I have a big Lazy Susan on my bench to rotate heavy equipment I'm working on, but now I have to get trays to work on so I can stop losing SMT resistors and caps. One of the reasons I watch your channel is for all of the good ideas. Thanks.
Pretty nice kit! A bit of distortion but still good enough for testing audio circuits. Cool tape trick too. Also, lacing cord and some vacuum tube spotted.
Fascinating, it's always good to see you show us the fake parts but I would love to know what that THD number was with a straight swap to the known good device !....cheers.
The ICL8038 sine wave just isn't particularly good. The sine wave is derived from the triangle by piecewise approximation. The result isn't horrible but it isn't a good as can be had from something like an LC oscillator.
Tools will become magnetized just sitting in Earth's magnetic field. I have a bulk magnetic tape eraser that works well for demagnetizing tools, though it is a bit of a challenge sometimes because it is so powerful. One thing magnetized Erem cutters will tell you is that you are cutting leads that are probably harder than is good for the cutters unless you have the ones with tungsten carbide inserts in the blades.
@@d614gakadoug9 My Erem cutters have been cutting magnetic component leads for more than 30 years with no noticeable diminishing of function. Components with pure copper leads are few and far between. I'd rather spend a few $ on sharpening my cutters every 60 years or so than try to source all my components with copper leads. As far as I can recall they've been magnetized since day 1. It doesn't really bother me.
@@uni-byte How well the steel alloy cutters hold up depends a lot on the blade style. The "semi-flush" types are generally a lot more robust than the fine, full-flush cutters. I've seen Erem cutters completely destroyed by a single cut of something too hard for them. It was a pair I'd purchased for a place where I was consulting. Some bozo used them to cut who-knows-what and put a horrible nick in the blades. Somebody else tried to sharpen them and rendered them useless for anything. They were one of the fine-wire full-flush styles. You will never escape iron alloy leads. Lots of resistors, especially cheap ones and some good quality moderate power types have steel leads (to reduce heat conduction to the PCB, which decrases power handling but protects the board from scorching). Alloy 42 and Kovar are both iron alloys. Fortunately most of the iron alloys used for leads are relatively soft. I"ve seen remarkably hard leads on some polystyrene capacitors from years gone by. I reserve my assortment of Erem cutters for fine work. I have a pair of Erem cutting forceps that are really nice for certain things. One thing I'd like to procure, though I actually do almost no electronics anymore, is a pair of shear type cable cutters with well-hardened jaws. Shears like that are vastly better than diagonal cutters even for small cables or large single wires but I've yet to find any that aren't damaged by cutting coaxial cable with copper-clad steel centre conductor. (Cutters made for trimming dog toenails work great on copper wire and hold up fairly well - you get a nice, clean, square cut.)
@@d614gakadoug9 You probably know a lot more about these than I do. All I can tell you is the 4 Erems I have are the 776E model. I got them slightly used from a guy that was trying to run a jewelry school but had failed. I paid less than the price of one for 5 of them and sold one for half of that. Every now and then I need to clean them, sometimes to the extent I need to dismantle them, but none of them have any nicks in the jaws or any gaps at all and they all cut with a decisive "snap". I only use them on component leads and small gauge copper wire. I have less expensive and less precise tools I use for inevitable minor abuse. No these though.
I bought one of these recently that's based on the XR2206 chip. It doesn't have cool adjustments for tweaking the sine wave, though, and the sine wave output looks pretty sketchy. I think I might have to get one of these kits (and swap out the TL082 with one from Digikey).
I did one of those last month from Amazon, cost more, I had some gift card credits to use up. I think the op amp is a fake. It seemed to work better when I replaced it with an old one I had in stock. The generator chip has little hf glitches at high frequencies. The amp and buffer seem to be mostly useless.
I played with an ICL8038 a couple of years ago - very disappointed. I found if you managed to get a 'reasonable' wave shape it was quickly buggered when you changed the frequency. I have found the XR2206 much more agreeable. Still if your just starting out either will be ok as a basic signal generator considering the price. I think your best to use batteries, they don't pull a lot of current and you are starting with clean power, not all the noise from a switch mode power supply.
