Hi Welcome to everyone's favorite segment: the Mailbag. where I open stuff that people send me and if you want to send me stuff here it is Dave Jones that crazy Aussie Bloke Borham Hills BC Pier Box 7949 borh Hills New South Wales 2153 Australia not Austria And yes I still have a whole bunch of stuff here to open and there's some very cool stuff in there. so I'll open just a couple items now. um I've got an hour or so to kill.

so I thought I'd Uh, rip into a few and this one is from RF Electronic in Sweden There you go RF Electronic with a K. SE Check them out so it just has components. worth 40 bucks. It's quite thick.

quite a thick uh padded envelope. So warning contains ESD static sensitive devices. All right. where's my knife? Let's rip it open.

Here we go. Looks like we have some Staples in there as well. Oh know, we have those uh, old-fashioned uh um I don't know what you call those actually. um like little clip things.

Yeah, you don't see those too often anymore. so looks like we have a pink ESD bag and then a another. Oh man, we have components. Let me have a look in the rest of it here.

there's a letter thank you very much Greg from RF electronic notice you were low on 4148 one in 4148 dodes. so yeah I mentioned that in a previous video or something. so I thought I' donate a couple. Well let's look at uh Greg's idea of a couple here here, shall we? I Think it's going to be more than a couple? It might be goodness.

How many a thousand a th000 you kidding me? Look at this. a I never run out again and it looks like I have more than one packet. So these are Phillips oh proper Phillips branded ones 1 in 41, 48,000 pieces 75 Vols 200 milliamp and the data sheet is available at his website RF electronic. as well thank you very much Greg This is awesome.

What am I going to do with 4,000 Dodes folks? I've got 4,000 diodes. What am I going to do with them? Should I do like a resistor like I did with the resistor. uh video where I actually um, you know, went through and and probed like you know a thousand of them and got the characteristics. Maybe I can do that for these dodes I wonder what interesting characteristic we could find? Maybe the spread of the um, well at that at that one particular current of course that the multimedia gives out.

so perhaps we could do that. Does anyone want to see that is that useful? I don't know if the top of my off the top of my head whether or not that's any useful cuz typically you don't. You know these aren't art toleranced or anything like that. they just you know they just are what they are.

Um, you know you don't really. um, particularly get them. Uh, use these for the in in any way for any sort of tolerance, so not sure if measuring a thousand of them will actually help. But anyway, if you got a good idea what I can do with 4,000 signal diodes, let me know in the comments.

please Thanks! Greg Beauty That's one hell of a thick padded uh envelope too. Look at that. It's like it's really monster thick in there. It's all filled with all this uh I presume it's a crushed, um, you know, pulped, uh, paper and stuff like that.

That's what I presume it is anyway. W nice padded bag that's a padded bag number five and we'll have a look at the Swedish stamps here. We've seen that Swedish stamps before. These are 50 Chona stamps and these are a butterfly wing.

There we go. We may have even had an identical one before. We got some lovely seashells there and I don't know what? o Rd is no idea. Next, cab off the rank.

He has sent it to that crazy Aussie bloke and it's from Kendan Rickets. Thank you very much. Kendon he's in St Petersburg in Florida in the United States of America and it cost about 13 United States dollars. which is about one Aussie dollar these days.

I think jeez, look 28 to the 12. that's how long I've had this thing. So like a month more than a month? sorry I Just uh, all this mail bag just keeps accumulating I don't know. Anyway, Oh by the way we do know what this no I'll make it a surprise I Do know what this one is.

It says it on the Customs form on the outside. This one folks will do a tear down right here and now so you get oh bloody hell hang on. We have some vintage computer gear here folks. so we have a note: oh Hoy Dave thank you very much.

he's maybe he's alluding to what Davey Jones's Locker there I was uh cleaning the garage and found my dad's old PDA it does not work. thought you'd like to mess with it Merry Christmas Belated big fan. Thank you very much Kenden! This is excellent. Never had one of these.

It is vintage computer time folks or vintage PDA time and the Apple Fanboys are about to get all excited. It is an Apple. There's the colorful Apple logo. It is the Newton message pad.

Awesome! Let's crack this sucker open and just before we tear it apart, we'll take a look at the outside here. Now this is the original Hc1000 model Message pad came out in 1993 so that is now goodness 20 years ago. Can you believe 993 was 20 years ago? Unbelievable! So um, it's got a 336x 240 screen. I mean it's quite large, but it its resolution is pretty darn uh low.

