Eratron PPC 8200 and family

Howdy!

You're no doubt tearing your hair out looking for some tidbit of technical data on a piece of Eratron equipment. Me too. I've found a few things that might help you:

Eratron is another name for ERA, or Energy Research Associates that was based in or near San Francisco some time ago. (Source) The patent application mentioned below indicates it was Campbell, California.

They patented their electron beam power supply design. It's rather brilliant compared to the more conventional design the Mideast Industries PR-40 uses, but its brilliance shows up mostly in electron beam applications where output arcing is not uncommon.

The patent number is 4,314,324. If you use the USPTO site, you'll want to go to http://www.uspto.gov/. In the left column under Patents click Search. Scroll down to the heading "USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT)" and click on either Patent Number Search (if you want just the text) or View Patent Full-Page Images (if you want the partial schematics). Enter the patent number on either page and it'll zap you right to the patent.

Now if you're like me, the computer will be grumpy and not show the TIFF image the image viewer embeds. If this is the case, right click on the side of the page, select View Source, scroll down in the new window to the bottom and start looking for:

<embed src="/.DImg?Docid=04314324&PageNum=1&IDKey=219CCF24E627
&ImgFormat=tif" width="570" height="840" type=image/tiff></embed>

Now for a bit of surgery. Take the URL you've found for the image viewer. For me it was:
http://patimg1.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=4314324&idkey=NONE

Snip up and paste together a Frankenstein URL using the first half of the image viewer URL and the embed tag's data:
http://patimg1.uspto.gov/.DImg?Docid=04314324&PageNum=1&IDKey=219CCF24E627
&ImgFormat=tif

Paste that into your address bar and the image should come up after thinking a bit. Now, see that PageNum=1 bit stuck in the middle? You can use your original page viewer to see how many pages there were and what sections they were divided into to navigate simply by changing that one number.

Cool, eh? :) I thought so anyway. It's a simple hack. If you want to actually read the images or keep them, you can use a tool like wget with the Frankenstein URL to pull the TIFFs straight off the server.

Have a nice day!

...and remember, 3-phase can kill you. :)

Where has the Wavetek 195 Gone??

I was recently asked as part of my employment to find a manual for a Wavetek 195. After much Googling and hunting and prodding and sifting, I found absolutely nothing. This is why I'm writing this post.

The Wavetek 195 was renumbered as a Fluke 282.

It's that simple. I had to call Fluke, ask, and be called back as they had a hard time rediscovering this fact for themselves. The Wavetek 195 shows up in exactly one document in all of their internal systems, and that document is what you, the reader, can find for yourself. It's about 1 page and not terribly useful.

Oh, mergers...what fun! ;)

Motorola Droid disassembly

Taking things apart is fun...especially when it was expensive, has been replaced, is out of warranty, and needs fixing. So my boss handed me his recently bathed Droid to take apart, rinse out with ethyl alcohol, and reassemble. A brief Google search found these two links:

Dr. Wreck's Motorola Droid teardown
Note commenter Jeremy on the second page of comments.

Dr. Wreck's analysis of the carnage


These are nearly comprehensive and very impressive. However, I would like to insert an omission or two.

When pulling the back cover off, there is a black flat piece that runs along the top (camera end) of the battery compartment that needs to be pulled down as it has two tabs around the first silver torx' socket's base.

Note that the mic will lift right out.

The antenna board seems to be glued in, but it doesn't seem to interfere with removing the edge cover so I didn't remove it during disassembly.

Keep track of the three buttons: I nearly lost one to the floor. One doesn't come out until you remove the edge connector.

This phone has a sticker under the battery that holds a significant part of the edge cover down. Peel this back, lift the screen-ward edge in the direction of the back of the phone and the opposite edge will disengage towards the front of the phone.

The screen mount has NINE (9) screws holding it in. Five you can see with the phone open and four you can only get to with the edge cover off. I am presently having incredibly amounts difficulty getting the center right keyboard edge one to come out. Judging by their use of glue in holding the edge connector on, it has probably been loc-tite'd into place so it's brutally obvious to a trained service tech when I have invaded the inner sancta of the phone... EDIT later today: every device has failed to break the screw loose, so I had to drill out the head.

Also keep track of the various rubber buffer pieces on the main board. In my considered opinion and lack of specific experience, they can hide water damage and are essential to vibration protection.

