I don't need to know the exact mbps that is currently getting pulled off my server, I need to know at a glance if my load is going into the red. I don't have the time to take my eyes off the road to read that I am traveling at 55.4 MPH @ 2571 RPMs, I just need to know that my needle is pointing up and left, and that my tach isn't pointing straight up.
That said, I want digital values for all of those things, streaming in real time through the appropriate systems, feeding logs, and populating data warehouses for later analysis.
Digital meters don't have the slow response that d'Arsonval meter movements have, unless extra circuitry is added. The inertia and magnetic delay of old-fashioned electro-mechanical meters naturally filter fast variations in the signal, and can result in a useful reading in cicumstances where the average digital meter produces a garbage reading. Of course, it's also good to know when a signal is noisy or jumpy...
I use digital meters exclusively these days - they're convenient, rugged, light, and have a higher input impedance and better resistance reading capabilities than all but the very best of the old analog FET-VOM's. But every once in a while I wish I had a well-damped analog meter to save me from dragging out the scope.
You can make low pass filters in the digital domain, just as in the analog domain. It's fairly easy, in fact. Instead of having the digital meter display the direct digitized signal, have it display an average over the last n samples. You could even make the value of n user-selectable, so you can control the amount of "slowness".
Well, apart from the fact that all mechanical meters will eventually fail, being mechanical and all. Not sure how that is "more reliable". They can lose accuracy with age, due to wear on the spring & bushings, and loss of magnetism in the magnet, etc, not that that have good accuracy to begin with.
Almost everything electronic has been replaced with higher complexity, yet still higher reliability, cheaper, smaller, solid state stuff.
as a guy over 50 who has analog meters (triplett, simpson, stuff like that) that are nearly as old as I am, I can say with confidence that you have no idea what you are talking about.
digital meters tend to fail more! they are more complex, and unless you buy very good ones, they will suffer 'cap problems' (esp. if made in china, which nearly all things are, these days).
otoh, buy a used meter of the type I described and as long as it was not hit by a truck, it will likely work and out live YOU.
springs fail? never saw that happen. bushings fail? again, never saw that happen.
I would guess, based on your very high UID that you are a youngster and never really used or lived with such gear before.
probably better to just remain silent than to speak up and tell everyone how much you don't know.
Hey, don't make assumptions like that. I've got tube voltmeters that are older than you!
One of which the meter failed on. Something in the movement let a sliver go, which stuck to the movement's magnet, which the coil was then jamming on / binding with. Ended up sorting it out, but it was like brain surgery. This was on a Hickok 209A [imgur.com], circa 1940, with a gigantic 9" meter on it.
I'll stick with my 80's vintage fluke bench meters for most things. They don't look quite as cool as the Hickok, though.
You're comparing old, high quality, analog meters with modern digital cheap shit from China. But that's not really realistic or fair. Nobody's going to manufacture a modern instrument, and install second hand analog meters. Instead, they'll order some cheap, shitty, analog dials from China, made from injection molded plastic instead of brass, and using a printed paper scale glued on by hand.
Most electronic equipment has about 3 forms of life.
1) Burns fast. Usually within warranty. This is usually some sort of manufacture defect. Lifetime of 1-2 months. 2) Med burn. Just stops working something in it busted out of warranty (usually by 1 day;)) Lifetime of 4-10 years 3) old timers. These things do not stop working. They last decades.
When you look at old equipment you usually only come across old timers. As the first two categories were junked decades ago.
as a guy over 50 who has analog meters (triplett, simpson, stuff like that) that are nearly as old as I am, I can say with confidence that you have no idea what you are talking about.
digital meters tend to fail more! they are more complex, and unless you buy very good ones, they will suffer 'cap problems' (esp. if made in china, which nearly all things are, these days).
otoh, buy a used meter of the type I described and as long as it was not hit by a truck, it will likely work and out live YOU.
Also, don't forget "survivor bias" - how many meters of yours work vs. how many were made? I mean, everyone says "stuff was built better in the past" yet we're not flooded with antique radios, classic cars, old TVs, etc.
In fact I have a lot of old analog stuff (multi-meters, audio kit) that my father left. I am currently refurbishing his multimeter - only because the sockets for the test leads have corroded, nothing wrong with the analog galvanometer itself.
Much of that old stuff did not "die", people threw it away because they assumed newer stuff was better, or because the old stuff becomes incompatible. Marketing droids see to the first, and as an example of the second I threw away a tube TV only because it would n
I am currently refurbishing his multimeter - only because the sockets for the test leads have corroded, nothing wrong with the analog galvanometer itself.
