The Birth of a Lab

[trent1098s]

Haha man that’s a heck of a picture. I love that last one. Great looking bikes. I’d give an eye tooth for that old Ducati.

Here’s my Ducati spanking me.

About the time the front brake rotor was grinding off my helmet in the last pic I was yelling “DAMNIT GET THE HELL OFF OF ME!” and with a big shove, I pushed her off. Rode the crash truck back and started drinking.

It was just a simple low side in turn 6b of BHF, tried to get a little too fast of a run starting in to the back stretch and tucked the front.

That impact broke a short rib and I was peeing blood for a couple days, but I was still back out on the track the next morning! In fact the picture of the GSXR above, was from the very next morning.

I cobbled that backup bike back together after the crash. You can see it here with warmers on in between runs, I’m taking a breather on the ground on the right between practice sessions, surrounded by bits of that ducati.

I got pretty good at fiberglass repair.

The one thing I never can convey to folks properly is the friendships you build in that scene last a lifetime. They’re tight bonds you form with folks. I still talk to old riding buddies daily, online, and follow their progress. A couple I used to race around with on the amateur circuits have gone pro at this point. Good bunch of guys and gals.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. Injuries and all. It helped form me in to who I am today. Stare death in the face, laugh, and pin the throttle. Taught me to manage my fear of things. To conquer it.

Wouldn’t change one single thing.

[devhammer]

I never raced, and was fortunate enough to never lay my bike down at speed, but I have an inkling from my riding days of the appeal…and community is always a powerful thing, particularly one formed in the presence of risk and danger.

Glad you made it through all that, and can still look back without regrets.

[trent1098s]

Lower cabinets built and painted, hardware on, backsplash built and laminate cut & placed, carpet trimmed

Got some heavy boxes of tile keeping the big piece in place over the weekend until the glue cures. It was raining yesterday and the contact adhesive was being somewhat less than cooperative.

New desk is (mostly) here, 2 of 3 pieces showed up yesterday afternoon. Power distribution unit for the shorter bench section is in. Using an old PDU for the longer bench.

[Terrence]

@trent1098s

…while folks wait for me to notice that they’re out there.

…I already have plans for the bullet proof glass.

Match made in heaven. Put the bpg in your office for those who take notice of your “bank president” timing on noticing them.

[Mr_John_Smith]

For a split second reading through, I though I was on a totally different forum.

[trent1098s]

Got the bench trimmed out finally. PITA to get the topmost trim, trimmed, under those cabinets. So wish I would have tackled it a different way.

There SHOULD be a desk here, by now, but it showed up via FedEx Ground in MUCH smaller pieces than I was anticipating.

Last picture of the clean vault wall…

Because… racking.

[trent1098s]

So divided the workspace up in to breadboarding & troubleshooting side;

And then production on the other;

Got all (ok, well, MOST) of the components put away today.

The laminate I chose works really well. I can easily pick out tiny components I drop on it. EVERYTHING stands out on it.

Waiting on monitors for the bench (will have a microcontroller flashing / programming station on the longer side, as well as a testing station for QA). Got the mounts but no monitors.

Also still waiting on a desk and a new CAD workstation. Retiring my 5 year old 6 monitor rig. Going to do 3x 4K screens on the new one. Will use my 6 monitor rig still in another office, for doing cluster and server maintenance work.

[trent1098s]

Finally got monitors mounted over the bench.

And most of the desk assembled. Got a pair of 40" 4k displays for the new CAD rig I’m building.

Bench saw a little assembly work this week, too. Backplane prototypes assembled, waiting on me to populate some compute modules and other modules next week.

[Duke_Nukem]

What fun. Reminded me of when we got an old heritage building for one of our software companies and there was a vault on every floor and a skylight that went down 3 of the 6 floors. After the renovations were complete we moved in and apparently no one mentioned a drain that was never to be block and so a cleaning staff put a mop in there and I guess it was the roof drain or something so we flooded the night after we moved in. We had the vaults turned into server rooms, cost some bucks to get holes drilled into the vaults for power, networks and air conditioning but really what else would you put in a vault (operations guys loved being able to lock out developers from the production vaults). I miss that old building as it was a great place so I’m a tad envious of your setup.

[trent1098s]

Thank you.

I’m hoping we get no “great surprises” after the renovations, like you encountered. I was involved every step of the way and made every decision on floor plan, etc. I also did all of the electrical re-wiring, and a good amount of work framing, carpeting, doing ceiling tiles, HVAC, bench building, etc.

So if something goes horribly wrong, I can only blame myself.

Along the way we only had one bad accident, when I got electrocuted.

(Yes, you read that right).

When the building was wired in the 70’s, the electricians of the age took certain liberties with regards to how they routed 120v hot legs and neutral legs. There are only about 1 common (neutral, white) lines for every 2 hot legs. Part of my rewiring involved bringing 4" junction boxes scattered about the building in to modern code, with regards to conductor fill factor. They had boxes so overstuffed you couldn’t get the panels on them. Most splice boxes were hanging open with a spaghetti mess of wiring.

So I ran hundreds of feet of new conduit, and started rearranging circuits to fit the new floor plan, and everything I touched along the way was brought up to modern NEC code.

One “trunk” I was working on consisted of 9 separate circuits, 4 switched return legs, and had 2 commons in it. The box was so overstuffed I couldn’t even get to everything. And, it happened to be 18 feet off of the floor at the very underside of the roof, over a main HVAC trunk; so I could hardly reach it.