UPDATE: Even with two separate water damaged Droids, no combination was successful in restoring life. Luckily, my boss' Droid was still able to recognize a USB connection and dump anything useful onto his PC.

Mormon Exodus

The trek undertaken by early Mormons from Illinois to Utah is a well-studied and fascinating phenomenon. Studies have been done correlating the Mormon Trail with the Oregon Trail and other routes while looking at mortality, demographics, and socioeconomic statuses (statii? statae? states?); however, one topic that is often overlooked is the motivation behind this monumental movement.

Section 136 of the Doctrine and Covenants gives us several insights into it. The verbage used is extremely reminiscent of the Exodus books, so we expect the people and the leadership to see this journey as a religious pilgrimage. For example, the terms "covenant" and "statute" figure prominently. The direct commands from God are also very similar to Deuteronomy's style, not to mention how the first verse starts out with the "Word and Will of the Lord" to the "Camp of Israel." This is then followed with archaic constructions involving 'captains of <insert number here>' and the formation of 'companies.' It might have been just as effective to use military organizational jargon like 'platoons' and 'brigades,' but the specific terminology lends a more religiously impactful weight to the directions.

A few of the commandments are noteworthy in this vein. Particularly, verses 20-30 contain several 'cease' commands in addition to several 'thou shalt' constructions. It's hard to get closer to Exodus 20 in style. This comes with verse 22, where the Lord identifies Himself in one of His oldest ways: as the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

I also note, in abstract, that vv. 34-36 carry an old-school wickedness-punishment weight, while v. 39 points out a justice-balance issue.

Thus this short and scatterbrained blog post ends.

Crandall Printing Museum

This was an awesome field trip. The only functioning Gutenberg printing press in the world is rather impressive, with sturdy olive-press style construction, boiled linseed oil with lead and copper oxides in the ink, and a replica type throwing tool. It's in the Crandall Printing Museum in Provo, UT.

The presentation was cool: the presenter walked us through a simplified engineer's narrative of the development of each part of the system. First we went through making punches and making type (an idea possibly obtained from the Orient), mass-producing type, setting it in a stable place, making useful ink, and finally developing a reliable way of printing pages. The printed and dried raw sheets were then sold to monasteries, where monks carefully and elaborately decorated each page of the Bible and then bound them into volumes. (I imagine that not quite so much care in decor was taken with other books of the era.) The next 50 years brought millions of books to light as printing became a well-established technology and the Renaissance came into full swing. Nice timing, eh?

The technology fascinated me. The typeface started as a filed piece of iron which was then punched into copper. The copper functioned as a mold for the letter-end of the type and had to be cast with a dimensionally heat-stable alloy (13% antimony, 80% lead, 7% zinc as I recall; a rather obscure mix that seems to work perfectly) so that it would conserve the shape of the cast with enough precision to be useful. Incidentally, a well-designed mold added perfectly straight sides so that the type could sit next to itself and remain properly aligned. The casting device (the name escapes me) was set up to be able to easily cast several of a letter in a minute or two, or several different letters almost as easily. The first printing was done with small tracts and publications in common languages, so when Gutenberg landed the job of printing Bibles for the Catholic Church, he had to file, punch, and throw enough of 256 uniquely Latin characters (counting accent marks, common abbreviations, &c.) to set six simultaneous sheets of the Vulgate version of the Bible. It was a massive project, and his financiers reposessed the shop before it was complete. (I suspect they continued its operation and fulfilled the contract. Our tour guides didn't mention it.)

What got me is that a top-of-the-line press from 1830 was nearly identical. The bed and press were larger and 16 pages could be printed instead of 2. The casting tool had had a trigger added to avoid opening the mold between letters. That was it. The principles were the same, the tool was almost identical, and not even the ink had changed.

The ink was boiled linseed oil with copper and zinc oxides mixed in. It was very black. Gutenberg had to develop this too; the quill pens of the period used a very thin water-based ink which wouldn't adhere to the type and transfer to the paper at all well.


I must say, I was extremely amused when I read a quote on the wall extolling the incredible impact of printing on humanity--arguably unparalleled as yet--and then saw that the reference was an "internet edition" of a text. The Internet is, I think, effecting a similar change in society in these days; however, it still has a few hundred years to try to match moveable-type printing.

