Skynet is Coming

Yes - when I bought my VW Touran I was stuck for 15 minutes trying to open the fuel cap to fill up. I thought it'd be under the dashboard like the others I've come across. It wasn't until I chanced on 'tank flap' (literallissimo translation of German 'Tankklappe' ) in the last book of the 3-volume manual that I found I had to press a backhanded rocker switch tucked away on the back wall of the driver's door stowage bin...

Edited By Mick B1 on 23/02/2021 11:24:52

Due to an unfortunate muscle-wasting problem I had to acquire a device to get me out of the bath.

The manufacturer chose to call it a 'Bathmate'.

1/ Don't go there...................unless you never want to be alone !!

2/ Don't go there.

People are missing the point.

The Covid Chip will tell Bill Gate where you are, you need all these smart gadgets, so he can know what you are doing.

"Hey Elon, I see you forgot to brush your teeth yesterday! Jeff and Mark always brush twice a day, you really need to take care of your toothy pegs, dentistry is expensive even for us billionaires. Stay cool - Bill "

The more advanced (? - all right, complicated) things are, the less their manufacturers help us.

The more big organisations want us to do everything on the Internet to serve only themselves, the harder and less efficient they make their web-sites and call-centres to use. Unless you want to buy something....

Not the only ones though.

At work we had to return hire-cars refuelled to avoid the hirers' fat refuelling charges. Not this one. Bringing it back after someone else had collected and driven it to the site where he stayed, I did not know if it was petrol or diesel and even the filling-station staff were baffled by the totally meaningless symbol on the fuel-cap.

BT Broadband's "Help" website tours a maze of options and waffle via one those idiotic "Frequently Asked Questions" anthologies, and returns to you to Square One. You then realise the lack of a "FAQ" means your problem with the service is not an Officially Approved Problem therefore cannot exist. Like the Ministry of Truth dictionary in 1984 - to go with the audio version of the Telescreen, called "Alexa".

Or my battles to learn even the basics of CAD - the on-line .pdf manual is very scanty, poorly-organised, has no proper index, but assumes you know CAD principles and terminology so is only an expert users' aide-memoire to the specific controls. Where do you find such basics? Err... perhaps they fell foul of Winston Smith's dictionary editing. (Rather like a certain real junior-edition dictionary whose publishers have deemed children must not learn ordinary nature words and names.)

Who are the worst offenders for not helping you use their products and services? Computer and telecommunications companies.

That's one reason I refuse to have a "smart"-phone. I was unable to find instructions for the one I did have a couple of years ago. I sold it after a few months of calls and messages I missed, or heard/ read but could not return. It transpired the makers regarded 'phone calls as an auxiliary "feature", not primary function!

If I can NOT find the way to contact the Customer Services department of an organisation, I write to the Chief Executive (using an email address found on "ceoemail.com".

I usually get a response from a minion in the Executive Office although sometimes from the CEO himself.

Writing to the CEO usually resolves the problem

MC

The velocette manual even had drawings of the very few special tools you needed., and I seem to remember it telling you how to make an oil filter

Funny you should say that - I have been given several loads of wire ended resistors, capacitors and semiconductors because two engineer friends have gone totally over to surface mount and i still use the old fashioned stuff on breadboards and Vero.

So yes, they are basically being binned by at least two professionals of my acquaintance!

And not just small PIC-like chips. Rather powerful microcontrollers are, ahem, cheap as chips. Plus Field Programmable Gate Arrays and similar technologies capable of being mass-produced and told what they are later. As these things cost about the same as a discrete components of the same size and can do much, much more, there's been a rapid move away from discrete components. Many of them are getting difficult to find.

Bring back ECC81s and 6V6s. It's not proper electronics unless it glows in the dark and smells of hot Mullard!

Dave

I am totally wired to all the pc's at home and have turned off the wifi as on an estate with dozens of potential hackers within reach, I feel safer.

Now you’re talking Dave, small glass bottles with fire inside. The ones with carbon anodes were not so small.

They were ‘Pick-n-Place’ too.

