(AI translated, from April 16, 2022)
There are no interesting projects, so this will be a small gallery and some grumbling.
I’ve complained about this more than once:
Some industrial “chiller.” It seems we’ve already stepped well into the 21st century, but industrial controllers still kill with their stupidity. What did they mean by this message? Well, “generic alarm number 1,” which blocks everything. “No” means the alarm is not resettable. What causes this alarm? It doesn’t matter. That’s how it’s programmed. I figured it out completely and will explain the whole mess to you. Right away, I say, don’t buy devices from Italians. There is a small induction furnace and a water cooler next to it. It’s filled not with water but with antifreeze because it gets cold in Lithuania. If the system is on non-stop, everything is fine. But for a while, the furnace wasn’t needed, and to save electricity, everything was turned off. When turned on—error and nothing works. It turns out, the idiots (they were warned about Lithuanian conditions and antifreeze) programmed the system so that if the temperature is below 10 degrees Celsius, an alarm goes off (like “drain the water, because of unexpected winter in Palermo”) and blocks the circulation pump (and the chiller). The melting furnace doesn’t see circulation and doesn’t turn on. Similarly, the chiller itself, which has a heating system, doesn’t turn it on because circulation is blocked. The only solution is to wait for spring until the antifreeze warms up to about 12 degrees. Then everything will work. If there was circulation, the melting furnace would heat the system in a minute. And if you don’t turn off the system, the chiller itself heats the water (antifreeze). And of course, passwords are set everywhere, and the controller itself is stupid. So far, I haven’t managed to reprogram it, the only solution left is a “Soviet hack”—connect a relay that will override the circulation pump. ble.
Here you see a clay crucible that melted like this. And you know, again, it’s the fault of… the industrial controller. This time, Omron E5CC. How? Why? Well, the muffle furnace’s heating element failed, and the furnace didn’t reach the set temperature of 1150°C. Although the time was set, something didn’t work, and the furnace tried to reach that temperature all weekend. So instead of a couple of hours of the technological process, it was doing 70 hours of stupid heating. And everything melted, all the crucibles, the entire furnace, all the heating elements, and the Pt/PtRh thermocouple.
Remember that holiday, “Jingle Balls” where they sing?
Guess where all those Chinese garlands go after the holidays? To the landfill. They are really working, I picked up a few random ones, turned them on, and they light up. So, when winter comes again and you are an eco-hipster, you should think about it.
Another achievement from China:
This is the turbo fan of some expensive hairdryer. Really interesting construction—an “on-board” AC/DC/AC 3-phase converter, the hairdryer motor spins at a crazy speed. But the problem is, the hairdryer heats up first, and second, it spins at many, many RPMs. So it’s enough to hit the hot and running hairdryer harder on the table, and due to the softened plastic, the turbine hits the casing. Or just because of the too-tight wire, it breaks. It’s really a thin wire because the motor is somehow high voltage. And the construction is such that the motor is not disassembled at all.
And to reduce the level of grumbling:
Many have encountered BGA (ball grid array) chips, and they annoy us all, but there is such a thing as CCGA (Ceramic Column Grid Array), where the connection is with columns. This is a complete mess and nonsense. Fortunately, it’s only an IBM perversion. Why is it needed? Well, to avoid thermo-mechanical stress. If you take a palm-sized microchip (especially on a ceramic base, where it’s turbo hot) and solder it to a standard PCB, when the chip heats up, it will tear off all the balls. And the “columns” allow deformation. Do you think this is the biggest perversion? It turns out there are also “spring” pins, but they are only liked by NASA.