Switchers are generally a terrible choice for analog instruments unless you go to the trouble of adding additional filtering. I've used small DC-DC modules (e.g. 12-24 volts in, ±15 V out, or the like) in analog instruments, but with added LC filtering. You have to be careful and read the datasheets closely since some of them won't tolerate much added capacitance. Lots of the datasheets will provide guidance on added filtering. I've also used a capacitive charge pump inverter like the 7660 in a very sensitive instrument, but again used additional filtering. This is NOT stuff for the beginning hobbyist, though. Batteries are a good hedge against making difficult problems for yourself. I'm really surprised the ancient 8038 is still being made. It's and interesting part but hardly an industrial jellybean. Same goes for the XR2206. One of the things you have to be careful with in devices that use RC oscillators is choosing the right capacitor type. Though most of these relatively crude circuits like the parts mentioned aren't greatly degraded, you want to avoid caps with high dielectric absorption. Once you get into capacitances large enough that COG ceramics are out, polypropylene is the best readily-available, affordable dielectric. Polyester is rather dismal. Most ceramics are awful. Lots of the newer high C•V-product types have horrendous voltage coefficient of capacitance which can bend what should be a nice triangle wave badly out of shape. It rather looks to me like ceramic caps are being used in the kit in the video.
@@d614gakadoug9 With an XR IC I used an old air Tuning Capacitor and got the output to just over 3MHz. Granted it wasn't 'Crystal Stable', but wasn't too bad. This was an IC from good old Uncle AliExp. The duty was hovering between 50%-54%. OK so no good for a satellite or guidance systems - but I was pleased. Lets face it, you can't expect to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear ...
I have a big Lazy Susan on my bench to rotate heavy equipment I'm working on, but now I have to get trays to work on so I can stop losing SMT resistors and caps. One of the reasons I watch your channel is for all of the good ideas. Thanks.
It's a lot better than the three knob version I bought 4 years ago. LOL.
Squeak !.....RIP Calculon
@@andymouse 🧀RIP Calculon
Pretty nice kit! A bit of distortion but still good enough for testing audio circuits. Cool tape trick too.
Also, lacing cord and some vacuum tube spotted.
vacuum tubes in a future video. here is a video on lacing: ruclips.net/video/EN8dDR4ipBU/видео.htmlsi=gQry_7HiIjztrZFx
@@IMSAIGuy awww yeah! I do it NASA style.
Fascinating, it's always good to see you show us the fake parts but I would love to know what that THD number was with a straight swap to the known good device !....cheers.
just twisting a knob, really does the job!
What happens to the shape of the waveform with a better OP-amp?
I was hoping to see that also.
The ICL8038 sine wave just isn't particularly good. The sine wave is derived from the triangle by piecewise approximation. The result isn't horrible but it isn't a good as can be had from something like an LC oscillator.
I have some of those Erem cutters and they are all magnetized. I think they do it on purpose.
Tools will become magnetized just sitting in Earth's magnetic field.
I have a bulk magnetic tape eraser that works well for demagnetizing tools, though it is a bit of a challenge sometimes because it is so powerful.
One thing magnetized Erem cutters will tell you is that you are cutting leads that are probably harder than is good for the cutters unless you have the ones with tungsten carbide inserts in the blades.
@@d614gakadoug9 My Erem cutters have been cutting magnetic component leads for more than 30 years with no noticeable diminishing of function. Components with pure copper leads are few and far between. I'd rather spend a few $ on sharpening my cutters every 60 years or so than try to source all my components with copper leads. As far as I can recall they've been magnetized since day 1. It doesn't really bother me.
@@uni-byte
How well the steel alloy cutters hold up depends a lot on the blade style. The "semi-flush" types are generally a lot more robust than the fine, full-flush cutters.
I've seen Erem cutters completely destroyed by a single cut of something too hard for them. It was a pair I'd purchased for a place where I was consulting. Some bozo used them to cut who-knows-what and put a horrible nick in the blades. Somebody else tried to sharpen them and rendered them useless for anything. They were one of the fine-wire full-flush styles.
You will never escape iron alloy leads. Lots of resistors, especially cheap ones and some good quality moderate power types have steel leads (to reduce heat conduction to the PCB, which decrases power handling but protects the board from scorching). Alloy 42 and Kovar are both iron alloys. Fortunately most of the iron alloys used for leads are relatively soft. I"ve seen remarkably hard leads on some polystyrene capacitors from years gone by.
I reserve my assortment of Erem cutters for fine work. I have a pair of Erem cutting forceps that are really nice for certain things.
