Alex_rcpilot

Damn I also thought about getting myself a set of those to mount my triple 22"s on. Personally I don't have lots of choices except for DXRACER and a stand made by a local company. The rest of them are just too small to for anything larger than 19". I think DXRACER looks good, and probably works well, but I heard the plastic cover may not fit well all the time. I can live without the covers though. Problem is I don't have $340 to get one for now. Always a pleasure to share some pics:

Yup, I was also testing some LED's with various acrylic diffusion concepts. But I haven't got a whole lot of time with that for now. Got more important things to do. I'll share some results once I come up with anything.

I'm quite curious about how the mil spec backlighting components look like. And if you plan on improvising, it'd be really nice to make its brightness adjustable. EL sheets are easy to tailor and install, but AFAIK you can't dim them. LED's are easy to control with PWM regulated current drivers, but diffusion sheets are too complex. Maybe there's some other way.:music_whistling:

I like the CMSP panel. Do the symbols light up when an EL sheet is put on the back?

Thanks for the timely correction Succellus, I like the way this thread has developed. Hope it helps more people live a safer life.

AFAIK, there're improvised approaches. You may check AC voltage across PE and Live, if you're not sure which one is live, try twice with both. If you ever get the reading close to nominal supply voltage, it may suggest you have a working PE. If you still suspect the PE can't carry enough current, you may connect a light bulb or something else across L and PE, instead of across L and N, if the RCD in your house trips, then it's at least capable of protecting you.

Oh, no problem. Since my pals and I all live in urban areas, we're not familiar with SWER mains supply. Actually I wasn't aware of its existance until you've mentioned it.

Yeah but that was until the word "plug n' play" came to be. And BTW, in this case even if you had turned off everything before hooking up the gear, you could still endup with a spectacular puff of smoke. :D

Sorry I didn't quite follow you if this's not the first time you've asked. Are you talking about the way mains power supply equipment is set up in this guys room, or are you not sure what the phrase means?

Well true story here is unscrupulous real estate developers sometimes choose to ignore grounding reqirements, they falsify paperwork and bribe officials to cheat the acceptance procedure. When they get away with it, people will end up living in a building where the PE hole in their wall sockets are nothing more than a decoration. And even if the building fully qualified all the standards required right after construction, the grounding could still fail over time due to numerous causes. Theift for example poses a major threat in rural areas where public utilities are poorly inspected and faulty equipment are often left alone. Corrosion and geo-environmental changes may also cause the protective grounding resistance to degradate (increase). Under such circumstances it's the property company's responsibility to replace the grounding conductor or lower the soil resistance by injecting some chemicals deep into the earth to improve grounding resistance (decrease).

oh, well, I can't rule that out. Pity he hasn't got a multimeter, otherwise I could ask him to check a couple of times the AC current amplitude between his case and the metal pedestal. Can't always be someone around welding or using a motorized tool.

No, even if he had a welding machine, he would have known not to use it indoors so close to a computer. Most houses here have simple paved floor and metal parts with large surface area sitting on the floor are easily grounded. They aren't as conductive as PE but should be enough to cause some problems.

I can't deny any part of that, but I can't resist the temptation from these new toys either. Currently I'm flying with my 7 year old X52. Still saving money to buy a hog.:music_whistling:

Not quite sure which type of cable he used, but he's definitely going to figure it out. And yes, apply insulation wherever it is possible. Personally, I allways keep my products' cases insulated from internal GND if earth protection (PE) is not DIRECTLY accessible.

Nope, not so much going on according to him. It's not a garrage like most of you guys may have. BTW, I just tried floating the GND of my own rig, and then I measured 122V between the chassis and the PE hole. Guess it's enough to do some damage even not directly correlated.

Yes, GND is the local 0V reference. And yes, I've occasionally made confusions. Given the massive terminology, it only takes a tiny negligent to totally mislead people on such topics. Perhaps we shall can the earth ground "PE". A good power supply with Y capacitors inside would only leak less than 0.7mA to PE. Distributed capacitance between primary windings and secondary windings in the PSU's high frequency transformers might add a slight amount of current to it. This current is within the permitted range of an RCD. This current also prevents the voltage on the PE from rising, because as I said before, the leakage has very high impedance. I'm a little confused at exactly how much extra current it took to blow that fuse. If it went over 30mA, then this computer would constantly trip an RCD if it was properly earth-grounded. Otherwise, the margin left on the fuse for overload redundancy was indeed very small. Maybe the fuse was rated under 500mA, and maybe as the crew made contact with the pedestal, the discharge of this energy created EMI which messed with the chip inside the hog and shorted its internal MOSFET's, and then, excessive current from 5V supply of the USB finished the job.

