I am Going to Blow This Up – Labs Update

[AdamFromLTT]

It’s only been 3 months since the last Labs update, and so much has changed. With an RF chamber, advances in test automation, and a functional PSU tester, things are really kicking into high gear.
 

 

[Kazlehoff]

can you guys PLEASE PSU test a DeepCool DA500 PSU? back when i worked at [MAJOR CANADIAN BRANDED COMPUTER COMPANY THAT ISNT NCIX OR MEMORY EXPRESS AND IS STILL IN BUISNESS] i kept returning them as defective from system assemblies, because they would fail testing on the 3.3v rail. Presumibly, Deepcool got pissy about it, complained to our head office, because i had a product manager in my service department asking for an explination. when i demonstrated, HE TOOK MY PSU TESTER AWAY (btw, my property) and told me not to RMA any more Deepcool powersupplies unless they diddnt turn on.

[da na]

14 minutes ago, Kazlehoff said:

can you guys PLEASE PSU test a DeepCool DA500 PSU? back when i worked at [MAJOR CANADIAN BRANDED COMPUTER COMPANY THAT ISNT NCIX OR MEMORY EXPRESS AND IS STILL IN BUISNESS] i kept returning them as defective from system assemblies, because they would fail testing on the 3.3v rail. Presumibly, Deepcool got pissy about it, complained to our head office, because i had a product manager in my service department asking for an explination. when i demonstrated, HE TOOK MY PSU TESTER AWAY (btw, my property) and told me not to RMA any more Deepcool powersupplies unless they diddnt turn on.

Sounds like average Ne- *cough* sorry [Canadian retail brand] behavior to me. 

[Kazlehoff]

Wasn't new egg. and im not going farther than that. its not a company thats been in the limelight recently. would be happy to share details with LMG staff, but not causal conversation.

[grozak7]

Are the reviews and lab data going to be posted on the ltt website, like anandtech-style, or are they going to be exclusively on video?

[MP-]

@AdamFromLTT so I develop wireless devices for a living  - why aren't you guys using the industry standard R&S CMW500 or CMX500 (e.g that we would use when getting PTCRB certs etc) ? Linus went on a long speech about how the reviewers need the same devices as the people developing these units when talking about the power supply tester - does this not apply here? I'm sure if you hit them up the vendors would be happy to send you demo units as they do all the time in the industry - if that does not work - I have a couple of them for my work and there is a spare one (pictured) that you're welcome to borrow if you like (just pay for shipping both ways from the US). 

I'm sure you guys know but a nice wide-band spectrum analyzer to look for crud would also be very useful - something like Aaronia and Signal Hound with very fast sweeps and a wide window for high probability of intercept are great for this kind of checking too - which should be plenty good for your reviews. The prices aren't super bad compared to R&S/Keysight/Anritsu all things considered too  I'm sure you're talking with all the best experts - but feel free to reach out if the labs folks want a "from the trenches" confessional about where the skeletons usually are in these designs (and where reviewers should look) or to borrow some gear. 

 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Wonder if the new Markbench setup would allow your team to test a wider range of titles. Genuinely surprised that titles like Destiny 2 which sit on the most current player charts for so long never get any sort of coverage from any outlet. 

 

Especially with Intel Arc, it'll be nice to have more results for older DX9 titles that likewise still consistently make it to those charts for some representation. If you want to break out from TF2, Portal 2, or L4D2 with some buddies, how will Arc do? 

[Zodiark1593]

A Chroma, that's pretty cool. I used one at my old job for HiPot and voltage leakage testing.

 

Incidentally, I'd recently got a position as a lab analyst (really, a lab tech), so I find the Labs stuff to be quite interesting.

 

[Beamolm]

12 hours ago, MP- said:

@AdamFromLTT so I develop wireless devices for a living  - why aren't you guys using the industry standard R&S CMW500 or CMX500 (e.g that we would use when getting PTCRB certs etc) ? Linus went on a long speech about how the reviewers need the same devices as the people developing these units when talking about the power supply tester - does this not apply here? I'm sure if you hit them up the vendors would be happy to send you demo units as they do all the time in the industry - if that does not work - I have a couple of them for my work and there is a spare one (pictured) that you're welcome to borrow if you like (just pay for shipping both ways from the US). 