To get there I was standing on the very top of a 10’ ladder, with my right arm slung over a metal roof girder, and my left arm stretched out as far as it could go. I was pulling decommissioned circuits out of the box; every hot leg tested dead, no circuits active, all the breakers for those identified circuits were off.

Well, those commons bit me. My left hand was twisting back together a group of commons. It turns out that in a completely different conduit, elsewhere, the rear stairwell lights were ran without a common; they used one of the two lonely commons which 9 other circuits were using, and came “back” through this junction box. So I’m twisting a bundle of white wires back together when the whole mess of them arcs.

At some point between testing that box that everything was dead, and the time I worked on it (keep in mind every circuit had already been identified), someone tried switching on the rear stairwell lights to paint (they didn’t come on; I had the commons torn apart). Testing again (I always test before touching something) before I twisted the wires revealed nothing because the circuit was incomplete, right up until I gave that common leg a path to ground when I grabbed it…

I lock up. My left hand had slipped forward off the insulated handles and my bare index finger and thumb were touching the metal jaws; my right hand was gripping a roof girder, and my right armpit was over an HVAC steel bracket wired to the building superstructure. I was grounded 100% across from one hand to the other, and was shocked right across my chest.

I started losing my balance, and the fall broke the connection. Only thing that saved my life was falling.

Except my right armpit was hung over the HVAC so I dangled there for a minute until I got control of my body again, and got my feet back under me on the ladder.

Well, we isolate what the damn circuit was that returned along that common path, and killed it. I got back up and finished tidying up that box.

Come down.

Not feeling so well.

So I get an employee to take me over to the ER.

They did an EKG, and a bunch of other tests. I’d depolarized half of my heart - I had an incomplete right bundle branch block show up on the EKG. The left side of my heart had begun triggering the right side to beat, after I’d depolarized the right side from the electrocution event…

48 hours later I was back to normal.

But, this remains a good teachable moment to other aspiring circuit designers and electrical dudes. Always be careful.

I should have been wearing my insulated antishock gloves when doing the job; but had taken them off on that one ascent, because the handholds were precarious.

[Terrence]

Well thank God you made it out of that one. In the interest of an interesting story…that chapter maintains the high level.

[trent1098s]

Thanks Terrence. I was very happy to be “OK” during that.

The followup cardiac appointment with the doc uncovered another previously hidden heart issue (valve problems) which may have led to an early end if not diagnosed early. I’m being closely tested and monitored for issues right now while they decide how to go about addressing them.

So getting electrocuted very well might have saved my life. The jury is still out, but depending on the results of the echo and other tests the doc is doing, I might be able to look back at that accident and say “damn, I got really lucky.”

Odd luck like that runs in my family.

My mother took a header down the stairs at her house about a decade ago, and they ordered up a CT scan of her head just to make sure she was OK. They found a golf ball sized tumor in her brain, which they removed a month later.

Sometimes accidents are just clouds with silver linings…

[Terrence]

As long as you keep finding silver linings, life is good.

[Brett]

I had a not too dissimilar electrocution story, but coming from Aus means its 240v, but it was much less severe than yours (and in no way my fault - just exacerbated by my stupid troubleshooting nature - not that I’m saying yours was your fault either!)

My mother moved into a new house in May last year. It was newly built, and when she moved in there were a few niggly little things, as there always is. I’m part of the crew helping move her in and unpack and everything. My nephew (who is 8) comes in all concerned and says he got a shock from the garage door. OK, that’s significant enough to look at. We all go and have a look, there’s no obvious issue we can see, it didn’t seem that he got a big zap, both me and my brother-in-law had touched the door several times with not even a tingle so we think it’s possibly just static electricity (it is winter, pretty dry, and my nephew was riding his scooter in the garage, so it’s not too far a reach). Then, some bright spark says oh maybe it’s shorting to ground and puts the back of one hand on the garage door and the back of his other on the internal side of the electricity meter box, and gets flung back and hits the ground on his back. Once I pick myself up off the ground we all agree there’s a significant wiring issue and call the builder and he gets his sparky over. Turns out that the installers who put the roller door up screwed through an active wire. In hindsight, should have had one of those proximity testers and may have seen that it was live, and it also explains why at least one circuit was tripped when she first moved in.

This was ¬3 hours away from my home - I felt OK (yes, like I’d been shocked, but ok) immediately after and so I wrapped up a few things we had to get done and left for home, thinking I was fine. But by the time I got into our area I told my wife that I wanted to go to the local medical centre for a check just to be sure, they did an ECG and things looked fine except my pulse was ~40. That then had me under watch for a while, but it didn’t really change, they sent me on my way with a referral to a heart specialist. I got to do 24 hours with a blood pressure and ECG data loggers (aside: oh my gawd I really wanted to pull them apart and find out what was at the core of it - but I would have been very disappointed if it was only an Arduino ) as well as an on-the-spot ECG, ultrasound, and another ultrasound after the walking/jogging/running test that I made thru about 14 mins of. They found a bit of a leaky valve, nothing requiring immediate pipework or attention, and I have a lower than normal heart rate. My 12 month checkup re-confirmed that and I’m over to 24 month checks now.

[devhammer]

Glad you’re OK. Scary stuff, and a reminder for the rest of us to never take electricity for granted.

[trent1098s]

It can be fun working with electricity and gadgets, but mistakes can be permanent.

I’ll be working with some high amp relays next week and safety is my #1 priority!

I guess the only other tidbit to drop is we all work with DC, doing this stuff, and mainly it’s in the milliamp range, but … DC can kill you deader, faster, than the AC that lit me up, and it don’t take MUCH to do it - just takes the right path through your body… So it pays to be careful regardless of how “little” you are working with!