Tag: front panel

HP 6644A refurbishment – front panel, back protector (#P14F1)

Time to finish the HP 6644A revamp!

tl;dr for the last post: Here’s where I stopped refurbishment after cleaning and replacing caps and fan:

First off, those leads stick out quite a bit at the back as well. I can’t really say which diameter I used, judging from the yellow cable lugs these were 4mm² for the power lines and 1.5mm² (red lugs) for the sense lines. Apart from not fitting the old protector, that one already has seen some damage. Probably because it is so tiny…

So: Redesign. Twice, as the first version that closely resembled the original design had really flimsy legs that suffered the very same fate. […]


Hiland M644 Multifunctional Transistor Tester LCR Resistance Inductance Diode Capacitance ESR Frequency Meter PWM Signal Generator (WHL #50)

Another component for one of the upcoming projects – a refreshed transistor tester.

I’ve been using these for ages now, I actually built two of them before they got popular (what a hipster thing to say?) and every Chinese seller decided to roll his own. The original thread on mikrocontroller.net dates back to early 2012 and the SVN repository even contains a few fixes of mine to the manual, as I was proofreading this thing at the time.

Times have changed, and the ready made versions are so cheap nowadays that homebrew really doesn’t make any sense any more. […]


Revox Evolution front panel repair (#P10F1)

Soo…the Revox thing from #P10 wasn’t done at the time, and when the missing cable arrived from China (“DB9 Male to Female Gold-plated Extension Cable Pure Copper Line RS232 9 Pin Serial Connector Wire COM Core with Double Shield” for a whopping 4.53€), it didn’t really work as expected.

I wondered: Did they do fancy things with the shielding, in order to squeeze out one more connection from this otherwise 9 pin cable? The cable might have different characteristics compared to the metal-to-metal contact of the serial connectors directly sitting on top of each other. […]


Revox Evolution 19″ panel mount (#P10)

Christmas, the fabulous time of the year where you got plenty of free time, but you aren’t supposed to make hell of a noise :suspect:

Happy 2019, y’all!

Having ordered a second 19″ keystone plate recently, I decided to finally make the user panel of my Revox Evolution stereo system into a front-mount panel that fits the outside of the rack. Without, it got even more hidden inside because of the top-mounting system that is used. Here’s an original marketing wankery image from Revox:

So if that unit is sitting inside of a 19″ rack, imagine the user experience (wank, wank) of operating the display if the top part is blocked by other stuff. […]