That scope is screaming hack-me ! I would love to have one, upgrade it with a usb touch screen, solid state hdd, more ram, endless possibilities ! nice score Dave !
I am so jealous. I have looked endlessly for this kind of thing in Richmond VA USA, but there is nothing like these auctions you find with great scores!
For getting labels off I discovered that Zippo lighter fluid (Naphtha) is great for it. The Ronsonol brand lighter fluid used to say right on the container that it is "Excellent for removing labels", but I hadn't used it until recently. Coleman fuel is also a [light] Naphtha and should work equally as well. They are much cheaper than GooGone but don't have the orange smell (d-Limonene and Tripropyleneglycol methyl ether). GooGone is actually a low odor kerosene. It is a little bit heavier and will evaporate more slowly, like White spirit. .
Not sure if they sell them over there. But here in the states I found using a Magic Eraser to scrub off those nasty stickers to be easy and to clean up old hardware.
EEVblog Completely forgot about that video, sorry! But I was actually talking about a product called Mr Clean's Magic Eraser. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine_foam
If the label is thick, I try to peel off as much as possible using a sharp razor blade which is lying almost flat on the surface, taking care not to scratch the plastic. This cuts through the glue between the plastic and label leaving only a smear of glue behind. I then attack that with the alcohol.
Gotta love HP/Agilent equipment. I'm still using a 1960's vintage power supply at work that appears to be all original. My only annoyance with it is that the chassis is connected to the positive terminal, which makes it unusable for powering stuff that's got an earth grounded chassis.
The BIOS shows that the floppy drive is a LS120 ... it's a floppy disk with an optical tracking mechanism to store 120 Mb of data. It was a competitor to the Zip disks of yesteryear.
Dunno how the interior of the scope is, but you can probably change that old hard drive to something newer, like a Solid state drive... boot in seconds!
Ah dave the 2400 keithley brought back memories ...sold mine on ebay for as you said a pretty penny, put it up with a buy it now price and some guy in austria bought it instantly. 100% profit on that one thanks to work throwing it out,
Always interested in a teardown, however I have to admit you have done a lot of teardowns of test equipment and although I do enjoy those as well, I think the more unique items make for more interesting teardowns, for instance off the top of my head, that EPIRB emergency beacon awhile back was really cool. Anything retro computer or even medical stuff is interesting. You know, stuff that we haven't seen before.
Looks like we both went Auctioning lol. I scored 35 Astron rm-60m's for $200 and 10 whitebox PC's with intel i5 boards /w cpu's, 4Gb DDR3 ram and 1 Tb Hdd's , and 5, 22" LCD monitors for $150 for the lot at the state surplus auction 2 days ago. Amazing what they have at these places and how cheap some of it is..
Pretty good construction on that PSU, by modern standards, but not a scratch against older HP stuff. I have a 70's HP system PSU, bought cheap because other bidders didn't know it could be option modified to operate at 240 V 50hz!! Construction quality is amazing, with diecastings on the chassis, solid aluminium front panel, custom parts everywhere! OK it's not as sophisticated feature wise, and it has analogue meters but to use and look at, it's a thing of beauty! Only things I want to change are the volt and current pots, to 10 turn. Resolution on the standard pots is clunky.
Hey Dave, would you consider adding a touch screen in front of the display on that oscilloscope? Or would hacking in just bring down the value since you are selling it anyways? Thought it would be a nice upgrade to get rid of the mouse..
You scored big. I need to get a couple of those. I've got a few Heathkit Power supplies and a large homemade one, so I need something a little more industrial. I'll have to check out Ebay.