I'm sure you guys know but a nice wide-band spectrum analyzer to look for crud would also be very useful - something like Aaronia and Signal Hound with very fast sweeps and a wide window for high probability of intercept are great for this kind of checking too - which should be plenty good for your reviews. The prices aren't super bad compared to R&S/Keysight/Anritsu all things considered too  I'm sure you're talking with all the best experts - but feel free to reach out if the labs folks want a "from the trenches" confessional about where the skeletons usually are in these designs (and where reviewers should look) or to borrow some gear. 

 

In addition to this, you might want to check power supplies for how much Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) they emit. You would want an EMI receiver to do this kind of testing. I would be curious how many of these power supplies actually comply with common standards like FCC and CE considering you can "self certify". I am developing a similar power supply right now and being compliant can be quite the challenge. You would need to get an antenna and pre-amp as well.

[LTTMobileJake]

14 hours ago, MP- said:

@AdamFromLTT so I develop wireless devices for a living  - why aren't you guys using the industry standard R&S CMW500 or CMX500 (e.g that we would use when getting PTCRB certs etc) ? Linus went on a long speech about how the reviewers need the same devices as the people developing these units when talking about the power supply tester - does this not apply here? I'm sure if you hit them up the vendors would be happy to send you demo units as they do all the time in the industry - if that does not work - I have a couple of them for my work and there is a spare one (pictured) that you're welcome to borrow if you like (just pay for shipping both ways from the US). 

I'm sure you guys know but a nice wide-band spectrum analyzer to look for crud would also be very useful - something like Aaronia and Signal Hound with very fast sweeps and a wide window for high probability of intercept are great for this kind of checking too - which should be plenty good for your reviews. The prices aren't super bad compared to R&S/Keysight/Anritsu all things considered too  I'm sure you're talking with all the best experts - but feel free to reach out if the labs folks want a "from the trenches" confessional about where the skeletons usually are in these designs (and where reviewers should look) or to borrow some gear. 

...

Hey! I'd be happy to have a chat if you've got some time next week? We're in talks with a couple manufacturers (R&S, Gauss, Keysight) right now for equipment, but it'd be good to get some input from actual boots on the ground  I'll DM to setup a time

[LTTMobileJake]

1 hour ago, Beamolm said:

In addition to this, you might want to check power supplies for how much Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) they emit. You would want an EMI receiver to do this kind of testing. I would be curious how many of these power supplies actually comply with common standards like FCC and CE considering you can "self certify". I am developing a similar power supply right now and being compliant can be quite the challenge. You would need to get an antenna and pre-amp as well.

I'll chat with our EE running PSU testing

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

2 hours ago, Beamolm said:

In addition to this, you might want to check power supplies for how much Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) they emit. You would want an EMI receiver to do this kind of testing. I would be curious how many of these power supplies actually comply with common standards like FCC and CE considering you can "self certify". I am developing a similar power supply right now and being compliant can be quite the challenge. You would need to get an antenna and pre-amp as well.

The issue with a lot of the conducted emissions testing is that a lot also depends on the equipment specified, if you swap out the LISN for something entirely different you can draw entirely different conclusions. We had a lot of issues with that when customers would use a custom LISN while casually forgetting to specify what they used, which would then lead to very interesting (and very expensive) issues after delivery. So I'm kind of wondering what the best way would be for LTT to approach conducted emissions testing, since a lot of it depends on which standard they'd decide to follow.

 

15 hours ago, MP- said:

@AdamFromLTT so I develop wireless devices for a living  - why aren't you guys using the industry standard R&S CMW500 or CMX500 (e.g that we would use when getting PTCRB certs etc) ? Linus went on a long speech about how the reviewers need the same devices as the people developing these units when talking about the power supply tester - does this not apply here? I'm sure if you hit them up the vendors would be happy to send you demo units as they do all the time in the industry - if that does not work - I have a couple of them for my work and there is a spare one (pictured) that you're welcome to borrow if you like (just pay for shipping both ways from the US). 

I'm sure you guys know but a nice wide-band spectrum analyzer to look for crud would also be very useful - something like Aaronia and Signal Hound with very fast sweeps and a wide window for high probability of intercept are great for this kind of checking too - which should be plenty good for your reviews. The prices aren't super bad compared to R&S/Keysight/Anritsu all things considered too  I'm sure you're talking with all the best experts - but feel free to reach out if the labs folks want a "from the trenches" confessional about where the skeletons usually are in these designs (and where reviewers should look) or to borrow some gear. 

