Going emo
Posted By azog on October 5, 2009
Totally fits my mood
I told her, but she hasn’t responded, so I feel glum.
Silent Q
Azog's little slice of the world. Whee.
Mounting the til311 clock
Posted By azog on September 28, 2009
Got tired of the til311 clock sitting around nakid, so I tried to put it in an enclosure:
This is a small cigar box, almost just the perfect size to fit the PCB. The board was about 0.5″ too big on the width, so I had to decide what to do: shave off the PCB, or shave the inside of the box? It would have been easier to shave off a quarter inch of the PCB on each side, but for some reason, that gave me nightmares. So I used a dremmel to shave out the inside of the box.
Maybe you can see it, maybe not. But on each top and botton, I shaved off the inside to about half-way down, so I could sit the board in. Just screw it in to place. I had to stack four 14-pin sockets into each display, so it would lift up enough to clear the lid.
Yea, maybe not the most professional job, but hey.
DEC Alpha workstation
Posted By azog on September 16, 2009
Someone gave me some sort of DEC Alpha workstation:
A single 3.5″ floppy with room for a small something-or-other.
And from the back:
Lots of ports: 10baseT, 10base2, AUI, serial, parallel, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, a 50-pin SCSI, and what looks like two PCMCIA slots.
The guts aren’t that glamorous.
There’s no obvious model number on it, so I’ll have to dig around for some specs, etc.
I used to collect DEC equipment, mostly old iron, like VAXen. I had a couple of 11/730s, some rackmounted PDP-11 (one was an 11/23, the other was an 11/73, and I think one other).
Over time, I’ve had to pass up on offers for 11/750s and an 11/780, although the 11/780 required 3-phase, so it would have been a display only.
Unfortunately, old iron is expensive in terms of real-estate. It’s also pretty heavy on the power requirements. I had to follow a process to boot the VAX 730: power on the RA80, and let that spin for about 5 minutes, and then hit RUN on the processor, and cross my fingers that I don’t pop a fuse somewhere.
After four moves, I no longer have any of my old stuff, which is a shame. I don’t even remember where it all ended up. Some of the other non-DEC stuff was pretty cool, but I draw a blank at most of it. The only outstanding thing was a hand-wired S100 system with two displays: one was a console, the other ran a debugger.
Oh well.
Teledial model #1067 radio
Posted By azog on September 11, 2009
Another “find”, but this time, a guy at work, his mother was gonna put this in a dumpster. His wife wouldn’t let him have it, and when I heard about it, I offered to take it. I have no such barrier to my collecting habit :P And even if I just give it away to someone else, I feel better saving this from destruction.
I did not try to plug it in. The power cord is very frayed and the insulation is cracking, falling off. The best estimate is that this was in an attic for the last 30-40 years.
Unfortunately, it was unprofessionally refinished at some point in its life, so any original value is lost, but that’s Ok.
I’ll see if I can remove the chassis and do what I can, at the very least, replace the power cord. And since the original finish is already shot, I can do that myself, too.
til-311 clock
Posted By azog on September 8, 2009
Have you ever heard of, or seen, a til-311 display?
These are interesting “mid-retro” displays. They can display hex digits (0-F), have both a left- and right- decimal point, and blanking and strobe inputs. The logic driver is built-in, which is the tiny circuit you see near the notch. Driving these displays is very easy by simply feeding 4-bit binary. And they’re handsome.
I picked up a stack of 8 of these for what I considered a decent price. You can still buy them new, but they’re pretty expensive. So what else would I do but build a clock around them?
The first thing I did was breadboard a concept to see if it would work. And you’ll forgive the messy breadboarding technique. It’s not like I’m being graded on my work.
Once I had the basic idea down, I had BatchPCB fab up a board for me. My first one didn’t do very well, for reasons which I’ll explain later. So this is actually the second revision.
And a quick 30 minutes later…
Since I got 8 of these and BatchPCB gave me to boards, I have enough parts to build another, if I so desire.
Some issues:
The decimal points are not driven by the display logic, they’re directly connected to the power rails, so you absolutely need to use a resistor. My first board did not use a resistor, and guess what? I burned out the left decimal points on four of these displays.
I tried to use an on-board 7805 5VDC regulator, but I really don’t know how to properly utilize these in anything beyond a simple breadboard.
And for a real /facepalm mistake, I tied the AVR RESET to ground. AVRs uses an active-low RESET, so the device never actually started to run. That actually had me scratching my head for a significant period of time.
So “version 2″ dropped the 7805 and I opted for a 5v switched wallwart from SparkFun for $6. I remembered to pulled RESET to VCC through a 1k resistor. I also included two limiting resistors on the left decimal points. I physically removed the socket pins for the right decimal points. I also used a trick I saw elsewhere: two large through-holes provide strain-relief for the wall-wart cable.