Service manual stops at R905 but the last few "resistors" are all "zero ohm" which makes sense, except... why are they not listed as jumpers? www.manualslib.com/manual/529252/Agilent-Technologies-6541a.html?page=112#manual
An idea for removing those pesky stickers: Remove as much as you can of the paper so you don't have much but the adhesive left, rub or brush oil onto it (I use rapeseed oil, but no reason why mineral oil shouldn't work), let it sit for a couple of hours (I usually let it sit overnight), and the sticker residue should come off by simply rubbing your fingers over it. I don't know the exact mechanism, if it's that the adhesive is fat-soluble or that the oil simply wicks under the adhesive, or a combination of both. The toughest part is getting the oil and (minor) adhesive residue off, my standard routine is to rub in raw (hand) dish-washing liquid or kitchen de-greaser (be careful tho, some brands can discolor plastic), maybe let sit for a minute or two, then using the sponge side of a Scotch-brite(tm) or equivalent to rub the oily residue off, then rinse (it usually takes a couple of rinse cycles to do, you know it's done when the surface no longer is slippery. I'm sure that the rinsing can be replaced with a good bucket of warmish water and dishcloths and some added elbow grease. I use the method mainly to desticker plastic containers for food (some are excellent for component and parts storage), and such containers are a good starting point to learn how to use this method (so even if it turns out it doesn't work (it doesn't work with every kind of sticker), those-who-must-be-obeyed will be happy for a stack of free containers :) FINAL CAUTION: The process can be quite messy. Cover anything which might not take kindly to oil droplets (masking tape and plastic bags cut open comes to mind), have towels handy and use dishwashing liquid as soap when cleaning your hands up, and use some moisturizing cream when you're done for the day (dishwashing liquid lifts much of the oils off your hands, even the natural oils).
I found last part of your video, about upgrading that PSU, particularly interesting and informative. It would be great to gain some knowledge of inspecting, modyfing (most of all - understanding) that kind of hardware, wiring and communication standards, and in general how do they do it in such a big companies like HP :)
Can you get at least 4 digits of resolution and accuracy with some real cheap 10-25 turn POTs on amazon? I want to build a decent CV & CC 0-6A 0-15V power supply and for calibration use those POTs. For a voltage reference, what should I use? I want to set the voltage digitally with a micro controller, so what would be the best DAC to use w/ arduino? to To get 0-15V, I am not changing the feedback loop, but instead plan to use a fixed resistor divider for the feedback and using the DAC as a variable voltage reference.
My dad has a whole lot of test equipment. I don't know all the names, but he has many of Hewlett/Packard manufacture. One of his test devices, with a speaker, has tubes in it. Another one has a 16-bit microprocessor. He used to fix test equipment.
I imagine that Infiniium would work much better with a few hardware and software upgrades. Did Agilent provide Win2K or XP compatible software and drivers?
Dave, looking for and Spectrum analyser, up to 3Ghz and as cheeap as possible, but NEW. What would you recommend and what do you think would be a logic price for this gear. The ones from rohde are sky expensive. cheers.
Hi Dave. I have similar models 6632B 0-20V 0-5A. But what i did find is a bit disturbing. When you remove top cover and you just turn on your power supply..then on those power transistors (those with small heat sinks on them) you can boil eggs... That design is really poor, temp. go up to 90 degree (depend on rail ofc). When fan is on then it is all right but design like that is not good. They should increase size of those heat sinks or decrease voltage difference. Btw i'm not sure how to calibrate them If you can pls make video with calibration procedure. Thanks.
Wow the Agilent ocilloscope is a nice machine, expensive tho would be fun to know how much you payed :) Was thinking it's a bit slow and Harddrive is getting older, why don't you open it up and clone the drive and put the contents on a DOM (disk on module) or a fast CF card with a PATA adapter? That would make both boot times and load times a lot faster due to no accesstime. Also get rid of the annoying HDD noise. Also decrease heat in the machine and you can put a resistor and maybe get the fan down a bit :) I would also get a small keyboard with build in trackball to save space when using it :) Can find old ones for cheap :)
The OCD in me *hates* it when people put inventory/asset tags onto equipment haphazardly like that. (But I'm going to try not to lose any sleep over it).