Unless you want to use it to check that your 100K resistor is not a 101K resistor.
I know, but we're talking about refurbishing an old analog meter and using it today. And it's not just the 1% difference that makes it tricky. Even seeing the difference between 100K and 110K can be tricky on an analog device, since the Ohm scale is usually inverted, and high resistance values are close together.
As an Instrument Reliability Engineer working in industry, your experience represents a very small subset of scenarios where your meters have a better failure rate. Then you use words like "cap problems" which leads me to believe you're comparing quality made in USA gauges with cheap Chinese electronic imports and are basing your conclusion on that. Unfortunately your experience goes against all reliability literature and statistics that have been collected around the world.
As a guy in my 50s who now needs reading glasses, I'm finding digital displays increasingly frustrating, especially small cheap LCDs that aren't very distinct unless you're looking at them from straight on. I much prefer digital clocks, but if you can't tell a 3 from an 8 or 0 or a 1 from a 7, they're not very useful, and it's almost always easy to tell the big hand from the little hand. Similarly with digital meters, big numbers with fat segments are still easy to read, small skinny ones aren't.
Almost everything electronic has been replaced with higher complexity, yet still higher reliability,
Half right. Stuff does tend to become more complex over time. But not necessarily more reliable or more usable. For example, some of our kitchen appliances are indeed more usable than those I grew up with in the 1950s. Some are cluttered with unnecessary, weird, or incomprehensible "features". There are a couple of companies whose products I won't even consider any more when making purchasing decisions b
I was thinking more in terms of replacing simple electro-mechanical systems with more complicated transistorized ones. Not adding excessive touch logic BS to stoves:)
For example, prior to the early 60s, cars had generators. No silicon in them at all. The voltage regulator was basically two relays, and a bit of electro-mechanical trickery. very simple. If one contact failed, stuck on, a parked car would kill it's battery, if the other stuck on it would overcharge the battery when running.
A damn good example of mechanical vs electronic is the controls for washing machines. Mechanical controls last until they break from fatigue in the metal or plastic, which usually takes 2 or 3 decades of heavy use. Electronic controls, given the damp environment of a washing machine, tend to go bad in just a few years regardless of use level.
That's the reason why even if I own a really nice Multimeter, I still use an old analog one from time to time (because of the too-fast response time of Digital)
That's the reason why even if I own a really nice Multimeter, I still use an old analog one from time to time (because of the too-fast response time of Digital)
I bought a mid-range digital multi-meter and was disappointed to find there is no damping on the readout. Even such a simple thing as reading a battery voltage the display acts crazy until you press the probes on really hard and keep dead still. As a result I still reach for an old, really cheap (it was from Tandy) little analog meter for most jobs unless I want particular accuracy or something out of the analog meter's range.
I would put a damping circuit in it myself if there were any means of doing
So it seems to be less about the medium and more about the designed controls.
Exactly. If designers want to do internals with digital bits, that's their decision. If they even have a decision. But the output should be adjusted or adjustable to user needs. Which is hard, because frankly we techies suck at interface design and.experts on interface design seem to be, if anything, worse than non-experts at producing usable devices. For situations like trying to adjust for maximum or minimal level, digital
Pro audio software all has analogue like meters, but they are all digital of course being computer software. You can adjust how they respond, tell them how to integrate the data they get, how fast to respond, etc. So you can tailor the output to what is most useful.
Also as a converse back in the day some high end analogue audio meters were made to try and quantize data. They'd be designed to segment the display to 1dB increments around the clipping/saturation point so that the engineer could make more usefu
My current ride is Lubuntu 14.04, using upstart, systemd nowhere in sight, life is good, and it's the LTS 'stro, which'll keep that mean old systemd away for years...
The other place analog (or analog-style) gauges shine is when the rate of change is more important than the value. Speedometers and tachometers are good examples: You usually care more if you are speeding up, slowing down, or keeping the same speed than whether you are going 65 or 66mph.
Because the average human being can actually read it better off of a changing analog-style dial than they can understand a bare number. It has to do with us being well developed at judging distances for throwing and jumping. (And an analog dial allows you to read both off of one instrument.)
Exact speedometer reading can e quite critical, says officer friendly.
My Honda has digital speedo and analog tach, which seems to be an optimal combo.
It also has rotary knobs for the volume and tuning on the digital radio, mimicking the old analog items, and that's so much nicer than up and down push buttons.....
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially when you don't need to know the exact number and you need a visual indicator that can be recognized at a glance.
Speedometers, tachometers, load balance reporting, etc...
