mediocre x-rays

At least you see the rewing between the balls.

Thanks for the pictures.

I really want a better xray, or someone that I can send things to, to be xrayed.

One outfit will do 3D xrays for us, at about $2000 per shot.

Those shots aren't bad at all. The 7020 looks just like the ones here.

Do you know what the voltage and exposure time were? There might be room for some tweaking -- maybe a better sensor, or a way to position the subject closer to the tube (or to move the sensor farther away from the subject) to get some magnification.

LOL. It'd be cheaper to bring a box of donuts to the radiology department!

If I thought people would pay $2K/shot for 3D CAT scans of PC boards, I'd grab a screwdriver and look around for some stepper motors. Of course, the usual compromise would apply. Throughput, quality, or cost, pick any two^h^h^hone.

-- john, KE5FX

The machine is a giant parts counter.

We did find that we get best resolution if we space the parts about 6" above the bottom of the sample drawer. I think my guys tweaked the available settings for me.

Inventory control gets tricky when we pull reels from stock, use them on the p+p, and return them to stock. We count them on the reels, which helps.

So this thing counts multiple reels at once (up to four according to the brochure?) How does that work -- you can't stack them vertically, can you?

I just spent $300 at Mini-Circuits that I didn't need to spend. Ordered a bunch of GVA-123+, which I already had in a drawer, and a bunch of AVA-183A+ when I had AVA-24A+s on hand as well. It's a shame nobody sells a machine that prevents dumbassery like that. (Yes, I know, it's called a "computer"...)

-- john

I think we do them one at a time.

The SOT89 MMICS are great.

We have a stock number and a bin for each part in stock, and a material control system that I coded in PowerBasic. That works fairly well. Nowadays, most parts are on reels.

I'm not allowed to take parts out of stock (well, not during regular working hours) because engineers can mess up the leaders on reels. We have to email a request for parts to the experts, and that can slow us down. So we have a parallel stock upstairs, sample kits and Amazon stuff. I keep my parts stash in coin envelopes and Danish Butter Cookie cans.

If you want better resolution take it to your dentist.

Dental X-rays are better than nothing (see the photo near the middle of the page at

-- john, KE5FX

Thats a mm focalspot size x-ray tube, I'm guessing. You'd need a micro focus x-ray tube (um) to get sharp images. But thats added cost since it's gas charged with CF6. and probably has a better imaging panel.

But your just counting stuff so it's a moot point.

These are beautiful images:

Cheers

I assume you mean SF6. However, why would being microfocal need SF6 anyway? I'm sure the microfocal set I used years ago didn't have any SF6 in it. (It operated between 30kV and maybe 60kV.)

John

Pressurised sulphur hexafluoride is an excellent insulator, and allows you to stand off 60kV over a relatively narrow gap. It might help you get your very compact x-ray source closer to the object you wanted to image.

A friend of mine advised me to stay clear of the pulver that develops where SF6 meets discharges. He wrote his doctor thesis about discharges in gas.. Fun fact is he lost his ham radio station when a thunderbolt hit his front porch. :-)

Maybe 35 years ago, a customer of mine (an institute for destructionless material testing) needed some photomicrographs of soldered boards and could use the facilities of a sister institute that had an ultrasonics microscope. That used water as a coupling medium, the pics were breathtaking.

I was not directly involved into that operation; the sister institute was in Berlin, my home town at that time, and I was the taxi to both the institute and the pub. ;-) The customer's boss did oversee my diploma thesis even much earlier.

Gerhard

Or maybe a low-res imager. The working area is huge.

Nice.

I did find a Xilinx appnote that mentions on-die bypass caps.

Metal fluorides of any sort are bad news. When I was a graduate student in chemistry we had a well-ventilated fluorine laboratory up on the roof. The people who worked in it never looked all that healthy.

A little bit of sodium fluoride in the water supply leaves enough calcium fluoride in the enamel on your teeth to poison cavity forming bugs, but too much leaves you with mottled (If caries-free) teeth.

It's been controversial since I was a kid.

Not much of a controversy. That web page simply points out that toothpaste is also fluoridated and that it is possible to get too much fluoride. It presents NO evidence of any country creating problems by fluoridating the water. None.

Fluoridation is controversial in the same way the moon landing is controversial. There will always be some who question things.

Am 30.12.20 um 03:51 schrieb Gerhard Hoffmann:

pulver == powder, but then there is "to pulverize". Weird.

cheers, Gerhard

Nobody puts moon landings in your tap water. Anti-vaxxers tend to be anti-fluroidation too - if you are too dumb to understand what's actually going on, you can imagine and believe all kinds of nonsense.