The PS/2 mouse (as any other such device) must be plugged in at system boot in order to function. :)) That's per standard. Greetings, from Bulgaria. Love the show. Have been tuning in for quite some time now. :) Keep up the good work.
Hi Dave, great video as always. With reference to the 'Scope, most old PS/2 interfaces need the device attached on boot up or they won't be detected - did the keyboard work when attached?
Love the power supplies you as well as the multiplex switchs (I can think of a low voltage switching idea for those using some led lighting), that windows oscilloscope is not bad at all esp seeing you got all those probes with it, if it did not work that well I would set it up for a Technology Museum reading the trace of a reciever or the like.
Only skimmed the vid so not sure you mentioned but those PSUs can also be used as dummy loads if you set the output voltage to 0v
mikeselectricstuff I was going to do a video showing this use of the 4 quadrant capability
I've worked with all that equipment while I was at HP years ago! Very good equipment then and still is if it works! Excellent score!
Bonus, thats got an LS-120 floppy drive, they weren't very popular but could store a lot more than a regular floppy on it !
27:20 - If i remember correctly, PS2 mice and keyboards only work if they are present when the BIOS is initialising
WOW Dave, your catching up to me with all your lab gear now.... That made my eyes pop out :^) Its hard to work at the microscope now!
Good score man!
Awesome show Dave!!! Love how you give the tech talk tips in a tone to those learning
but what an awesome score!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***** Those resistors are not electrically connected. It is for the production line slaves to put the right parts to the resistor position
You can put those system PSUs in series to get more voltage or parallel to get more current by using those IP/S connections on the back.
3:44 that top yellow unit on the left is also very good and still sold today!
That scope is screaming hack-me ! I would love to have one, upgrade it with a usb touch screen, solid state hdd, more ram, endless possibilities ! nice score Dave !
put an i7 in it if possible lol
I am so jealous. I have looked endlessly for this kind of thing in Richmond VA USA, but there is nothing like these auctions you find with great scores!
From what I remember there is an option for front binding posts. I bet barely anyone bought it given the intended purpose of the powers supplies.
Would love to see an installation on those front posts. Keep up the good work!
Dave you get me so damn excited about electronics
i took a nap when you started the o-scope
You can easily put resistive touch panel in front of this agilent oscilloscope display. I believe that will ease usage and rise the price
For getting labels off I discovered that Zippo lighter fluid (Naphtha) is great for it. The Ronsonol brand lighter fluid used to say right on the container that it is "Excellent for removing labels", but I hadn't used it until recently. Coleman fuel is also a [light] Naphtha and should work equally as well.
They are much cheaper than GooGone but don't have the orange smell (d-Limonene and Tripropyleneglycol methyl ether). GooGone is actually a low odor kerosene. It is a little bit heavier and will evaporate more slowly, like White spirit.
.
Not sure if they sell them over there. But here in the states I found using a Magic Eraser to scrub off those nasty stickers to be easy and to clean up old hardware.
Dustin Holden You mean like this: EEVblog #560 - How To Remove Sticker Residue On Test Equipment
EEVblog Completely forgot about that video, sorry! But I was actually talking about a product called Mr Clean's Magic Eraser.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine_foam
I find that a little alcohol works well. I have a few litres of 100% ethanol for cleaning purposes only, of course. :)
I've tried alcohol.. But those pesky Goodwill stickers are almost impossible after being attached to some types of plastics.
If the label is thick, I try to peel off as much as possible using a sharp razor blade which is lying almost flat on the surface, taking care not to scratch the plastic. This cuts through the glue between the plastic and label leaving only a smear of glue behind. I then attack that with the alcohol.
That taller, thinner Agilent PSU looks nice. Great get Dave!
THe teardown of the oscilloscope could be great. Also a lot time ago I saw a thread about hacking this scope.
I think you could get more acq memory.
