the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

what exactly are the characteristics of a "bond villain"? we've never seen a james bond movie
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Outernational
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i wonder if we could just ask Keysight (the modern company that is what remains of HP's test equipment department)

they might not still have it, but they also might
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actually, would anyone happen to be good at digging up old manuals? i feel like this one would be a fascinating one to go through but our attempts have so far been stymied by the fact that modern HP has reused the number for a printer
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that flyback transformer is the source of the ticking i mentioned earlier, by the way. under no load it operates at about 1~4 Hz depending on the set voltage, making a tick every time it switches, and as the load increases it ticks more, up to a maximum of something around 3~4 kHz (by our ear, anyway--we don't have perfect pitch so this is a very rough estimate)

it's quite something to look inside
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maybe we'll try to reverse engineer it sometime

it's not that complicated a thing; the dials on the front are just decade switches for resistances (and the 1s digit is a potentiometer for fine adjustment), that'll obviously just be a divider in the feedback network (probably a kelvin-varley divider?)

the converter itself is an enormous flyback--i do mean enormous, the flyback transformer is about the size of a box of tissues--running in a variable frequency mode
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it's a high voltage power supply, 4 kV/50 mA (max of 2 kV from ground, but the output is floating so you can do ±2 kV for a total of 4), and it's from an era where they advertised it being fully solid-state as a big selling point

and honestly that is a big selling point now, too; getting old equipment that uses tubes is always a pain because sometimes the tubes need replacing and sometimes they're ones that you can't get anymore

would love to have the schematics for it
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electronics test equipment from before around the 60s or 70s is always so much more reliable than modern stuff
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i love the hp 6525A that we have at work

it's such a... Thing

weird box with dials on it on the bench with a couple wires sticking out

ridiculously heavy

makes a continuous ticking noise when plugged in (if the dials are set to anything other than 0000)

still works perfectly (if a bit out of calibration) when it's about 60 years old

they don't make things like that anymore
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or ngspice i suppose, which is a bit more of a problem because that's the open-source spice (i almost typed open-spice source)
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it seems like all power MOSFETs, SiC MOSFETs, and IGBTs, where the manufacturer provides models for them at all, have subcircuit models that use things like if statements that cause discontinuities, which cause Problems with numerical stability and convergence

LTspice, at least, has built in models for VDMOS devices (which would cover power MOSFETs and SiC MOSFETs) and IGBTs, and if they had just used those you'd get much better performing models

they just wouldn't work in PSPICE
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also it's nice when things go easily and you don't have to fight with ltspice to get things to converge
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something we're learning (that we kind of already knew) at work is that we work a lot better when we enjoy what we're working on, and we *really* enjoy working on power supplies
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chrono trigger is also an iconic title screen, very good
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it's probably a really obvious answer but we just have to go with xenoblade chronicles
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tell me about a video game that you think has a really good title screen
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concept: a living language, but literally, as in a language that is sapient and has its own opinions and thoughts

i have no idea how this would work but it sounds like something out of hitchhiker's guide
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huh

today on a whim we tried the weird hershey's "symphony" bar that we've always seen in stores and wondered what's different from a regular hershey's bar

it's actually really different??? it's still mass-market cheap chocolate but it's way better than regular hershey's
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this youtube channel that does "video game with an actual (kind of person the game is about)" videos (we've been watching their "phoenix wright with an actual lawyer" series) seems to have just posted a video of "disco elysium with an actual communist" and it just feels kinda like that would be any playthrough of the game we would watch
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