Inevitable progess?

 

Presenting an ACER Nitro 5 Intel i5-8300H with Nvida GTX 1050 Ti. The first computer in this house to be running Windows 11, version 23H2 and unfortunately this "progress" is inevitable because of the imminent demise of Windows 10 as I will attempt to explain.

I have been thinking for a year or more about my next steps for my daily computer, I have always run a laptop for most of my needs, and I have a separate, more powerful computer for gaming.  It is an unfortunate fact that Microsoft is once again murdering their baby on the 14th October, 2025 and replacing it with an intrusive, highly controlling, operating system that has strict hardware requirements. That being said, they are replacing an already intrusive operating system with something more intrusive and restrictive and it is a fact that Windows 11 will not work on processors older that eighth generation and computers without a specific generation of TPM module.

We reluctantly moved from Windows 7 and grumbled, and it is merely history repeating itself now, and there are rumours of Windows 12 being released before the demise of Windows 10, a sort of reflection that every other release is a good one, a bit like Star Trek movies, although that paradigm has been broken with the last few movies being pathetic and cartoonish. I have heard bad rumours about Windows 11 but it only seems fair that I should try it for myself.

I don't mind improved hardware, but I do mind Microsoft forcing me into it when I can get by with perfectly adequate older stuff, so in the meantime...

Step one has been going on for almost a year now, I set up a Linux OS computer for appraisal as a "daily driver" trying one version and then taking advice and settling on another. It was noticed during the year that the little NUC computer we have attached to the TV for streaming was being bogged down by the various "secret" windows updates in the background, so about a month ago, let us call it step two, I created an identical NUC but with Linux installed. These two machines have been ticking along nicely, doing what is expected, they wait patiently when updates are available for user permission and there are no windows shenanigans...

Step three to improve things took place this week. I run Windows 10 Pro on a Lenovo T530 laptop, specifically that model as I like it with the backlit keyboard and if we look at the age of it, well the processor is from 2012 and an i5-3320M, Intel Ivy Bridge and over the last few months Windows has slowed, as it does so it needs a total refresh. In terms of Microsoft's plans and industry opinion, this laptop is obsolete, yet it is, in my humble opinion, perfect for everything I need in a daily driver. I bought another from a chap in Victoria last week on eBay for the total cost of $65 and I have set up a fresh Windows 10 installation without compromising my existing machine, it is now fully functional, a clone of my older T530.

Step one, two, three all entailed a machine that will not officially run Windows 11 and I need to plan for October 2025, which will arrive quicker than expected, due to the odd nature of forward time travel in retirement. The Acer Nitro, being fully compliant with all Microsoft requirements for Windows 11 is a stepping stone, an educational computer to dovetail me into their new ways. 

The question is, will it be adequate for Windows 12 when it inevitably arrives?

A Thirty-Eight Year Arc

In early 1985 I was sent to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California to represent the Uk based APPH Stress Office for development of the US Navy Hawk Derivative, the T45TS, a jet trainer aircraft based on the BAe Hawk T.1 and my  responsibility was structural integrity of the main landing gear. That is just the background to the 38 year story arc I am about to tell, the story is a minutia from my life, but it reflects how our brains store it all, well, most of it anyways.

Hewlett Packard had brought out a couple of programmable scientific calculators in the previous years and several in the American design office had either the HP-11C or the HP-15C and the more affordable of the two, at seventy-five US dollars, was the HP-11C. In those days Hewlett Packard sold their calculators by mail order, or through specialist shops, and the one shop I frequently "window shopped" at was a camera store in a mall near to the McDonnell Douglas facility.

I was twenty-seven, I had some extra cash in my pocket and I went into this camera store, with full intention to buy the HP-11C Calculator, but instead was distracted by the latest Minolta Freedom camera which I eventually bought, focus free, auto flash and for small format 35mm cameras it was the cats ass as they say. I took a lot of good photos with that camera in the short time I had it, one day, while out with the other adventurers somewhere in Southern California, I put it down on a wall while I had a sandwich, forgot about it and walked away. I often wonder what images I lost at that moment, in the subsequent thirty-eight years it wouldn't be the last camera that went missing.