</ramble>

Organizational details

If a class assignment involves the minutes from a meeting, I expect a dry time. The minutes from the establishment of the highest governing councils in the LDS church were to their nature, but there are fascinating underlying details contained in them.

The assignment is the minutes from a meeting of 24 men who held the office of High Priest in the church in 1834. This is the same office and authority that Melchizedek held in Abraham's time. In this document (Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations, pp. 639-648) we see that an interesting medley comes out. For example, page 640 ends with a historical tone explaining the meeting, page 642 starts with names, agreements, and a general record of what transpired in the meeting, and continues on to a soft revelatory tone. Here we are informed in a passive tone that this council is for this, extreme cases are to be judged so, governing body equivalencies, quorums, and balances, how to ensure fairness and avoid insult, and other details of operation.

I call this a 'soft' tone because the informational section says nowhere "Thus saith the Lord." It is firm and direct about how the council should work; the basics of receiving revelation had already been established in the minds of the people (sections 8 and 9 of the Doctrine and Covenants come to mind), so the Lord simply revealed the working structure and relied on the council to obey the instructions and seek His guidance for the details.

I'm also surprised by how carefully laid out the rules are. Political problems are countered (mind you, not 'entirely avoided') in one case by requiring that an equal number of members of the council be appointed to speak in favor as well as against an individual accused of breaking church law. (For example, this council would hear charges of adultery and would consider excommunication for it.) Also, those dissatisfied with the conclusions or those discovering new evidence are provided with venues to seek amends.

Also, the structure has a certain resiliency designed into it. If the president himself is absent, one of his two counselors (in this case, one of the two men appointed to help with his work) would be able to stand in. Also, a binding majority of the quorum is 7 of the 12, with worthy and reliable men being called to fill in the remaining seats as required.

Meh; I get distracted with intricacies. That's probably why I'm in computer science and electrical engineering...with some dabbling in social engineering, which the council of high priests is a fine example of.

BYU Museum of Art visit

I had a good time during the class' visit to the MOA this last Wednesday. I learned a bit about myself...and a bit about religious art.

See, I thought I loathed humanities. It gives me the heebie jeebies when a person starts asking about "what this picture means." This is particlarly true when they proceed to take a bronze relief and invoke the imagery of the cross to carefully come to the conclusion that one figure is representative of divinity while I intrinsically held approximately half of that notion. The figure's position and poise conveyed power and influence on deity scale, while the second figure's positioning conveyed a lesser degre of existence. Why would we reach out blindly, grab some symbol with merely geometric applicability, and proceed to rigorously build these impressions ex nihilo into discrete facts when I already had them well in hand?

(Please please please realize that the above passage makes some attempt to lampoon my former way of thought!)

Heh. So I didn't like that bit. As the conversation progressed, a comment was made: whatever the original artist did or did not intend (which I was handling internally as canonical), we can take what we see and feel in the art and use it as a way to examine ourselves. Self reflection and examination; this process of conversing was a somewhat crude instrument to promote them. I think.

Also, if one wants to absorb much of the available imagery, it helps to start from small quanta and slowly iterate through all of the possible combinations of small interpretations. This eventually turns into the part I really like: the pieces come together into a sort of story or explanation, and as pieces are noticed and interpreted variously the bigger story changes or illumines accordingly.

So, did that last paragraph confuse you? Heh. Me too. That last sentence was way too long. This is the other tidbit I learned about myself. I am too vague. I will stumble all over myself and try to describe the description. Once, during the tour, I volunteered a comment pointing out one specific aspect of a painting. Our guide then asked, "So...what does that mean?" I was caught completely flat-footed. Absolutely astonied. Instead of being the kid that is too good for this, I was suddenly the kid who knows less than half of the game and just tried a move that is 'dumb.'

I notice, now, that the idea of challenging one's self with questions developed from religious art is actual a neat idea. It is similar to reading scriptures: the questions I need to ask are not necessarily inherent in the art, but they are, I think, inherent in my thinking. Thus, analyzing it doesn't evoke what the artist wrought, but instead invokes the process of internalization.

Anyhow, I learned a) that I CAN benefit from introspection from the Dreaded Examination by Humanties Attitude (which isn't so bad after all) and b) that said Examination "Isn't So Bad." I'm glad I went.