What's gone well for you recently? No matter how big or small.

I took a couple of weeks off work, as much as you can when it's in the middle of a lockdown pandemic in the united kingdom, and I had a couple of wins myself.

blown up chip

For many years I kept hold of a computer hard drive that had died on me, of all things the microcontroller on the control board blew itself up. I had looked for a replacement control board online and at the time they cost £100+ because this was such a common problem, however recently I looked again and found that it was on ebay for £6, with a 50/50 chance of being the wrong model.

I took a gamble. A direct swap of the board isn't what works with this, as you can even see highlighted in the ebay listing screenshot, each drive has a BIOS chip on it flashed with the necessary settings for the platters, sectors, etc. of the hard drive. Without the right BIOS chip, you'll just get garbled data or clicking.

Time for a bit of desoldering and kapton tape.

As luck would have it, it worked! My hard drive was brought back to life, and I was able to recover my data once more.

I'd say that is a good 'win' for £6 and a reflow station

What's gone well for you recently?

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michaelkellett over 5 years ago

I've just completed this:

It measures the sensitivity of a multi axis piezo electric accelerometer at frequencies between 30 and 200 Hz.
The reference accelerometer (white thing on top of the little shaker table) has a vacuum port so the device
under test can be pulled down onto the reference without glue or clamps.
The box contain all the electronics to drive the shaker and condition and filter the signals from the DUT and
the reference. It uses an STM32F407 processor which controls everything and implements tracking digital filters with
about 0.2Hz -3dB bandwidth and 20Hz -70dB bandwidth.

I had a bit of a crisis during manufacture of the reference accelerometers - the mill died as it was machining the
accelerometer bodies (Y axis servo amplifier blew, with noise but no smoke). Haas did a good job fixing it: I emailed them
on Sunday afternoon and it was back and running the next Friday lunchtime - so only out of action for less than a
week.
All that remains to do is formal calibration and it will be off to its new home.

MK
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michaelkellett over 5 years ago

I've just completed this:

It measures the sensitivity of a multi axis piezo electric accelerometer at frequencies between 30 and 200 Hz.
The reference accelerometer (white thing on top of the little shaker table) has a vacuum port so the device
under test can be pulled down onto the reference without glue or clamps.
The box contain all the electronics to drive the shaker and condition and filter the signals from the DUT and
the reference. It uses an STM32F407 processor which controls everything and implements tracking digital filters with
about 0.2Hz -3dB bandwidth and 20Hz -70dB bandwidth.

I had a bit of a crisis during manufacture of the reference accelerometers - the mill died as it was machining the
accelerometer bodies (Y axis servo amplifier blew, with noise but no smoke). Haas did a good job fixing it: I emailed them
on Sunday afternoon and it was back and running the next Friday lunchtime - so only out of action for less than a
week.
All that remains to do is formal calibration and it will be off to its new home.

MK
Cancel
Vote Up +7 Vote Down

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