So, the Hewlett Packard was forgotten about and when back in the UK a month later I bought a TI-66 Programmable calculator, again landscape format, same capability as the HP-11C but input was algebraic, not RPN. I held onto that calculator for almost a year, but subsequently, it was lost through no fault of my own when my Mark V Cortina was stolen from a Liverpool car park outside an MFI furniture store. I had gone in after work to look for a coffee table, good job I did not buy one because when I came out, the car, and my briefcase containing the TI-66, were gone.

A week or so later, I received a phone call at work, someone had found the briefcase on the shoreline, my paperwork and reference books were still in it, but the calculator long gone, I picked the case up and did not give the guy anything, mainly as I suspected he was probably linked to the bastards who had stolen the car, perhaps I was wrong about him and he was just a good samaritan in the right place at the right time, cynically I suspect he was just attempting to steal another quid out of my pocket.

So, I could carry on for the other thirty-seven years, but to end it here, the arc is complete as in the last month I have bought myself the HP-11C calculator and the owner's handbook. The total cost for the pair works out at a cash deal with a local seller of $50 for the calculator and via eBay, a price of $38.73 for the book, making a grand total of $88.73 which is in good old Canadian dollars, about sixty-four of those US dollars, so in reality It looks like I saved myself eleven bucks by waiting, however, looking on eBay for the box, if I ever want one, it looks like I will certainly blow the budget....

Waveform generator Kit build

The Bitscope has a wave generator built in, but I felt that, as part of my soldering apprenticeship, I should build a kit that would add to the understanding of an oscilloscope, so I had ordered a five dollar XR2206 based waveform generator kit which arrived last week and we will travel through the gauntlet of welding it together. This is basically what you receive in one of these kits, components, main board, case and difficult to read instructions :

The components, along with an acrylic case to hold the item. What is not shown in the photo is the missing fifth non-polarised capacitor which I later found stuck up on of the knobs. Twenty-eight components and a case. There would be over seventy soldered joints to be done and I was surprised how my skills have improved over the last few kits.

In true Blue Peter fashion, here is one I made earlier:

I mean ok, some things were not perfectly aligned, but that is the nature of these fiddly little kits, they are large enough to be completed, yet small enough to be difficult and frustrating. However, a pat on my back for completing this with my sausage fingers and increasingly dodgy eyeballs.

The case almost made me lose it, perhaps I was approaching the end of my patience after soldering everything, but the case components needed to be stripped of their protective paper, and then the uncooperative puzzle needed to be assembled. It was indeed a wriggly little thing and some of my slightly off tolerance soldering of the bits came back to haunt me. 

The input was supposed to be 12V but to test I used a 5V supply, but that was enough to prove that the new gizmo worked. I tested later with the correct voltage and the output was definitely better. The kit was completed in about an hour and a half, it would heve been quicker if I had found the missing capacitor before I started, it would have been less frustrating if I had more accuracy in soldering a couple of the larger items, the power input and the potentiometers which had a direct effect on assembling the case, but it was done, and I was happy.

It has been a good week, the eureka moment with the Bitscope and the success in the waveform kit.

Bitscope BS10

The electronics journey is continuing and I worked out my multimeter needs, my bench power supply requirements and I decided to investigate oscilloscopes. I have to admit, I am mostly clueless about all of this, brain the size of a planet but it is becoming more and more unwilling to allow things to stick, sort of a low gravitational pull, things land in there and then bounce right off into space.

Multimeters, Bench power supplies, oscilloscopes. The amazon marketplace is an absolute quagmire full of questionable products, so for weeks I was looking at oscilloscopes, digital ones, and I was contemplating a used Tektonix TDS 1012 from eBay, sourced from a Vancouver university and probably fifteen or more years old, and on the other side of the coin, a new Chinese import on amazon, both of which would be setting me back around two hundred and fifty buckeroonies.

