diy solar

diy solar

Something wrong here?

jafo said:
I always thought there was an easier to hook up to a busbar. Just need a little duct tape, a hammer and a screwdriver and you can fix the world
Click to expand...
... and, apparently, a couple of .22's Kinda redefines the meaning of a "blown fuse." Yeee-ikes.
 
I remember back in the old days when a fuse would blow in a Linear Power Supply we would wrap the original fuse in Tin Foil and stick it back in. It use to take weeks to get a replacement if the Radioshack or Lafayette did not have the right one.
 
robby said:
I remember back in the old days when a fuse would blow in a Linear Power Supply we would wrap the original fuse in Tin Foil and stick it back in. It use to take weeks to get a replacement if the Radioshack or Lafayette did not have the right one.
Click to expand...
Lafayette Wow! you have been around for a long time too.
 
Ok, so I have a really embarrassing but true story, that is at least tangentially related to this thread.

In the late 1980's I was a software / hardware engineer for a defense contractor. We had a piece of equipment in a secure / classified location that had failed to do it's job. I flew out there, messed with it a while, and figured out what likely was wrong. I flew back to my home base and excitedly explained it all to my boss. He gave me the OK to change the firmware, burn a new EPROM, and hand carry it back out to the facility and install it.

For those too young to know, EPROM stands for Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. These were the chips with a little glass window in the top. You could shine a bright UV light on the little glass window, and it would erase the contents of the chip so you could program it again. It was good for those of us who didn't get things right the first time.

I did all the right things. I wrote up the design changes to the firmware, had a senior engineer approve the changes, burned an EPROM, and tested it on the breadboard version of the device we had in the lab. Everything worked spectacularly. I went through security to package up the EPROM to be hand-carried into the facility, and made my travel plans.

The day came. I flew out carrying the package like it was going to save the world. I went through the hour long process of being allowed to bring it into the facility. A local engineer had been assigned to help me with the update to the EPROM. She watched me and asked questions all along the way. I powered down the system, took out the old EPROM, and inserted the new EPROM. Then I went to the console and was ready for the moment of truth. I told her to flip on the power, but nothing came up on the console. I asked her if it looked like the power was indeed on. She said "well, the light is on in that chip you put in". Panic hit me: The glass window of the EPROM was not where light should be coming from. I knew right away what happened. I had plugged the chip in backwards, and the "light" was the reverse polarity power burning up the chip.

So my entire trip - my tickets, my time through the airports, my rental car, my hours with security, my hotel room - was all a complete waste because I plugged the chip in backwards.
 
Horsefly said:
Ok, so I have a really embarrassing but true story, that is at least tangentially related to this thread.

In the late 1980's I was a software / hardware engineer for a defense contractor. We had a piece of equipment in a secure / classified location that had failed to do it's job. I flew out there, messed with it a while, and figured out what likely was wrong. I flew back to my home base and excitedly explained it all to my boss. He gave me the OK to change the firmware, burn a new EPROM, and hand carry it back out to the facility and install it.

For those too young to know, EPROM stands for Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. These were the chips with a little glass window in the top. You could shine a bright UV light on the little glass window, and it would erase the contents of the chip so you could program it again. It was good for those of us who didn't get things right the first time.

I did all the right things. I wrote up the design changes to the firmware, had a senior engineer approve the changes, burned an EPROM, and tested it on the breadboard version of the device we had in the lab. Everything worked spectacularly. I went through security to package up the EPROM to be hand-carried into the facility, and made my travel plans.

The day came. I flew out carrying the package like it was going to save the world. I went through the hour long process of being allowed to bring it into the facility. A local engineer had been assigned to help me with the update to the EPROM. She watched me and asked questions all along the way. I powered down the system, took out the old EPROM, and inserted the new EPROM. Then I went to the console and was ready for the moment of truth. I told her to flip on the power, but nothing came up on the console. I asked her if it looked like the power was indeed on. She said "well, the light is on in that chip you put in". Panic hit me: The glass window of the EPROM was not where light should be coming from. I knew right away what happened. I had plugged the chip in backwards, and the "light" was the reverse polarity power burning up the chip.

So my entire trip - my tickets, my time through the airports, my rental car, my hours with security, my hotel room - was all a complete waste because I plugged the chip in backwards.
Click to expand...
I know the pain my friend :eek:
I had a small Paging company back in the late 80's that I ran as a side business using the Motorola digital pagers and we also had voice pagers. During a thunderstorm lightning hit out the encoder unit for the digital paging and we only had one unit and no spares. I think the unit cost something like $3500 at the time so buying spares was a luxury.

I went to work on it immediately and replaced a number of burned out components by cannibalizing parts and getting some parts from work. Then in a couple of hours it was ready to be powered up I got nothing and soon realized the EPROM had also died. I pulled it out and put it in my programmer and it was all FF's or 00, I don't remember which but it was the sure sign of dead EPROM.
I called the company that made the unit and they said they could get me another EPROM but it would take several days to get it in my hands.
We had few hundred customers, some of them Doctors and they had no service and were complaining like hell.

I asked them if they could get me the firmware file and they said yes but I cannot remember the details now but for some reason we could not get the file sent via modem. In a last ditch effort I asked the manager if he had a hard copy of the code and could he Fax me the code:cautious: and he said sure but it would be a lot of sheets of paper and take forever. I said do it and I also want to order a new unit in case none of this worked.

Long story short I ended up with a big stack of paper and then had to get the six Ladies who did the Paging shifts come into work and start entering in split section of the papers into a text document page by page using two PCs.

I had to go through each section and double check the Hex code number by number against the Faxed copy and paste them in proper sequence to create back the orginal file. After about 12 straight hours we had the file and I burned it to the EPROM and of course I got a bunch of errors on the units display when I booted it. I had to go through the code about three or four times before I found every single error. On about my third erasure and reprogramming of the EPROM the unit booted up and we where back in business. It was probably one of the most tedious things I had ever done under pressure but it paid off. About a week later the new unit that I had ordered along with an EPROM arrived.
 
So my entire trip - my tickets, my time through the airports, my rental car, my hours with security, my hotel room - was all a complete waste because I plugged the chip in backwards.
Click to expand...

You probably didn't know that ships used to carry three chronometers. Because if one failed, and you only had two, you didn't know which one was off. Or you just didn't think about it ;·)
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