Caption This 05/31/2019

When you ask a "literalist" to switch the channel!

Where "sharp" and "not so sharp" collide.

No, what's really amazing is that someone is still watching TV using a cathode ray tube device.

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't done it myself.. ??

Early remote controls were not very sophisticated...

. . . before she goes to sleep in my shirt.

#redneckremote

A hardware toggle Volt.

We have developed a sharp remote TV control, that we think should be built into future models.

Ripley's Believe It or Not Record:
World's Longest Running Appliance Lifetime Test...Sharp's Hi-Rel Grey Stripe Mod of the TV3-14T

The modern television age can be said to have begun with the first mass production of
television sets by Sharp in 1953.

In January 1953, the Sharp model TV3-14T became Japan's first commercially produced television.

At the time, the North American market was suspicious of reliability of Japanese made products.
The Sharp engineers determined that the TV set's reliability was limited primarily by the power
switch. TV sets of the time were normally repaired if TV repair establishments could reasonably
be expected to be capable of performing such repairs. Sharp executives, concerned that limiting
the lifetime rating of a TV model based on its power switch was unnecessarily pessimistic,
authorized its engineers to grey stripe a production line set and retrofit a hi-rel power switch.

In this attempt to quantify the actual lifetime of the design, the engineers gray-striped this
production line sample. They perfomed this retrofit with a proven long-lifetime switch to create
a TV set without this limitation on its lifetime. The lab is still visited twice a day by
technicians who power on the set at dawn and power it down at dusk. Sharp comitted to the Japanese
government that the lifetime determining experiment would run until the modified set fails.
They now predict that the set will fail sometime in the third millenium when the plastic toggle
on the high reliability switch will crack, fall off, and the technicians will no longer be able to
safely perform their power cycles as defined in their original test procedure document. The shell
of the set was replaced in 1969 when Sharp moved to injected moulded set enclosures and was under
a Japanese government directive to reuse earlier grey stripes when the purposes of the tests to
be performed were not in conflict. The original lifetime test specification was limited to the
internal parts of the TV3-14T and did not include the enclosure cabinet.

Here is a picture of the Grey Stripped TV3-14T set which is currently powered on but can receive
no signals since all analogue TV broadcasting in Japan (except limited areas) stopped on
24 July 2011. The technicians provide a temporary test signal each day when they first power up
this grey stripe but unfortunately the photographer was late arriving and did not take the picture
before the test signal finished its sequence. Sharp was reluctant to modify their historical test
procedure just to get a photograph so our photographer has scheduled another shoot sometime next
month. We will publish another picture in our next edition but felt it was important not to hold
this article back from publication and risk being blamed for a possible premature set failure.
_______________
thewildotter

Sometimes too close to the truth.

We manufactured an LED security indicator for GM North America. Test specs required 100,000,000 test cycles, 5 sec "on",5 sec "off". We received "deviation" to supply after 6 months testing, but had to continue the test till around 10 years AFTER the model was superceded and really only 15 years into the 31 year test expectation.

I don't know what the outcome would have been if we had a "failed" unit.

That's what happens when you let someone who is bad at math determine the test standards, and when someone who doesn't look at and crunch the numbers is allowed to approve the project requirements.

Don't most "extreme" test situations for switches top out at one million operations, not one Hundred Million?

Dang, I can't even say "One Hundred Million" without thinking of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, the number even SOUNDS ridiculous with or without context.

The number was determined by a senior engineer at GM North America and was written into the "validation testing" by them. I suspect that they got the data sheet for the LED that nominated a 15 year operating life and did some maths on that to get 30 years at 50% duty cycle.

I had negotiated the concession to supply with incomplete testing before we had even cut the blocks for the steel for the injection moulds. The local engineers were not able to over-ride the US spec but were able to be reasonable about things.

We did have some specs for 100,000,000 operations but they were for mechanical relay components and some other things with shorter cycle times where tests could be completed in 6 months or so.

The worst we had was a cascaded specification. Our initial device rated at 8 Amps DC operating a 5Amp fused circuit, so tested at 25% overload (10 Amps) for Nissan.

GM decided they liked the part, so "rated" it at 10 A (Because of the Nissan test results) and had us test at 25% overload "plus a little bit" so we had to report at 13 Amps.

Toyota then decided the part might also work for them, so they put the test up to 15 Amps, BUT to get approval from Toyota Japan it was then further increased to 18 Amp test requirement.

We "lost" a few power supplies during those tests. Load was specified to be tungsten filament bulbs with typical inrush at 5 to 8x steady state current and these were sequenced so that the bulbs could cool before next activation.

The loaded circuit in ALL these vehicles was NEVER more than 5A.

But that is the industry!! The big boys are the customer and if you want to supply, then toe the line. No negotiation.

Parental Control Option

"Don't tell me you can't operate the TV. I've made it as simple as I possibly can!"

Ingenious. Can someone on CR4 please share the specifications.

For an additional charge, this switch can be upgraded to make it "Universal Remote Compatible".

It's the battle short switch for his assault TV.

I wondered what ever happened to my old video game TV.

Oh yeah: I'd forgotten about the old DIGITal calculators:-

And remember, base 8 is just like base 10 if you are missing two fingers.

That was a line from Tom Lehrer's "New Math".

Yup.

And based on the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, God has 13 fingers.

The answer is 42.

The question is, "What do you get if you multiply 6 by 9?"