The Chinese unit by FNIRSI, named I assume by throwing a bunch of random scrabble tiles at a fast moving bucket full of poo, was a contender and as prime day arrived the price came down a little, but I have faith in my fate and I resisted. 

I was off at the swap and shop, talking to the retired electrician, and he mentioned a contact on used Victoria, so I logged onto the website and found him, and we had quite a good chat about oscilloscopes. The chat made my enlarged brain think more deeply and I was in doubt about the meaning of life, the origin of all things and the existence of toast. It seemed to me after the large thunking session, that an oscilloscope would take up a lot of real estate on my finite sized bench, and right there on my workspace was a keyboard and screen in the form of my laptop, so perhaps there was another solution?

It was a fortunate moment, for there on the auction site was a thing called a Bitscope, an external piece of hardware that would interface via USB into a computer and the software would create a DSO or Digital Storage Oscilloscope, in effect a solution for my needs and limited desktop space. In addition, the used unit would only end up costing me ninety dollars, a definite incentive for purchase and investigation.

It took a week of brain stretching before the eureka moment, but the understanding landed on the surface of my brain and I hope it will create a colony there. In the photo above you can see the size of the unit, hooked into my little laptop and recording two channels of signal from a simple hookup onto a little motor, with power from that cheap bench supply magnified an extreme number of times to show the ripple and the noise. The Bitscope is a capable device and instead of me throwing words at the screen to describe it, I think an annotated photo of the innards will explain far better than my extended mumblings.

It is indeed an amazing little device and the software works very well. I hope that my learning will continue and I can make good use of it in the coming years, also included was a BNC adapter, so I will be obtaining "real" oscilloscope probes from the far off lands, in fact, one is probably on a camel plodding over the Himalayas as I type.

One last thing, this unit also has a waveform generator built in, which is very important because when you have nothing to do you can connect it up and spend hours just staring at pretty little graphs on the screen and marvel how much more intelligent you are than a tree stump.

Another Bench power supply

I say another bench power supply, but I don't think I did a blog on the first one, let me check....

There is something about having an electronics hobby that seems to encourage buying more of things, I bought six or more multimeters before settling on three that I now use, the others have been sold back into the marketplace, a couple still lurk around the house, but they too will probably be sold, I say probably as it is perhaps wise to keep back a sacrificial multimeter for bonfire night, whatever night that might be.

I digress.

The first bench power supply was a KORAD KD3005D that I bought from Digi-Key and it is a 30 Volt, 5 Amp unit, is a well built, accurate, linear unit that is my primary supply. This blog is not about that one because it is somewhat boring.

The one I will talk about is a project right out of the box, I knew that when I ordered it, so it will be a bit of interest for the blog, it too is a linear type of power supply, not a switching supply, but not as sophisticated as the KORAD, which is saying little. The second power supply does not really have a brand name, more just a model number of 1502D+, and don't ask me what the plus is for...

It was for sale on Amazon and landed cost at the Ponderosa was C$52.63 which was about a third of the cost of the previous unit from Digi-Key. The model number gives it away, it is a 15 Volt, 2 Amp unit for a grand total of 30 Watts output. I had learned before ordering that the ripple on the unit is perfectly fine for hobby use but with a little spike on startup, so I will keep that in mind. The main issue "out of the box" is that the simple design of the power supply produces 20 Volts before regulation, so even when running low voltage output at two Amps, the core 40 Watts needs to be dissipated via the 2N3055 transistor, and I can vouch that produces a fair bit of heat, in fact, a lot of heat... 

The temperature of that little transistor is far too hot for my liking and by design there is no internal fan to remove the heat (although in the manual, it indicates there is) so I will follow the path of another owner of this starter bench power supply (who made a video on Youtube) and in the next week or so I will obtain a suitable heatsink to increase heat dissipation, the installation of which may be the subject of a future blog, once I have worked it all out of course.

Answers on a postcard please...

Another weekend goes by and one of my favourite sellers at the flea market had a few items from a late tinkerer called Bob. It seemed that Bob was always playing around with electrical stuff and for just a few dollars, some oddities came into my possession, with no intended purpose besides curiosity. 