It uses an um Arm 610 processor which uh works at about 20 MHz or so and uh, it's obviously got a um little holder for the pen down in there, but that's missing. It's got I don't know that's a DC input jack not sure what that is interface is there and up the top here looks like we have have some infrared stuff looks like the windows gone on that and a Uh one and a Pcmc slot which was all the rage back in the day. And if we check out the batteries down in here, we've got a CR 2032 backup battery and see instructions on battery compartment lid I don't think so if we whip that out, this is actually rather nice. Check this out.

I Really like this this? uh, it holds four AAA batteries and it's a nice little holder there with the two pins on the end designed to mate with the two spring contacts down in there. and uh, you know they've put a lot of design effort just making sure that that uh battery holder works well, but unfortunately, um I hear or I read that the uh battery life on this thing was atrocious. so that's why it wasn't uh, popular apparently. Looks like we got a speaker there and that's it.

and this is interesting. under the backup battery there it looks like that they actually have a little micro switch there. that or a tactile switch that uh tells um presumably tells the OS uh when the battery is inserted. There you go and they got some sort of looks like it's some sort of sliding switch here to inuse replace main.

but I can't seem to slide that sucker at all. So I'm not sure what the deal with that is. They've got another switch down in here which detects that the uh main battery apartment is uh, inserted so the main battery holder. So they've They've really gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that you know presumably cuz you this a PDA you don't want to lose your contents losing your contents was you know that would absolutely ruin the product? Um, as it would these days.

Of course you know if your mobile phone lost everything your whole life's ruined. same thing back then so they went to a lot of effort to make sure. um, both in Hardware physical implementation in hardware and software to make sure that doesn't happen here. We got secret switches all over the place.

There's another little blue one down in there which does something. little secret reset switch. Although, there's a reset switch there so I don't know what that one down there's doing. For the record, there it is.

Model number: H1000 uh, 7 Volts At45 Amps Copyright 1993 Apple Computer Inc Cupertino California And to get all the Fanboys excited, ah, some artistic focusing there on the Apple logo. Does it get any better than that? All right, we'll just whip this sucker open real quick and oh, look at those. goes all the way through threaded inserts of course. Sure, it's a fairly welld designed and built.

you'd expect that actually. I'm not sure what if these ones need to come out to get that back covered off, but anyway, doesn't matter. Oh, there we go. There we go.

It's just falling apart. it's begging to be opened. And there we go. There's with the back cover removed.

We've got our arm processor here. It's the P610 arm. There we go. It's dated uh, 9331.

so the 31st week, uh, 93. Very interesting package. LSI device up here. That must be the system Asic in thing that handles uh, well.

basically everything else. Because we've got an arm processor, we've got memory around here. we got a clock. um, have to have a look at that one what that's doing.

but basically there's not much else. There's some power supply support circuitry around here, so unless there's more on the bottom side of the board. um, it's all happening in this. LSI Over here, check out the dodgy Brothers solder in here.

We've got a cap tacked onto this thing and we've got a I Don't know what the man. No, we got a wire. There was a wire attacked onto there where the soldering. Just look at the flux residue on that.

absolutely awful. Oh, that's shocking hand soldering. But anyway. well I presume this is a production uh version, but go figure.

Anyway, Um, it looks like we have that looks like possibly a bridge rectifier maybe. or is that some sort of common mode choke or something. and yep, I just checked that it didn't look like a Diode Bridge package. although it could possibly be because here's the DC input jack.

So they could have used a Diod bridge if they wanted to. to, uh, get the polarity correct on the input. but I measured it. No, it's um, practically.

you know, at DC it's a direct short from one side to the other like that. So that is a common mode choke. which, um, it looks like they may have had. um, you know Emi problems cuz they have tacked this cap on here as an afterthought.

So yeah, I think they've had issues there. um, there's an inductor missing there couple of test pads I don't know why they've gunked that down there for not sure of the reason behind that. We've got ourselves a fuse there. 1.25 amps by the looks of it.

got ourselves a service Mount Tanum there I think it is. Then we got a and that 3414 there which looks like it possibly could be like a DC to DC converter. It's not. It's actually a dual uh High current op amp from Japan radio.

Corp So there you go. Not sure what they're using a dual High current op amp for and moving along we have an Analog Devices Ad70 that's a 12bit ADC presumably used for the touchcreen would be my guess and then it's upside down so all the electrons are falling out. but that's a an AMD Am 85c 30 and that's a Serial Communications controller and that's for the Uh serial Port Which is there it is. that's the serial Port down in there, it's the Um custom Apple serial Port Then we have a linear technology LTC Uh 902 CS I Couldn't find any info on that so I have no idea what that one is.

Um. then we have a couple of Apple ROMs version 1.30 There we go. They've got Uh Mass ROMs there and Apple branded of course and up there. So we've got a low low ROM and a high ROM there.

