LIVE: Sick cats, vet bills, new meter software, decoding XZZPCB files, and repairs
136It's been a busy time. The last 7 days have been quite harrowing as we had one of our rescue girls come down with a mystery illness, after 3 days of not eating she was off to the clinic first thing on Monday and the diagnosis was not great based on the clinical symptoms... not eating, vomiting, pain, bloodworks off, ultrasound showing enlarged lymph nodes and xray showing a large mass - most of you can take an assumption on what the vet invormed us was ahead.
Skip ahead today and Maple is back home with us after a full surgical open abdominal examination, amazingly the large mass was... fat and everything else looked good, bloodwork normalising, eating again, now we have to wait to see what the outcome is from the biopsy results; trying hard not to forget that those results could still bring the bad news. Best case scenario, we've spent $2,500 on a medical mystery, and we'll be fine with that.
A new multimeter software package has been opened to the public, this time for the B&K 594x series of meters;
https://github.com/inflex/bk5490c-osd
Nice thing is that anyone wanting to adapt to their own SCPI based meter should be able to do so; this also includes serial port auto detection and .cfg file parsing/reading for settings
Next up, XZZ's pcb file format looms in front of me; while I've decoded the outline, the network names, and even the network data (diode/volts etc), the pad/part data itself remains an odd mystery. I need to get myself a licence of the XZZ software but frustratingly it requires either google or facebook auth, or your phone number :(
Finally, for the purpose of this live stream, I'll be fixing up an iPad (or two) and trying to fix a Lenovo Slim 3 with no power.