Why I dig my job.
Turning absolutely useless and archaic technology BACK into production. This requires inspiration, creativity, and a willingness to look totally stupid. Wow I just described myself.
Problem: We needed to convert RJ45 ethernet to Fibre (multimode ST) and then go 100 meters then convert it back.
We had a box full of media converters that did just this, however some of them are labelled "may be bad" or "we think it's failing". And we couldn't get any 2 pair to work without extensive testing. Finally we made a pair work, but it meant we lost all of our spares, which in a place with bad power like this, we couldn't afford.
So we went digging through a box of old parts. I saw two technicians grab and toss these little thinnet to fibre converters. It was old, and useless and why haven't we thrown them away yet?
And I had this thought "why are we discarding these, we might be able to use them."
So I connected two together. On one end Fibre, thinnet male/female in the middle, and rj45 on the other end.
WOW, it's a really crazy piece of equipment. And I made 2 of them.. one for each end.
AND... because it's old junk, we've got a ton of it, which means plenty of spares, which means we don't have to buy more, which means we save money.
WOW!
that's completely and totally nuts from a geek point of view, and I love it.
Sadly, some testing proved that these little units eventually gave us some data corruption, but it was really fun laughing while we were doing this. I'm glad we didn't put it into production, there is a certain level of professionalism I wish to maintain.
