Driving up an hour on the highway to a farm-y area where my amazing co-worker lives. She's got chickens, fish, dogs, cats, horses, a woodshop, lots of hay (I helped unload a couple hundred bales today), and a CMM and CT scanner. The CT scanner is mine, and also maybe dead weight.

Well, maybe no more dead weight than the machine at my University.

It varies a little bit from my machine. The control boxes are an older version --- no indicator light on this one, and where the light was is instead the reset switch. Handles on the boxes, too. On the inside of the machine, lead sheeting instead of taped chunks for extra radiation proofing. (and the screws are actually on the additional radiation shield, instead of being loose). The detector has a cover over it. No peltier cooling box. 

Most prominently, though, the LVDS cable for the ancient camera data was cut. It was fucking cut. I didn't really understand what I was seeing when I first looked at it --- I assumed it had to do with that field upgrade. But no, I found the other half of the cable --- the people decommissioning decided that, for whatever reason, maybe because it had a long cable, it was no worry at all to cut it. What a bunch of fucking idiots. 

It's technically possible to fix, but not really a game changer. I was already set to have one machine be in the original state, and another machine be the host of upgrades. The biggest upgrade since that time period would be the detector. I have one of those...

Connect to it, and the motors and switches run okay, so that's good.

The door is hard to shut, but if you just give it a good push it seals shut just fine, and the interlock says: (After you push the reset button, of which there's no indicator light on this machine): Door Closed! Woohoo! 

With much fanfair, click on the turn on x-rays button, and it does in fact, make a loud buzzing noise! Huzzah! And some funny signal fluctuations, which again appears to be due to the cable. 

IT turns out that the X-ray switch doesn't control manual mode, but rather, controls whether the X-rays turn on at all. Still not sure how to turn on the manual control so that the dials do something, but at least I know that the interface works. Useful knowledge.

Problem is that, at the end of the day, the source is almost certainly busted. Gets to a max of 1 kV and 6 microamps. And by the end of it, settled at 1 of each. That's one-one thousandth of a watt, by the way --- a good few thousand times less than the tube normally runs at. 

It is very slightly possible that, the "warm up" utility will make a difference, and I can't run this because I can't get it to connect to the shutter server (just crashes after that). But it's not very likely --- you'd at least see the voltage climb up, maybe hear some arcing, not just stay at 1kv. 

This is really disappointing to me. Still haven't figured out what's wrong with my University system, interlock wise. Just have to hope that the source on that works. And that even if it does, there won't be a spare.