So they need two of them. and there's our Um chipset. No, it's not a GPS it's um, it's an Arm P610 arm. There you go in a quad flat pack package and then we have some Um SRAM over here.

uh Mitsubishi M5 M51 there 128k by 8 SRAM So we five of them there that has a total of 640k of SRAM memory and no, it doesn't store anything in Flash Um, that's all it's got, which is why it has the battery backup over here. The battery backup keeps all your stuff in SRAM uh. Later versions of the Uh Newton they actually uh moved on over to flash but this one uses SRAM so it was very important to keep your data alive 40 mahz uh oscillator there or 40 MHz Crystal uh, they would be dividing that by two for the main clock 32 khz watch crystal there and over here we have an SC 361 no idea what that does. Uh, a couple of support circuitry around there and probably the most interesting thing on this whole thing.

or certainly the most interesting. this custom LSI from Apple Check it out and check out that open frame style package. They've views there. It's just a thing of beauty.

It really is. Love it. There's a screenshot, there's a wallpaper for you Apple Fanboys I'll take a photo so I have no idea what sort of stuff is integrated on that thing. If you've uh, got any idea, let us know in the comments or over on the Forum and you'll notice inside the lid here too.

there is another. Well, there's a little actuator arm there for a micro switch which detects that the pen is actually pushed in to the holder down in there. I Love it. Attention to detail.

So there we go. manufacture data, the case down in there and if we have a look, I've cracked the whole thing. open here and you'll see a big shielding plate here. There's our uh LCD connecting cable down in there that would be uh for the LCD and for the uh touch as well.

and uh, that's the bottom side. There's just a bit of miscellaneous uh, support circuitry on there. There's an um, infrared uh module over here, an Irda module. There's our power slide switch there, which of course, uh, meets up with the slide switch on the side.

and uh, yeah, Apart from that, there's not a huge amount to it. They've made a cut out in the PCB there for a Uh for the uh large Reservoir cap there. that would uh be to ensure that the um, that's 470 mic by the way. That would be to ensure that you don't lose the SRAM contents when you if you accidentally, uh, remove both the main battery and the backup battery at the same time you you know you probably have a few minutes or uh, something like that or a few tens of minutes.

uh Grace So you can change the backup battery and the designers have thought, well, this thing draws so much damn current from the batteries. There's the battery compartment in here that it needs a thermister to measure the battery temperature. um, cuz I don't think this had any uh charging I think it just used uh primary batteries. So there's that Irda module and nothing else too exciting around here at all.

Sorry folks, good old 4066 Got to see some 4,000 Series Seos in there. Awesome! And there's that secret tactile switch we saw inside the battery compartment. Look at that and if we remove this uh battery uh indicator mechanism, then we get down and we can see the Uh production programming interface there. or or a production uh test interface.

Um, because this thing comes uh, pre-programmed Of course the uh, you know these are masked ROMs that we've got over here. So um, you know, it's not like you can program this thing, but that would have been a, uh, some sort of production test interface. There's the uh pad for the reset switch down in there, and that's about all she wrote. So this whole thing here is just a convoluted uh indicator mechanism to uh, tell you when you know it's safe to replace the main battery.

I Mean you can't move that like that unless you engage unless you engage the main battery pack. So you got to install the main battery pack and then you can slide it over to there and then, um, you know it because the battery sits in there. it's still got the cover in there so you're not supposed to be able to dig that out. but you could, right? But you couldn't get it out easily if you got in there with a fine point knife you like.

I Did you could, actually, uh, whip that out But the whole idea was that. oh, you still can't do that. So you've got to move this over to here and then that opens that window there and it allows you to place the main backup battery. Uh woo.

So there you have it, that's inside a 20-year-old now 20-year-old woo. Newton Message pad: Thank you very much Kandon! That was most interesting. If you want to discuss this and you got more info on it, jump on over to the Eev blog. Forum Now I know the Fanboys won't be happy unless I try and power this thing up, but unfortunately, Kendan said it doesn't actually work so I may actually have to do another video troubleshooting the thing.

But I'll check anyway. And interestingly, if you have it on the inuse position here sorry if you have it in the middle there, you can't actually replace this battery pack. It doesn't go down so you've got to actually have it on replace main and then the battery pack just slips in there nicely like that and then you put it back to in use and you can't get and it locks the uh battery compartment in there and you can't get the batteries out. Even if your cover falls off, you batteries aren't going to fall out.

So there you go. That uh works really well. They put a lot of effort into that and uh, let's give it a go here. Here we go and try and power it on.

Nope, nothing doesn't work. Sorry folks, catch you next time.