The time-base is a DS32KHZ, which I’ve used before, and love. The time setting switches are on a basic RC debounce circuit. Other than that, there is really nothing else on the board.
The clock is a basic 12 hour clock. On the minutes display, the left decimal point provides a blinking second indicator. On the hours display, the left decimal point provides an AM/PM indicator. Both of which you can see activated on the image above. The left-most hours display is also blanked depending on the hours.
There are a few issues with the software, but those can be addressed without concern over the hardware.
Sonora phonograph playing
Posted By azog on August 10, 2009
It took a little bit of finagling. Some basic cleanup, and probably most important, a new needle.
Found some good resources online. One had a “service manual” for a slightly different Sonora phonograph, but the same basic principles applied. At the very least, it taught me how to change the needle.
One interesting thing to side-note is that at least one manufacturer recommended that you change the needle after each play! Well, in today’s attention deprived society, I don’t think that would go over well.
This is on my cell phone camera, so the sound quality is pitiful. But trust me, it sounds great. It’s very LOUD, too. It is amazing that this is all just mechanical.
Nipperhead appears to be one of the best resources, with APSCO coming in tied.
“Victrola” curbside find
Posted By azog on August 7, 2009
This was sitting at the curb with a big “FREE” sign on it. If it’s free, it’s for me.
Some sort of “Victrola” record player. I say “Victrola” because it’s not really a Victrola, but I guess the same principle applies. According to the inside lid, it identifies as a “Sonora” , “The Instrument of Quality! Clear as a bell!” The date on the banner says 1915, but that’s probably just for the award(s) it won. I have no idea, yet, what date this is.
Even if it’s not a real Victrola, you just don’t see stuff like this anymore.
No electronics, no speaker, manual hand-crank. Steel needles to play the record! Whoever threw this out was considerate enough to include a handful of replacement needles, and a record.
You can see that it needs a bit of TLC.
Here is a short video of it playing. The record skips terribly. I don’t know if that is because the record is damaged, or the needle needs replacement.
Desoldering tool
Posted By azog on August 4, 2009
For some time now, I’ve been wanting a “real” desoldering tool. I do have one of these, which does the job in a pinch:
But if you’ve ever tried to reclaim parts, you’ll quickly find the limitations of such a device.
I’ve seen projects where people have modified those Radio Shack “desoldering irons”, augmenting the suction bulb with an aquarium pump. But I wanted something a little more robust.
So after futzing around and arguing with myself, I finally decided to buy one of these:
This is a Hakko 808 desoldering kit. I settled on this after spending some time searching around for desoldering tools. This one kept coming back in Google searches, e-bay searches, even on Amazon. For websites that allow you to post reviews, this always received good reviews. People seem happy with the performance, and apparently parts are easy to come by.
For light-weight duty, it is a little bit on the steep side in terms of price, around $200. But I’m hoping this will be one of those long-term investments, something that’ll function reliably for years.
Basically it has a hollow tip feeding to a debris chamber, and a trigger that operates a suction motor. Put the tip over the solder joint, let it melt, and press the button, and presto. Nice and clean. It helps to wiggle the gun while you press the trigger, as that helps to get out any stubborn solder. Also, as you lift the tool from the now-clean section, keep the trigger pressed. This forces plain air though the tube and helps prevent clogs.
As you try to lift the part up, there still may be a teensy bit of solder, so a little gentle rocking and cajoling can help.
I hate discarding perfectly good parts, even sockets, so after about five minutes, I reclaimed a 40-pin socket and a 16-pin socket.
This would have taken at least 30 minutes, and I might even have ruined something along the way.
The 16 pin socket is a machined socket, which are a little more expensive. And the missing two pins are deliberate. I had a part that fit into a 16-pin footprint, but only 14 pins were supplied, so I simply removed two pins.
When done, just clean out the tip, let it cool off, and empty the debris chamber.
Arduino and an LM34 temperature sensor
Posted By azog on July 30, 2009
Ok, so this is nothing that hasn’t been done before. But I’ve been working on another project, and it is just driving me nuts, so I need to take a break from it, and do something else. Maybe not “simple”, but “achievable!”
I ordered some LM34 temperature sensors to play with, and threw together an Arduino sketch to display them temp. on a multiplexed LED.
I know the picture isn’t very good, but I think you can see the temperature sensor on the right. Don’t know how “accurate” it is. “Accurate” in quotes, because the manufacture claims accuracy, but the environment may not be beneficial. I wonder how much heat is being generated by the Arduino itself? Is it affecting the temperature?
But if you just so happen to be interested, here is the sketch.
Spam comments
Posted By azog on July 27, 2009
Hmm, I hope this isn’t lame. But I think I’m gonna start messing with spam comments. I’ll just delete the links, etc, and post the inane text they try to pass off. So if you see some screwy comments that just don’t make sense, well, there you have it. I’ll probably get bored with that real fast, though.