Hi guys! I'm back in the garbage room here and it's Wednesday So I might call this dumpster diving Wednesday doesn't really rhyme but uh well. I Found a box of stuff in here. Look at this just sitting here. Check this out.

Genuine dictaphones. There's actually a whole box of them along with a whole bunch of power adapters. There they are. check that out and tons of power cords.

and over here it looks like there's another box. tons of IEC power cords which are awesome I mean even if you don't use them as uh uh, you know, regular I power cords I've already got a draw full of these so I don't need any more but you take them cuz they're like you know they can have 1 square mm copper in them so you know. Excellent find and if we dig around down in here, what do we got here? I have no idea what that is that feels real heavy is it? I Oh it's a it's a foot pedal. It's a foot pedal that that you put down on the floor and you can tap it with your foot and you can play.

There you go play Rewind Fast forward a man that's going to come in useful and here we go. Here's another dictaphone. This one's bigger and uh, bigger and heavier than the Box of other ones. But there you go.

It's genuine dictaphone voice processor. What else we got in here? Man, this is awesome. Somebody is clearly, um, you know there's some firm or something has, uh, tossed out these. They're probably working because um, you wouldn't throw out like this many.

There's no way you'd throw out this many if they were all busted. I Think they just, um, you know either either they shut up shop, they Mve, or they've chosen a new Uh system which doesn't use these tapes anymore. You know, some sort of computer based system or something. So look at this.

We' got a bag of oh hello, hello, what do we got down in here? D A I Was hoping that' be a portable little dictaphone. It's not. It's just the box. but yeah, look, there is that another foot pedal down in there.

There's a whole bunch of stuff. Awesome. What a score! I'm uh, going to have to take these and uh, well, tear them down. There might be some useful Parts They're based on the old, you know, tape, um based system, one of those little micro cassette recorder things, but heck, you know.

um I don't know, it's they've got to be got to have useful Parts in there. there's the uh, there's the foot control there and the Hand mic so you can plug the foot control in. but definitely well worth salvaging. And one of the Beautiful Things is they're already in a convenient carry box.

I can just pick this up and uh, take it away. Woohoo! So what did I score from that little dumpster diving episode there? Well check it out. I Got six uh, looks like identical model dictaphones, genuine dictaphones. Another looks like a really old sort of, you know, maybe late 80s uh, vintage dictaphone there I got a couple of H foot pedals here.

these will be. You know they could come in handy for um, uh, controlling stuff around the lab or remote control for the camera or something. Who knows. So there's two different types of uh foot pedals there.

There you go. that one. You can hear the micro switches. there you go.

That one's uh, really quite neat and it looks like this is the older one which uh, goes with this old style one over here and um I scored a uh, whole bunch of these. These are 16 volt 1 amp, uh linear? um uh Transformer Power packs Awesome. They're terrific. Um I got a about oh I don't know.

half at least half a dozen of these switch mode uh, power packs. and here they are. they're 12 volts, 2 and 1/2 amps. Awesome.

Um, what else have we got here? we've got. oh they don't use look, some of those don't use standard I uh uh. well your regular I Power connectors I got Pro probably a dozen regular I um power cords. these are actually you know they call them I but these are actually the C14 type.

the I 6230 standard I think it is. don't quote me on that. um lists a whole bunch of different ones. This one's I believe is called C14 and these are one.

Let's have a look here. Does it tell us Should tell us the size of the copper on there somewhere? Where is it there? It is 1 square mm so that's got decent size copper in it. Some Um I've looked at some here have only 75 mm. You can get ones with half mm copper and then we've got these larger on as well.

I believe these are the C20 uh ones they use these on like, um, high-end servers. They're capable of like 20 amps. That one's actually a feed through. um, like an extension cord.

but I've got uh, uh, another one there and that one uses where is it Tada 1.5 Square mm copper. So even if you've got a whole bunch of these leads as I do I got a whole drawer of them. Um, but still, you know you take them and scrap them. you can cut them up, use them as big high current uh, power wires and stuff because that it's 1.5 Square mm.

Fantastic. And there's the rest of it. I Did have a clean floor this morning, but now it's just filled with all this crap again. But hey, cables are cables.

I'm going to whack them away in the drawers and uh, these dictaphones. H You know what we say and here's something you don't see every day. Made in hungry hi to all my Hungarian listeners I'm not sure if I have any. Um, probably got a couple I'm sure.

um but there you go. that foot switch made in Hungary And here's this modern one and I think they still sell them and uh, even on eBay I I Just had a quick look and um, some people are selling these for like a couple hundred dollars. used crazy I mean we got volume tone Auto backspace and uh, tape speed there and you know there's not much else on it. There's arrays, play fast forward, and an LCD tape counter and the micro cassette thing I did find one Phillips micro cassette tape in the box.

so I don't know. Maybe it's got, uh, confidential client details or something like that. Who knows how do you put this thing in I don't know. Fail.

Oh, there we go there We go on the arm, whack it in boom H might try and power it up first see if there's anything on that. And by the way, the model we've got here is the 17404 Express Rer made in Japan So there you go. I Think that board looks conformally coded in there by the glare on it. Anyway, I'm going to power this sucker up and uh, see what we get here? We go on there we go.

Tada There's our tape counter rewind. Yep, it's at the beginning. Fast forward? Yep. Sweet.

All right. Play. Oh, speaker on. Now on either the new draft legislation or if they prefer Comma to recycle their redundancy seminar stop Grant to try and lock in a date with Sheamus for M March Stop Go.

We have some stuff. they've dictated some things and ten remains of the view that there is no concern with his seminar running a second. Who knows what that is. Ser Yuri Still cannot get a response from Ju.