Gotta love HP/Agilent equipment. I'm still using a 1960's vintage power supply at work that appears to be all original. My only annoyance with it is that the chassis is connected to the positive terminal, which makes it unusable for powering stuff that's got an earth grounded chassis.
the avalon copmany is so close to where i live like about 83 miles/133 km vista, ca very interesting there
I would love to see inside that 1.5 Gig scope. It would be neet to see if you can upgrade it in any way
The BIOS shows that the floppy drive is a LS120 ... it's a floppy disk with an optical tracking mechanism to store 120 Mb of data. It was a competitor to the Zip disks of yesteryear.
I'd love to see a full teardown of the scope, I wonder what the front end looks like.
Dunno how the interior of the scope is, but you can probably change that old hard drive to something newer, like a Solid state drive... boot in seconds!
I want to see a teardown of that Windows 98 scope!
if you really wanted to, could you move over the oscilloscope to an SSD to reduce boot time?
Dave sounds excited in this video :D.
Some lovely stuff there :).
I really want that scope and one one of those rack mount supplies.
Wonder what that would cost me.
Ah dave the 2400 keithley brought back memories ...sold mine on ebay for as you said a pretty penny, put it up with a buy it now price and some guy in austria bought it instantly. 100% profit on that one thanks to work throwing it out,
Will you film adding the binding posts? Please?
Those HP 3488A's look like Akai Samplers. Nice score:)
Yes these units have variable speed fans,
Dependant on loading !
Always interested in a teardown, however I have to admit you have done a lot of teardowns of test equipment and although I do enjoy those as well, I think the more unique items make for more interesting teardowns, for instance off the top of my head, that EPIRB emergency beacon awhile back was really cool. Anything retro computer or even medical stuff is interesting. You know, stuff that we haven't seen before.
It would be interresting to see how an hp acting when power is enabled. Any peaks in current or voltag, not like the rigol you tested.
oh geez, a K6-2/400? I really hope you redo the thermal compound on that-- they do tend to get on the hot side, even idle.
Was that a buckling spring keyboard he was using?
Dave never likes to say how much he paid for these things. He likes to leave us wondering.
In the next actions pick A Agilent ESG signal generator, they are very interest to take apart!
Looks like we both went Auctioning lol.
I scored 35 Astron rm-60m's for $200 and 10 whitebox PC's with intel i5 boards /w cpu's, 4Gb DDR3 ram and 1 Tb Hdd's , and 5, 22" LCD monitors for $150 for the lot at the state surplus auction 2 days ago.
Amazing what they have at these places and how cheap some of it is..
EEVblog is that probe the one that come with that multi thousand dollar scope in the crate ?
So how often should an outfit calibrate their power supplies, anyway?
Im interested in VFD tutorial, how to salvage and hook up one
Pretty good construction on that PSU, by modern standards, but not a scratch against older HP stuff. I have a 70's HP system PSU, bought cheap because other bidders didn't know it could be option modified to operate at 240 V 50hz!! Construction quality is amazing, with diecastings on the chassis, solid aluminium front panel, custom parts everywhere! OK it's not as sophisticated feature wise, and it has analogue meters but to use and look at, it's a thing of beauty! Only things I want to change are the volt and current pots, to 10 turn. Resolution on the standard pots is clunky.
How and where do you find out about these auctions? I've been looking for them and I cannot find any.
Thank you for any help.
what r these utilized to do? and do u buy, fix and sell? what do u do for work and lastly how did you get so freaqen smart?
Get some Goo Gone for those stubborn stickers! Works like a charm.
Hey dave? what do ya say? can we see the insides of the infinian scope?
Hey Dave, would you consider adding a touch screen in front of the display on that oscilloscope? Or would hacking in just bring down the value since you are selling it anyways? Thought it would be a nice upgrade to get rid of the mouse..
what happened to the Infinium oscilloscope
You can use tape to peel off stickers. Apply a strip of tape to the sticker, peel off the tape, and usually the sticker gets pulled away.