I don't need to know the exact mbps that is currently getting pulled off my server, I need to know at a glance if my load is going into the red. I don't have the time to take my eyes off the road to read that I am traveling at 55.4 MPH @ 2571 RPMs, I just need to know that my needle is pointing up and left, and that my tach isn't pointing straight up.
That said, I want digital values for all of those things, streaming in real time through the appropriate systems, feeding logs, and populating data warehouses for later analysis.
-Rick
Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:5, Informative)
But your point is just about the GUI.
Digital meters can be made to look Analog and provide that exact same feedback.
For a super stupid example, the windows task manager in the sys tray shows CPU load via a veritcal bar, exactly like an Analog vertical meter would.
So it seems to be less about the medium and more about the designed controls.
Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:4, Interesting)
Digital meters don't have the slow response that d'Arsonval meter movements have, unless extra circuitry is added. The inertia and magnetic delay of old-fashioned electro-mechanical meters naturally filter fast variations in the signal, and can result in a useful reading in cicumstances where the average digital meter produces a garbage reading. Of course, it's also good to know when a signal is noisy or jumpy...
I use digital meters exclusively these days - they're convenient, rugged, light, and have a higher input impedance and better resistance reading capabilities than all but the very best of the old analog FET-VOM's. But every once in a while I wish I had a well-damped analog meter to save me from dragging out the scope.
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Adds to complexity for nothing. much easier (and reliable) to use an analog meter if one is needed
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Well, apart from the fact that all mechanical meters will eventually fail, being mechanical and all. Not sure how that is "more reliable". They can lose accuracy with age, due to wear on the spring & bushings, and loss of magnetism in the magnet, etc, not that that have good accuracy to begin with.
Almost everything electronic has been replaced with higher complexity, yet still higher reliability, cheaper, smaller, solid state stuff.
Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:4, Insightful)
as a guy over 50 who has analog meters (triplett, simpson, stuff like that) that are nearly as old as I am, I can say with confidence that you have no idea what you are talking about.
digital meters tend to fail more! they are more complex, and unless you buy very good ones, they will suffer 'cap problems' (esp. if made in china, which nearly all things are, these days).
otoh, buy a used meter of the type I described and as long as it was not hit by a truck, it will likely work and out live YOU.
springs fail? never saw that happen. bushings fail? again, never saw that happen.
I would guess, based on your very high UID that you are a youngster and never really used or lived with such gear before.
probably better to just remain silent than to speak up and tell everyone how much you don't know.
Re: (Score:3)
Hey, don't make assumptions like that. I've got tube voltmeters that are older than you!
One of which the meter failed on. Something in the movement let a sliver go, which stuck to the movement's magnet, which the coil was then jamming on / binding with. Ended up sorting it out, but it was like brain surgery. This was on a Hickok 209A [imgur.com], circa 1940, with a gigantic 9" meter on it.
I'll stick with my 80's vintage fluke bench meters for most things. They don't look quite as cool as the Hickok, though.
I do use the
Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:5, Insightful)
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buy a used meter of the type I described
You're comparing old, high quality, analog meters with modern digital cheap shit from China. But that's not really realistic or fair. Nobody's going to manufacture a modern instrument, and install second hand analog meters. Instead, they'll order some cheap, shitty, analog dials from China, made from injection molded plastic instead of brass, and using a printed paper scale glued on by hand.
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He is also looking at survivor bias.
Most electronic equipment has about 3 forms of life.
1) Burns fast. Usually within warranty. This is usually some sort of manufacture defect. Lifetime of 1-2 months. ;)) Lifetime of 4-10 years
2) Med burn. Just stops working something in it busted out of warranty (usually by 1 day
3) old timers. These things do not stop working. They last decades.
When you look at old equipment you usually only come across old timers. As the first two categories were junked decades ago.
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And I'm fairly
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Also, don't forget "survivor bias" - how many meters of yours work vs. how many were made? I mean, everyone says "stuff was built better in the past" yet we're not flooded with antique radios, classic cars, old TVs, etc.
In fact I have a lot of old analog stuff (multi-meters, audio kit) that my father left. I am currently refurbishing his multimeter - only because the sockets for the test leads have corroded, nothing wrong with the analog galvanometer itself.
Much of that old stuff did not "die", people threw it away because they assumed newer stuff was better, or because the old stuff becomes incompatible. Marketing droids see to the first, and as an example of the second I threw away a tube TV only because it would n
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I am currently refurbishing his multimeter - only because the sockets for the test leads have corroded, nothing wrong with the analog galvanometer itself.
Unless you want to use it to check that your 100K resistor is not a 101K resistor.