The earlier incident was him blowing the fuse while mounting the screw. I guess you might got confused because some of my words, like "ground", or "Net". Ground or symbolled as "GND" for short is a term used by electronic engineers to define a local reference point. If you talk about a ground and a 5V supply, it means the voltage is relative to this GND point. But the ground itself may have nothing to do with the earth. Net as we call it actually is a member of a netlist which represents the connectivity of a circuit. It means an element which takes part in a circuit. In this case, the black wire in the USB cable is an object in a netlist, and it is connected to the GND net. Other objects which are on the same net include: all component pins connected to GND on every circuit board in the PC, the casing of PSU, the computer chassis, the 3rd pin in the PSU's power socket. So B and [1] are possible to happen at the same time. Actually, it's because of B, that [1] can happen. These parts together make up a huge equipotential body which floats when not earth-grounded. The weak coupling inside of the PSU plus the Y capacitor keeps charging this equipotential body to electrify it, and makes it worse than floating. I think the black GND wire in the USB cable was also carrying leaked current when this type of shorting happend, but there was only one fuse on the PCB and the portion of leaking current through the fuse was enough to blow it. After the fuse was gone, the leakage continued through the black GND wire. :)

Exactly. I was discussing the same thing with Dozer yesterday. It's not TM's responsibility to also take care of the grounding of the PSU. They'd assume that the computer was perfectly grounded, and devise the best solution for that. While the fact is otherwise. Not 100% residents are equiped with perfectly grounded wall sockets. And people happen to live in places like that. Legals is another story. In such rooms, even with a qualified power cable and PSU, the PC's potential could still end up floating around. Under those circumstances, it's kinda difficult to fix the grounding problem, then people would need work arounds and of course, precaution. For other dudes, just to clarify some worries: It doesn't take much energy to fry a component if it was a fuse already loaded with operating current. Designers add reasonalbe redundancy while picking a fuse for their devices. If the fuse was rated at 500mA and the device works on 420, an extra 100mA diverted through the case to the earth ground is enough to blow the fuse. The potential difference is caused by electro-magnetic field emited by the fast switching components and absorbed by the case of the PSU. This creates a coupling of electric energy and makes the case equivalent to a 100V+ AC power source against human. Fortunately because this weak coupling adds significant internal impedance to this exposed power source, it allows the voltage to drop below 36V when a grounded human touches the case. Although there's still current flowing through the human body, it's well within the safe current range of 30mA. In most ocassions it's below 5mA. But there's no doubt you gotta try your best to ground this sucker. Coz if the PSU happens to be an exception, there're still chances for someone to get electricuted. The PSU posed no harm to my team mate, but it fried his hog, why? Because the human body has greater resistance than the steel support and metal screw. Although it's capable of carrying enough current to reduce the voltage on the case, it's not capable of generating the current overload to blow the fuse. So there's no need to worry too much about your computer if you understand the physics behind this whole thing. Alright boys, fly safe, and fly happy.

We've just had a Warthog stick (right hand) resurrected from an earlier incident. The fellow guy discribed what had happend as "a little puff of white smoke" before the device went dead. From the picture of the circuit board which he took after disassembling the unit, a charred component could be seen sitting next to the VBUS pad of the USB cord. It could be a 500mA fuse or a filtering inductor which was destoried by overcurrent. As he recalled later, he was mounting the unit to a steel support on the ground when this happend. The smoke was seen right after he tried tightening the first screw. With this piece of clue, the cause of the problem became apparent: A. The PSU of his computer wasn't perfectly grounded, and there's potential difference between the power system of the PC and the earth; B. Inside the HOTAS Warthog, the GND net could be connected directly to the metal case for better EMC performance or whatever; C. The steel support on which the stick was mounted happend to be grouned to the earth; D. A circuit formed along the USB Cable, HOTAS, Screw, steel support and the earth, fuelled by the computer's PSU, whose energy eventually breached the weakest spot. After replacing the damaged component with an inductor, the unit came back to life. Since poor grounding and even strong statics is very common among ordinary computer PSU's, here are some precautions to prevent similar things from happening to your sticks: For the sake of every device connected to your computer, not just the stick, properly ground your PSU if possible; Don't use conductive material to mount the stick unless you have to; If metal has to be used, break the circuit by inserting insulation between mounting structures; The stick's metal surface IS the ground wire of your computer, it's an exposed part of a circuit. So prevent any contact from nearby conductors or electric static carriers. Carpet users might have already felt the pain.

Yup, they provide you with an SDK and some tutorials and expect you to have some knowledge with programming to figure out the rest.

卧嘞个擦，介也忒给力了点儿~~ Dude, whatever you put INSIDE the thread, don't mess with the title unless you wanna risk having your masterpiece moved to the chit-chat section. Anyway, I find most of this thread hilarious except for the title. You don't see that a lot in here. lol

That looks really great rocketeer. Caps look beautiful.

No problem, it was probably a mix-up with DPRK, coz I've seen that on Discovery channel.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. There's no law against foreigners travelling to rural regions. You can pick a remove village on the map and hit there any time you want. Even tourism itself is a financial approach of supporting regional economy. There are entire villages built to help attract tourists, but they're not built just to make a point to strangers, people do live there, and they live on what's around them. Transportation in general is sufficiently if not well developed, hotels can be found everywhere, which is convenient for visitor. The actual problem with visiting China is the language, even we ourselves could have problems with different dialects. Visitors tend to pick "hot spots" coz most of them may easily get lost elsewhere without a guide. :) As for the "less imaginative" part, I can't agree more on that. Can't veer off the topic too much, forgive me. BTW, I'm not surprised to find a fellow 3GO member here. Whatup! 443, lol

A section starting from #183 of Rocketeer's thread might be helpful for you. Personally I've opted to use two ordinary push buttons and build a rocker cap on top of them with resin.