Any plans on making some videos about ADC's like ICL7106?
Immediately back the hard drive up, and then replace it with a solid state hard drive.
I was going to suggest backing it up as well - if it fails you could be screwed!
You scored big. I need to get a couple of those. I've got a few Heathkit Power supplies and a large homemade one, so I need something a little more industrial. I'll have to check out Ebay.
Service manual stops at R905 but the last few "resistors" are all "zero ohm" which makes sense, except... why are they not listed as jumpers?
www.manualslib.com/manual/529252/Agilent-Technologies-6541a.html?page=112#manual
Try logging in on that scope under "Administrator" with no password. With any luck you will get admin entry.
Is that the metal LCD frame visible on the Agilent scope? That's a bit how ya doin', or maybe there's a screen protector missing.
PS/2 mice are not hot swappable. You need to plug it in before you turn it on.
Do you store your chazzi in your jacuzzi?
HP was a brilliant company!!!
@ 34:12 WAUWW That 1 Gig scope goes for €15.972 !!! Holy Mozes! The 1.5 Gig goes for about €2200,-
An idea for removing those pesky stickers:
Remove as much as you can of the paper so you don't have much but the adhesive left, rub or brush oil onto it (I use rapeseed oil, but no reason why mineral oil shouldn't work), let it sit for a couple of hours (I usually let it sit overnight), and the sticker residue should come off by simply rubbing your fingers over it.
I don't know the exact mechanism, if it's that the adhesive is fat-soluble or that the oil simply wicks under the adhesive, or a combination of both.
The toughest part is getting the oil and (minor) adhesive residue off, my standard routine is to rub in raw (hand) dish-washing liquid or kitchen de-greaser (be careful tho, some brands can discolor plastic), maybe let sit for a minute or two, then using the sponge side of a Scotch-brite(tm) or equivalent to rub the oily residue off, then rinse (it usually takes a couple of rinse cycles to do, you know it's done when the surface no longer is slippery.
I'm sure that the rinsing can be replaced with a good bucket of warmish water and dishcloths and some added elbow grease.
I use the method mainly to desticker plastic containers for food (some are excellent for component and parts storage), and such containers are a good starting point to learn how to use this method (so even if it turns out it doesn't work (it doesn't work with every kind of sticker), those-who-must-be-obeyed will be happy for a stack of free containers :)
FINAL CAUTION: The process can be quite messy. Cover anything which might not take kindly to oil droplets (masking tape and plastic bags cut open comes to mind), have towels handy and use dishwashing liquid as soap when cleaning your hands up,
and use some moisturizing cream when you're done for the day (dishwashing liquid lifts much of the oils off your hands, even the natural oils).
Does it work to use the Agillent ocilloscope as a normal computer?
I found last part of your video, about upgrading that PSU, particularly interesting and informative. It would be great to gain some knowledge of inspecting, modyfing (most of all - understanding) that kind of hardware, wiring and communication standards, and in general how do they do it in such a big companies like HP :)
Can you get at least 4 digits of resolution and accuracy with some real cheap 10-25 turn POTs on amazon? I want to build a decent CV & CC 0-6A 0-15V power supply and for calibration use those POTs. For a voltage reference, what should I use? I want to set the voltage digitally with a micro controller, so what would be the best DAC to use w/ arduino? to To get 0-15V, I am not changing the feedback loop, but instead plan to use a fixed resistor divider for the feedback and using the DAC as a variable voltage reference.
But i would like to see some in depth tear downs! ... equipment like this is really useful to learn some new techniques to implement!
Does the Windows osciloscope play Doom ?
My dad has a whole lot of test equipment. I don't know all the names, but he has many of Hewlett/Packard manufacture. One of his test devices, with a speaker, has tubes in it. Another one has a 16-bit microprocessor. He used to fix test equipment.