One thing I'd like to procure, though I actually do almost no electronics anymore, is a pair of shear type cable cutters with well-hardened jaws. Shears like that are vastly better than diagonal cutters even for small cables or large single wires but I've yet to find any that aren't damaged by cutting coaxial cable with copper-clad steel centre conductor. (Cutters made for trimming dog toenails work great on copper wire and hold up fairly well - you get a nice, clean, square cut.)
@@d614gakadoug9 You probably know a lot more about these than I do. All I can tell you is the 4 Erems I have are the 776E model. I got them slightly used from a guy that was trying to run a jewelry school but had failed. I paid less than the price of one for 5 of them and sold one for half of that. Every now and then I need to clean them, sometimes to the extent I need to dismantle them, but none of them have any nicks in the jaws or any gaps at all and they all cut with a decisive "snap". I only use them on component leads and small gauge copper wire. I have less expensive and less precise tools I use for inevitable minor abuse. No these though.
I bought one of these recently that's based on the XR2206 chip. It doesn't have cool adjustments for tweaking the sine wave, though, and the sine wave output looks pretty sketchy. I think I might have to get one of these kits (and swap out the TL082 with one from Digikey).
I did one of those last month from Amazon, cost more, I had some gift card credits to use up. I think the op amp is a fake. It seemed to work better when I replaced it with an old one I had in stock. The generator chip has little hf glitches at high frequencies. The amp and buffer seem to be mostly useless.
The glitches were known to occur, even with OEM 8038 chips. XR2206 OEMs, too. The clones of both have the original problems, plus more.
I came across the 7660 chip the other day and thought it would make a good "chip of the day". Everybody loves "chip of the day" 😂
similar: ruclips.net/video/ixj6ULP61dY/видео.htmlsi=i-v1M6n-O3va3lvg
I soak my acrylic panels in warm water. It makes them come off easier
I wonder how much THD the good opamp would improve. ,🤔
Is that the case assembled with no opamp? 🤣 Would be interested what THD it can get with a real TL0X2
oops just wrote the same thing I didn't see yours !
@@andymouseme too.
Wonder if warming the protective stuff would make the adhesive release?
Put a dab of hot glue and a paper clip on a corner of the protective film on the acrylic panels. Let cool, peel off by holding paper clip
your stuff is amazing Sir sometimes because ................
I played with an ICL8038 a couple of years ago - very disappointed. I found if you managed to get a 'reasonable' wave shape it was quickly buggered when you changed the frequency. I have found the XR2206 much more agreeable. Still if your just starting out either will be ok as a basic signal generator considering the price. I think your best to use batteries, they don't pull a lot of current and you are starting with clean power, not all the noise from a switch mode power supply.
Switchers are generally a terrible choice for analog instruments unless you go to the trouble of adding additional filtering. I've used small DC-DC modules (e.g. 12-24 volts in, ±15 V out, or the like) in analog instruments, but with added LC filtering. You have to be careful and read the datasheets closely since some of them won't tolerate much added capacitance. Lots of the datasheets will provide guidance on added filtering.
I've also used a capacitive charge pump inverter like the 7660 in a very sensitive instrument, but again used additional filtering.
This is NOT stuff for the beginning hobbyist, though. Batteries are a good hedge against making difficult problems for yourself.
I'm really surprised the ancient 8038 is still being made. It's and interesting part but hardly an industrial jellybean. Same goes for the XR2206.
One of the things you have to be careful with in devices that use RC oscillators is choosing the right capacitor type. Though most of these relatively crude circuits like the parts mentioned aren't greatly degraded, you want to avoid caps with high dielectric absorption. Once you get into capacitances large enough that COG ceramics are out, polypropylene is the best readily-available, affordable dielectric. Polyester is rather dismal. Most ceramics are awful. Lots of the newer high C•V-product types have horrendous voltage coefficient of capacitance which can bend what should be a nice triangle wave badly out of shape. It rather looks to me like ceramic caps are being used in the kit in the video.
@@d614gakadoug9 With an XR IC I used an old air Tuning Capacitor and got the output to just over 3MHz. Granted it wasn't 'Crystal Stable', but wasn't too bad. This was an IC from good old Uncle AliExp. The duty was hovering between 50%-54%. OK so no good for a satellite or guidance systems - but I was pleased. Lets face it, you can't expect to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear ...
*2. Hello! Very nice, thanks a lot!
An update on the "good " OpAmp, Pleeeez.....
No story? Psha.....
Right, I was thinking at the start, we're going to get a story. Love the kit builds, with or without.