Haha, completely agreed! This is literally what I came here to tell as well, WHY NOT THE CMW500!!!! The newer PXIe cards from Keysight ain't bad either from what I heard, but I've never ever touched one of those, what's your experience with those? And I know one of the university labs we worked together with also had something based on National Instruments hardware in a PXI chassis, but I'm not sure if that's still being kept up to date since the Emerson acquisition, plus they were locked into a LabVIEW based software solution for it...

 

But I was also thinking that a nice addition for testing some older devices (on top of a CMW500) would also be one of those ancient CMU200s ( https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_application/application_notes/1ga65/1GA65_0e.pdf ). They're dirt cheap on the second hand market (I even picked one up for my home lab at this point), they share some of the capabilities, and they're potentially not that bad for testing things like older bluetooth devices or running tests which are a bit riskier given that spare parts are easy to find from third parties, but of course they are limited to older standards. And I'm also wondering if it wouldn't be worth it for Labs to get a GPSDO frequency standard, do you find that necessary for your measurements @MP-? We needed it, but we were doing some weird things.

 

And what'd also be nice for the power consumption measurements of mobile devices would be a Keithley SMU or battery simulator, some of them have excellent low current measurement capability, if used correctly they don't suffer from voltage drops, and they offer the ability to repeatedly emulate a battery independent of temperature and aging effects. But as general advice, don't ever buy a Keithley/Tek device without a physical GPIB port.

 

1 hour ago, LTTMobileJake said:

Hey! I'd be happy to have a chat if you've got some time next week? We're in talks with a couple manufacturers (R&S, Gauss, Keysight) right now for equipment, but it'd be good to get some input from actual boots on the ground  I'll DM to setup a time

While I'm by no means an expert at RF testing, I'd put my money on the R&S CMW-series. R&S usually has excellent documentation, top notch support, and they actually think about this entire thing called "UI design" - which can be a bit hit-and-miss with higher end Keysight products. I can't comment on Gauss, and while I don't think Tektronix still makes anything competitive in this market segment, avoid Tektronix products if you wish to do any automation, their software support is generally quite bad, I've been on the phone with them countless of times for their switching chassis products, and they have yet to get back to me for my inquiry from 2017/2018 after multiple reminders through various channels over the span of multiple years, which is to say that their support sucks.

 

And it'd be kind of cool if you could give a more close-up description of the Chroma PSU tester you guys got for the more technically inclined amongst us. Give us our electronics engineering xxx-rated material! The crowd demands it!

 

Anyway, nice to see the progress.

[bluehawk]

Come on Linus if you are going to do a lab tour you gotta have random beakers and vials around with bright colored liquids with some smoke coming out. It's just standard lab stuff 

[Wagontrainer]

@LTTMobileJake
Hey LTT Staff, ive been a long time viewer and recently started my career in the telco world so ive been watching your EMF chamber content with a bit of a keener eye.
have you guys looked into getting a private network solution from one of the big mobile communications players? was it too expensive maybe? working in the department managing these things for the european market i can say that there shouldn't any legal or corporate restrictions blocking you guys from getting one.
 

[Matsuu]

I have a project that could seriously use that OCR Markbench software, did you guys make that or is that available online somewhere? Also if you guys did make it, I along with others I'm sure would love to see it open sourced.

[Catzzye]

Is Tall Man an employee on probation?

[LTTMobileJake]

On 6/23/2023 at 4:12 PM, Catzzye said:

Is Tall Man an employee on probation?

Yes, yes he is

 

  

On 6/18/2023 at 4:21 AM, Wagontrainer said:

@LTTMobileJake
Hey LTT Staff, ive been a long time viewer and recently started my career in the telco world so ive been watching your EMF chamber content with a bit of a keener eye.
have you guys looked into getting a private network solution from one of the big mobile communications players? was it too expensive maybe? working in the department managing these things for the european market i can say that there shouldn't any legal or corporate restrictions blocking you guys from getting one.
 

We haven't, but for the kind of tests I'll be running (at least for the near future), they'd be overkill for our needs right now
 

 

On 6/21/2023 at 7:54 PM, Matsuu said:

I have a project that could seriously use that OCR Markbench software, did you guys make that or is that available online somewhere? Also if you guys did make it, I along with others I'm sure would love to see it open sourced.

It's in-house developed, and while I know we have some plans around making it open source, I don't know to what degree etc.