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When analog meters were the standard, you were lucky to get a 5% resistor. 1%ers (as are common today) were exotic.
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As an Instrument Reliability Engineer working in industry, your experience represents a very small subset of scenarios where your meters have a better failure rate. Then you use words like "cap problems" which leads me to believe you're comparing quality made in USA gauges with cheap Chinese electronic imports and are basing your conclusion on that. Unfortunately your experience goes against all reliability literature and statistics that have been collected around the world.
The GP was right. Analogue meters
Presbyopia (Score:2)
As a guy in my 50s who now needs reading glasses, I'm finding digital displays increasingly frustrating, especially small cheap LCDs that aren't very distinct unless you're looking at them from straight on. I much prefer digital clocks, but if you can't tell a 3 from an 8 or 0 or a 1 from a 7, they're not very useful, and it's almost always easy to tell the big hand from the little hand. Similarly with digital meters, big numbers with fat segments are still easy to read, small skinny ones aren't.
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Almost everything electronic has been replaced with higher complexity, yet still higher reliability,
Half right. Stuff does tend to become more complex over time. But not necessarily more reliable or more usable. For example, some of our kitchen appliances are indeed more usable than those I grew up with in the 1950s. Some are cluttered with unnecessary, weird, or incomprehensible "features". There are a couple of companies whose products I won't even consider any more when making purchasing decisions b
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking more in terms of replacing simple electro-mechanical systems with more complicated transistorized ones. Not adding excessive touch logic BS to stoves :)
For example, prior to the early 60s, cars had generators. No silicon in them at all. The voltage regulator was basically two relays, and a bit of electro-mechanical trickery. very simple. If one contact failed, stuck on, a parked car would kill it's battery, if the other stuck on it would overcharge the battery when running.
Generator output ha
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A damn good example of mechanical vs electronic is the controls for washing machines. Mechanical controls last until they break from fatigue in the metal or plastic, which usually takes 2 or 3 decades of heavy use. Electronic controls, given the damp environment of a washing machine, tend to go bad in just a few years regardless of use level.
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filtered_value = (filtered_value*a) + (new_value*(1-a)); // where a > 0 and a 1
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Doing it in software, sure. Making it in hardware will add components...
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That's the reason why even if I own a really nice Multimeter, I still use an old analog one from time to time (because of the too-fast response time of Digital)
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That's the reason why even if I own a really nice Multimeter, I still use an old analog one from time to time (because of the too-fast response time of Digital)
I bought a mid-range digital multi-meter and was disappointed to find there is no damping on the readout. Even such a simple thing as reading a battery voltage the display acts crazy until you press the probes on really hard and keep dead still. As a result I still reach for an old, really cheap (it was from Tandy) little analog meter for most jobs unless I want particular accuracy or something out of the analog meter's range.
I would put a damping circuit in it myself if there were any means of doing
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Digital meters don't have the slow response that d'Arsonval meter movements have...
Digital meters that emulate the reaction of analog meters have been around in the audio world for a long time; like the Dorroughs audio meters.
They can even be set to respond using different audio weightings (responses).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ch70_x6MEM
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So it seems to be less about the medium and more about the designed controls.
Exactly. If designers want to do internals with digital bits, that's their decision. If they even have a decision. But the output should be adjusted or adjustable to user needs. Which is hard, because frankly we techies suck at interface design and .experts on interface design seem to be, if anything, worse than non-experts at producing usable devices. For situations like trying to adjust for maximum or minimal level, digital
And they can even be adjustable (Score:2)
Pro audio software all has analogue like meters, but they are all digital of course being computer software. You can adjust how they respond, tell them how to integrate the data they get, how fast to respond, etc. So you can tailor the output to what is most useful.
Also as a converse back in the day some high end analogue audio meters were made to try and quantize data. They'd be designed to segment the display to 1dB increments around the clipping/saturation point so that the engineer could make more usefu
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Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:5, Interesting)
The other place analog (or analog-style) gauges shine is when the rate of change is more important than the value. Speedometers and tachometers are good examples: You usually care more if you are speeding up, slowing down, or keeping the same speed than whether you are going 65 or 66mph.
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Re:Analog displays are better in some situations. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the average human being can actually read it better off of a changing analog-style dial than they can understand a bare number. It has to do with us being well developed at judging distances for throwing and jumping. (And an analog dial allows you to read both off of one instrument.)
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I can glance at the tach and see that I need to shift RSN, as the rate of approaching the redline is pretty close. :)
Analog is much better than a digital display that updates every few dozen mS with a number that is interpreted by a different part of my Brain. :)
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FTFY
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