They're actually dictating stuff we discuss to investigate something on there. So there you go. We have something on that. but well, that's boring as batshit.

so I am not going to listen to that. Couldn't care less. But there you go. These things work I don't know.

Should I sell them on? eBay No cassette. And of course, there's only one thing we're interested in what's inside. So let's uh, crack this thing open and see what we've got in here. As I said I think the board looked conformally coded through that I can see quite a sheen on it and uh, that would.

hey, here we go, it's going to pop open nice and easy. I suspect Taada. Oh there it is. it's inside a Dictaphone On first glance, this actually looks quite well engineered.

I like it. there's you know, the single top front piece we got a little. is that a02 watt? or wouldn't be a 2? W I don't think 2 W speaker there and uh, nice looking board down the bottom. there nice looking cassette mechanism I like it LCD is individually screwed into there but uh, this looks really rather neat H Going to have to delve a bit further.

get that main board out. Looks like this front button PCB here just lifts directly out bya these clips. so if you lift that up there we go that's well engineered with the retention clips and everything there. I Rather, rather like that.

That's a nice bit of work mechanism here. might come out in this plastic holder, might pop out in one bit, or is that tied into No. Looks like it might be tied into the metal bracket there for the tape transport mechanism. You can see the heads there and there's some useful cogs in there.

Maybe if you're into that sort of thing, there you go. that's rather neat. I Like that and uh no. I think it's will require a bit more percussive maintenance.

This is an interesting cable clamp mechanism here. It's a wire solded onto the PCB There, there's a there's actually a hole for it down in there and uh, it's just bent over like that to hold down the wires. I've never seen that before. Now the LCD module is interesting.

It has a large quad flat pack on the bottom. don't know what that is May It's probably some custom device, but by the number of wires going to this thing, it almost makes me suspect that it's um, like a self-contained thing that maybe just counts pulses up and down and uh, well, maybe well, no, cuz we saw it display cast didn't we for cassette? so I just curious to know what that, uh, what's on that interface there as this thing. um, you know, uh as this thing uh plays along and uh does stuff. maybe H we could probe that.

perhaps? let's pop out the tape transport mechanism here. This: it's got a little, uh, flat cable on it. There we go. that's what's under the bottom of it.

tiny little uh DC motor, little pulley, Cog interface board and the heads on the top. There's not uh, much to that at all, but that's a uh, nicely engineered little mechanism there. I Like it. There we go.

I've managed to lift most of it out and we got full access to the main board. Now what this little interface board up here is is, um, that that is an optic iCal encoder in there and that counts the pulses as this thing rotates. So that's for the tape counter. Because if we go down here and look at the uh, well down on the silk screen on the board down there, it tells you it's a real pulse.

There it is. real pulse interface. So you get a pulse for each rotation or quarter rotation or something like that. um which I don't know.

might presumably go directly to that LCD module. or it could be controlled by the H8 microcontroller there. Not uh, entirely sure there it could. uh, could work either way there.

but this is a rather nice board. I like it predominantly um surface mount the odd through hole uh Power component up here to220 there's a glass fuse in there. there's a large radial C couple of large radial caps there. but apart from that, it's a a fairly modern, fairly modern layout and design.

I Really think that's rather, uh, rather neat. And these pots here? these are I don't know, Are these like custom pots? I've never seen anything like that before, so they're rather unusual. They're staggered at different Uh offsets there across the board for the four uh wiper pots on the front panel. So I don't know, don't know what's going on there.

And by the way, no, this isn't uh, conformally coded. it's just one of these high Sheen uh solder Mass um, which you know does at first glance does kind of look conformally coded, but if it was board was conformally coded, um, you'd see the coding. You know it's actually sprayed on to the board after conformal coding process sprayed onto the board after the components are loaded. so you'd expect to see it all over the chips and everything.

but it's not. so it's just the solder mask. Now, this is rather interesting. this: Cog here if we flip this up.

sorry, uh sorry, no, it's this. It's this Cog here. So it's this one here. If we flip it up, there's actually a component.

What looks like a little mysterious box component down there on the board. but it's not. It's a stuck on rubber. Um, you know it's just.

uh. you can see the gunk on the side of it there and it's actually sto stuck down and it's dampening the bottom of the Cog there. So the bottom of that Cog just sits on that little spongy base on the board. and we have down in there a mysterious little single in line package.

You don't see too many of those, uh, quite rare. I'm not going to bother Googling that I'm going to assume um, by the Uh type of the Uh type of package and the electrolytic cap surrounding it, that that's probably the Uh power amplifier for the speaker would be my guess. And there's a couple of adjustment pots here. one for tape speed.

uh, one down in here for the Uh bias as well. That's for the tape bias level. and uh, that is about all she wrote. There's a freestanding resistor there.

Look at that. They've uh, had that sticking out of the board like that for power dissipation reasons. It looks like they, uh, kind of goofed that one in terms of the footprint. and they've made a correction for that late in the state, late in the game.

Uh, what else have we got? Not much else. There's not a huge amount in there, so we got a couple of regulators that one down, there is a 7805. uh, not a huge amount extra mount on the heat sink. You can see the thermal compound down in there couple of caps.

Not terribly exciting. Well, no, it makes more sense for that chip there to be the speaker driver. cuz there's the speaker connector. It's an 6607? no idea.

But uh, yeah. So that little, uh, uh, single in line chip? Probably some little, uh, you know, some some sort of a amplification device. Some sort of analog. um, usually these are like, um, you know, an amplifiers analog, bunch of discreet, matched, uh, transistor pairs or something like that.

So there you have it. That's a quick, uh, sneak peek inside a genuine dictaphone tape recorder. and I Scored six of the buggers. What a score in my today's dumpster diving effort I Like it.

and uh, this isn't a full tear down. it's not tear down Tuesday It's dumpster diving. Wednesday If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. and if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eev blog.

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