Electronics, photography and small green things
I am now a proud owner of this Canon X-07 hand-held computer. I found it from an online auction for an unmissable price. It was advertised as pristine condition with original box and manuals. This machine is quite rare, but has seen popularity in Finland and France. I’ll try to document this computer as thoroughly Read More ...
A Nixie tube is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information. It is a cold-cathode tube and similar to a neon-lamp. Applying power to one cathode surrounds it with an orange glow discharge.
Modern physics, especially radioactivity has always fascinated me. How can something that can’t be seen, smelled or otherwise sensed by human have such a large part in our perceivable universe, and at the same time be deadly to us organic lifeforms? It can be bit frightening due its properties, but it still is everywhere and humans have Read More ...
I got a Ibanez IBZ-20 guitar amplifier, that had some issues that needed to be fixed. All potentiometers were dead, and jacks were badly corroded, but in addition amplification was not working correctly. I could not find any schematics for this old amplifier, so I decided to reverse-engineer the whole circuit board.
Here is the schematic that I made:
IBZ-20-Schematic-BWIt turned out that problem with the amplifier was that one of the two 2SD313 power transistors was gone open. This in turn caused smaller transistors on PCB to act as power stage, and whole speaker current was passed trough small 270ohm resistor that could not handle that kind of dissipation.
I also decided to replace all capacitors, and removed that brown glue, which turns into corrosive and conductive mess when it ages and attracts moisture from air.
Canon X-07 is great little handheld retro computer. But being Canon, nothin is standard. Canon has always insisted using weird proprietary connector for devices, and usually it is impossible to find connectors that would fit them. This is also a case with X-07. It uses weird connectors for serial- and parallel ports. They look bit like a normal D-sub connector, and D-sub connector almost fits into them, but it is not a good fit. I wanted to make new connector that matches X-07’s serial port perfectly, so I took my callipers and 3D cad and started to work. Read More …
During renovation of Emco Compact 5 cnc-lathe, I got my hands on scrapped electronics of original control cabinet. I saved some of the more interesting boards, like one that acts as rudimentary GPU. Whole video board was separate add-on, that contained video processor, video RAM, character-ROM and RS232 transceiver, and connected to main CPU board with large 32pin bus connector.
I took my multimeter, scope and logic analyzer, and stared to reverse engineer the mystics of this video controller.
I have old but trusty Thinkpad X200s laptop that is now retired but still occasionally used. Due being s model, it does not have build in 3G/WWAN antennas in display because there is no space for them. Independent internet connectivity is often useful, especially in places where there is no WiFi or good cell coverage.
Like many business notebooks, my Thinkpad still had 56k modem and land line RJ12 connector, which isn’t that useful in most western countries where POTS and analog modem services have long being discontinued.
I got my radio amateur license and call sign OH3EYB
Tampere Hacklab has ongoing design contest for lamps. I participated in with this Asian lantern styled lampshade.
My design points for lamp were to be able easily lasercut and construct it from plywood, and to incorporate some sci-fi themed elements. Steps for this project include CAD drawing, laser cutting and physical assembly. This design came out as easy to reproduce, inexpensive, and aesthetically pleasing. Read More …
Finnish winter days are dark and cold. The sun rises only for short moment, and even then it is often cloudy, or the sun is so low that it can rarely be seen. A circadian clock is synchronized with daylight changes, and so without external stimulus from sunlight, my daily rhythm started to lag and spin around. Waking at morning was difficult task.
There is a ready-made solution for this, e.g. Philips does sell alarm clocks with build in wake-up lamps, that turn on at morning to artificially sync humans internal clock. Me being hacker, I had to make my own solution, as usual. Read More …
I went for a radioactive hunt with my friend. Some time ago we heard a rumor, that in Paukkajanvaara there was small uranium mine and enrichment facility between 1958 and 1961. Amount of mined uranium was small, and after 60s reduced need for uranium, mine was closed and never re-opened. During closing no cleanup was made, and due 60s lower standards and general neglect whole mining site was contaminated with radioactive uranium products.
We packed our cameras and a geiger counter and started car at this cloudy sunday afternoon. Read More …
I have finally got my own home! I just moved in, and got some furniture cheaply from recycling centre.
Now I’m just waiting to get my desktop computer and electronic equipment from storage. Read More …
I found new hobby in form of 3D models. I have previously tested blender, but have not done anything productive with it. Now I finally got time and determination to learn more of using it to make something wort of sharing. I have now been playing and experimenting with Blender about couple of weeks and I already have bigger project in my mind. Read More …
I “found” some old DELL PowerEdge 2850 rack servers. 2x 3.2Ghz intel xeon (P4 generation), 8GB memory, and bunch of 146GB and 74GB SCSI HDDs.
I don’t have use for these yet, but maybe something comes up.
Apparently I’m not the only one that have had problems with a Arduino (clone) nano’s USB connection. Usually it works ok but sometimes, particularly when an external power input is used, a FTDI chip inside the Arduino does not want to be detected by computer. This is bug made by the original Arduino developers to their schematics, and can be easily fixed afterwards if there is odd troubles with it. Read More …