It seems that Bob liked to work with wood as well, basically "bread boards" for his electrical projects which is where a lot of circuits were tested out in the early days, then in the 1960s solderless breadboards, like the ACE 200k unit shown in the photo, became a lot more convenient for learning the hobby and testing out hair brained schemes.

A couple of DC motors, the little one has a pulley on it, the bigger one has a propeller and some good quality alligator clips. The other thing of interest is the over designed bank of resistors. It is a fact that once you start collecting resistors it becomes strangely addictive, difficult to resist. I like these ones, they will look good in the collection. I like sausages as well, although they are quite difficult to collect.

There were some other things too, a few solar panels and a nice tool box for my soldering kit, a whole bunch of things that I am hoping will keep me busy in the fall and winter, although I suppose solar panels will be of little use in the shorter days but here, now that summer has arrived, there is no urge whatsoever to sit at my bench fiddling with resistors and light bulbs, but that will change.

The sun is shining and the garden calls, I will do some painting today, and the things that once belonged to Bob will wait their turn until later in the year, although I may put some voltage on that ACE circuit to see what those three LEDs are supposed to be doing, perhaps that will be the subject of the next blog.

Another month, more multimeters

A few days into the new month and another vintage multimeter arrives on my bench, obtained from an electrician who is paring down his "collection" and on first inspection, this multimeter looks very much like the horrendous Chinese death trap that I bought a few months ago, and subsequently sold in a hobbyist kit on marketplace. The new acquisition was obtained for seven dollars and I could see my wife roll her eyes as I gladly paid for yet another multimeter, but hey, come on, seven dollars.....

Now, not to be too excited, the vintage leather case is not the case for this particular multimeter, I suspect it is a case from a 1950's analog multimeter, genuine hide leather, the way they used to make them when there were less cows on the planet, that's an interesting concept right there, nowadays there are more cows, yet inversely, less stuff made from real leather?

The great reveal, a Gardener Bender GDT-190A. I deliberately added an extra letter into Gardner there, just because I think it sounds rather rude. Anyhoo, the old 1995 multimeter resides in the older multimeter case, the unit is in like new condition, which sort of reflects on how little the seller used it as he plied his trade. It was probably "special" so he deliberately ignored it over the years...

The similarity to that cheap and not so cheerful Chinese facade of a meter is very apparent, however this meter itself is very solid, has a good, genuine weight to it, no sense of disappointment, yet it was still made in China. It could have been the unwilling prototype for all the "830" type multimeters that they flood the market with nowadays, selling exploding mousetraps to all the fledgling electricians. It is apparent that Chinese crap in 1995 was far better than present day Chinese crap.

It was little bit of a struggle to get the back off, but now I know how, but will forget before I take the back off again at a future date. The internal electrical bits and electronics gave me a warm sense of happiness, and everything seemed to be in order, except for a couple of the soldered joints which appeared to have been done blindfolded or while juggling. I ask for forgiveness in saying that, I am an old white guy and was brought up in a certain way, during my apprenticeship, juggling while welding was discouraged.

A single fuse for the 2A current check, the typical shunt and next to that, three well soldered probe connectors, very sturdy. A little spring next to the large L7106CPL L9625 chip contacts aluminum shielding tape on the back cover and it is obvious where a good portion of the extra weight comes from, more robust circuit board, case plastics are thicker and a good portion of "real" electronic components including an IC the size of a small planet. 

The manual was very informative with diagrams, industry quality text and good sized fonts, the PVC test leads are typical of the time, but felt as though they actually had some copper running through them, nowadays the manufacturers produce test leads that sell for virtually nothing, so you can understand why they would not want to include any valuable materials. 

The overall impression was that, in relation to modern day offerings of this type, this particular model is a better alternative for home use, hobby type DC use, Arduino etc. I would still be reluctant to place the probes into a high current situation or an AC receptacle without using a robotic bomb disposal vehicle, but that is just me, crazy old tech geezer who wants to be older.

Laters....