open it up for repairs
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@zetasyanthis @rey oh we also have a temperature forcing system that we got for $1k used, plus $1k shipping and two dozen hours or so of repair work and learning how to do plumbing to fix it
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@zetasyanthis @rey we work for a startup so we don't have *that* much fancy equipment, the 1505 is about the fanciest thing we have

the scope we use is a lecroy ws4104hd, a 1 ghz thing from lecroy that cost $10k because we got it on a deep discount

other stuff in the lab is more pedestrian, there's an hp high-voltage power supply from the 1960s (yes, actually the 1960s, it still works perfectly), a handful of Instek power supplies, a Siglent function generator
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@zetasyanthis @rey that's a scope that would probably have cost about $15000-$20000 new, more with all the options this one had
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@zetasyanthis @rey you can get some pretty good used scopes on ebay at least! we saw a really nice tek dpo7054 for $3000 earlier today
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@zetasyanthis @rey i wish you could get stuff like this without being a big company

but this thing was bought used, at like a 50% discount, and it still cost more than a house
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@zetasyanthis @rey it's an Agilent N1265A ultra high current unit by the way, hooked up to a B1505A semiconductor parameter analyzer
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@zetasyanthis @rey they're designed for it! these are specifically designed to be used for high current
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@zetasyanthis @rey you should hear the clunking of the contactor when we turn it on

it can only do very short pulses of 1500 A, of course

It came with banana plug cables with a little mechanism inside the plugs that makes them expand when you twist a collet, to increase contact pressure. they're also on some #6 AWG welding cable instead of the more conventional for banana plugs #14 AWG
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@zetasyanthis @rey it was a custom one we'd made to fit into the Tek 370-style interface it has

we had a bunch of spare boards, so we just needed some time to assemble another and a new one of those sockets which are like $10 from Samtec
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@zetasyanthis @rey this actually had a purpose, believe it or not: we wanted to determine a rough measurement of the fusing current of a similar type of wire

figured this was a good enough approximation so put it in there and let it do its thing

it actually fried the socket we poked it into in the process, which indicates there was a lot of contact resistance
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@zetasyanthis @rey We once put a piece of #30 gauge wire wrap wire across the terminals of an "ultra high current" (capable of up to 1500 A) SMU and programmed it to just do pulses of current increasing until it breaks

it made it to several amps before it just melted
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@zetasyanthis @rey for stuff like that, i think an H-field probe is a lot easier to use

if a lot less impressive

remind us to tell you about liquid crystal hotspotting sometime
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@socks @gardevoir megavoir
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@owashii@plush.city notably, Radiant Historia has like five of those, and ten other decisions that just lead to an instant bad end (the game's central mechanic being time travel to retry things means that you can just go back and do the other choice)
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@owashii@plush.city there's also the occasional game where the bad guy does the whole "join me!" thing and you can say "okay" and then bad end
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@owashii@plush.city there's a handful of them, i think one of the paper marios gave you that option
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@owashii@plush.city it's literally just plug it in and it works if you're using a gamecube controller, exactly like on an actual gamecube

no configuration or anything required
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@NovaSquirrel I thought most games used 3... maybe we're thinking of something else
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