You picked the one where the fire had gone out, and put another in its place.

I’d better ‘getter’ out of here quick.

Sam

Many years ago, when I was a schoolmaster, a colleague (who taught History) cam up to the lab and explained that his television stopped working while his wife had been watching it - and could we mend it.

After explaining that the department existed to teach boys rather than to mend colleagues electrical equipment (in the same way as the metalwork department did NOT exist to mend staff cars) we had some Vth formers who were helping out around the labs, being "after the exams". These boys could look at the defective set if he wished.

So the Television set was brought to the lab and I told the lads to take it into an empty room. I then told them to leave it for a couple of hours in case there were any high voltages which needed to disperse.

I then told them to remove the back and see if there were any obvious problems.

"There's something like a light bulb that all cracked and crazed"

"That's a valve. They were used before transistors."

I gave them a tray of spare valves. "See if you can find one with the same number as the damaged valve."

So off they went and came back a bit later.....

"We found a valve that fitted"

"Was it the same number?"

"We could NOT see the number, but we found one that fitted in the socket"

I then took them into the lab, plugged the set into the mains and switched on the mains from the master switch on the far side.

Much to my surprise, a clear picture appeared. This was very near the Crystal Palace transmitter so an aerial wasn't needed.

We gave the set back to the owner who was very pleased and said that he would tell his wife NOT to spill coffee on the repaired set

But I was truly amazed that a valve, pulled out of a box at random, should be exactly the sort that was needed.

MC

Valve TV's. Them were the days. A colour set had valves the size of jam jars, mains connected to the chassis, a lethal 25Kv final anode voltage and were a 2 man lift. How we survived without H&S I'll never know.

What would you say about these new robot vacuum cleaners? Equipped with wifi and lidar, it scans every corner of your apartment, creates a map and uploads it to your mobile...

Door intercomms with remote opeining is today also controlled via mobile app. I had an old video intercom which started acting up, checked the outdoor camera unit maybe there was something loose. I was surprised and shocked to learn that shorting a couple of wires released the door latch!

Ha! ! small potaters ! KT 88's were the thing, 1960's/70's power amp stuff. Toast and fried eggs no problems Sir. Would you like 10 Years After or Chicken Shack with that?

At the day job I have actually used small PIC microcontrollers in designs were a 555 timer would have don the job. problem is the 555 needed more components and an expensive capacitor to get the required accuracy. overall cost was much higher.
Conversly a few years ago I used transistors and diodes to implement a control system (several inputs and outputs a bit of timing and a 3 state sequencer) that would have been a much simpler job to implement with a PIC. It ended up with 25 transistors plus a bunch of other components. Why would yo do that? It was a aerospace application with very low production quantity. Even though it was a low crticality system (DAL C) the cost of documenting and validating the software (to DO-178) was a very significant cost, hundreds of man hours.
Another advantage as I was able to do the environmental qualification by analysis rather than test. Funnily enough though fully approved by the regulator our customer sold one on and the final user decided that they wanted to test it. They ran a full set of relevant tests (DO-160G) and fortunatly (but not surprisingly) it passed.
For high volume production the saving of even a few pence per unit is significant. Using a microcontroller also allows the addition of new functionality (or fixing bugs) without changing the hardware design or bill of materials. However connecting everything to the internet is a very bad idea IMHO.

Robert G8RPI.

Thermionic valves...

Ah, real electronics you could see working; and mounted on steel chassis which when scrapped yielded assorted useful BA screws and the like.

I recall seeing a 1kW audio-amplifier whose output stage was two valves each about a foot high and some 2-3" diameter. It was being tested after a service, using an ordinary electric fire as the dummy load. I was told its frequency response far exceeded even the most expensive and/or best-quality "hi-fi", but you would not want these massively-built things, about 6 ft tall, in the lounge. Wrong colour for a start - light duck--egg blue rather than regulation matt black. The frequency response was necessary because it was made for sonar and other acoustic experiments, at anything from a few c/s to many kc/s (None of these new-fangled Hertz things in those days.)