Oh wow! I didn't expect an almost 1 hour long video this soon after the maker fair :)
Awesome! :D
Oh and: good morning from Germany :)
Hey what can you tell be about that keyboard there? Depending on who made it, it could actually be worth a fair chunk of change.
Youve tested the agilent infinium at my birthday thats cool
I imagine that Infiniium would work much better with a few hardware and software upgrades. Did Agilent provide Win2K or XP compatible software and drivers?
Did Dave say okshun score?
Dave, looking for and Spectrum analyser, up to 3Ghz and as cheeap as possible, but NEW. What would you recommend and what do you think would be a logic price for this gear. The ones from rohde are sky expensive. cheers.
"...half a bee's dick..."
hahaha....I love your impromptu descriptions in true Aussie style!
Great and informative video...Thanks - Jay
Was the banana thrown in?
why do i never hear about these auction! : (
Melbourne must have some of them!
Hi Dave. I have similar models 6632B 0-20V 0-5A. But what i did find is a bit disturbing.
When you remove top cover and you just turn on your power supply..then on those power transistors (those with small heat sinks on them) you can boil eggs... That design is really poor, temp. go up to 90 degree (depend on rail ofc). When fan is on then it is all right but design like that is not good.
They should increase size of those heat sinks or decrease voltage difference. Btw i'm not sure how to calibrate them If you can pls make video with calibration procedure. Thanks.
Wow the Agilent ocilloscope is a nice machine, expensive tho would be fun to know how much you payed :)
Was thinking it's a bit slow and Harddrive is getting older, why don't you open it up and clone the drive and put the contents on a DOM (disk on module) or a fast CF card with a PATA adapter? That would make both boot times and load times a lot faster due to no accesstime. Also get rid of the annoying HDD noise. Also decrease heat in the machine and you can put a resistor and maybe get the fan down a bit :)
I would also get a small keyboard with build in trackball to save space when using it :) Can find old ones for cheap :)
The OCD in me *hates* it when people put inventory/asset tags onto equipment haphazardly like that. (But I'm going to try not to lose any sleep over it).
The PS/2 mouse (as any other such device) must be plugged in at system boot in order to function. :)) That's per standard.
Greetings, from Bulgaria. Love the show. Have been tuning in for quite some time now. :)
Keep up the good work.
That banana sure was a great score!
nice scope... but can it run crysis ?
DOOMed;)
TubiCal my graphic calculator runs doom ;)
Well, it does have a floppy drive! I bet you could play _something_ on it...
Banana for scale.
Those scopes are going for around 3000 dollars in the USA. Out of my price range!
and what are they for ? :/
Nice one Dave!
Try some Goo Gone on that sticker residue, that stuff works great for that.
Hi Dave, great video as always. With reference to the 'Scope, most old PS/2 interfaces need the device attached on boot up or they won't be detected - did the keyboard work when attached?
Love the power supplies you as well as the multiplex switchs (I can think of a low voltage switching idea for those using some led lighting), that windows oscilloscope is not bad at all esp seeing you got all those probes with it, if it did not work that well I would set it up for a Technology Museum reading the trace of a reciever or the like.
a trick IT folks use to get stickers off is... invert a can of air use the propelent to freeze the sticker and glue backing and peel it off
What camera are you using? That Sony from a few bids back was excellent.
Don Myers My old Canon HF G10
EEVblog Any reason your using your older gear? The new cameras ( canon and Sony ) are excellent. Another great bid by the way
Don Myers It was to hand and had memory in it.
When the hell did scopes start arriving with more colors than Green?!?
Vista ca that's where i live haha! wow. they are literally right down the street from me
A little naptha (cigarrette lighter fluid) will make quick work of those annoying labels.
Clone the hard drive on the windows scope to an IDE SSD drive.
What do you do with all this stuff :)
Could I get that Windows scope?
Are you selling?
Could you hack the Infinium with an SSD, more RAM and a more current Windows release?
such a fcuking good oscilloscope!