WWSD? (What Would Spock Do?)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A recent batch of winch controller boards had an annoying problem. Under heavy load, the maximum speed of the winch was reduced because of induced interference in the shutdown control line on the circuit board. We have several hundred boards assembled. and there were limited options to fixing the problem. A re-design is really the right way to go, but we aren’t about to scrap that many brand-new boards for what is mostly a “cosmetic” issue (the affected boards were around 5% slower than good boards). After trying to damp the interference with a added capacitor (with little luck), I had the idea to reverse the motor cables. This immediately solved the problem, and only required changing the firmware to change UP to DOWN, and re-labeling the board. The board is not symmetrical, so the induced interference is much worse in the old UP direction, when the motor is under the most load.

Thanks, Spock.

2

That is awesome. Around 2016 I was converting from an older “get charged a premium for Maintenance” AS400 mid-range computer to a State of the Art iSeries (the successor to the AS400). The new iSeries does not support the old TwinAx standard that we were still using for 2 terminals and 2 expensive line printers. The terminals were easy to dump but the printers were a big expense and instead I found a little BlackBox that did the IP to Twinax for the printers. Problem is one didn’t work.

I ended up on tech support and it came down to for the one printer, I had to change the DIP switches to “Reverse the Polarity”. I felt like Scotty I did. It was awesome for this old Trekkie.

3

Someone on this board (I can’t remember who) once mentioned that they had reversed the polarity on their desk lamp by plugging it in backwards, and now it produces antiphotons.

4

When I was a budding Electron, I had an ancient desk lamp I had rescued from the someone’s trash. I learned all about plug polarity when I tossed the ground lead from my Heathkit VTVM

across my desk and it landed on the base of the lamp and exploded in a shower of spartks.

5

An appropriate typo alluding to the patron saint of reversed polarity. Also, a spartk probably includes both sparks and molten metal spatter.

Which are really the same thing, just a matter of scale. But the word makes a nice portmanteau.

6

“I am Spartks!”

7

No, I’m Spartks!

8

I want to pronounce the singular form like SPART-key or SPART-kay. But @Chronos with

is pure genius.

9

When the Internet is nothing but Chatgpts talking to each other, people will reminisce about how a simple typo could cause such joy, in the good old days…

10

Indeed. Fascinating.

11

I love this board.

12

Me too! Even threads like this that aren’t entirely in English. :slightly_smiling_face:

13

Don’t worry, they’ll do it, too:

14

Wow, were they young!

15

One of my favorites minor lines in all of Star Trek is “Geordie, I cannot stun my cat.”

(Cat Troubles - YouTube)

Nicely done OP!