Hi welcome to everyone's favorite segment Mailbag now in 4k resolution. That is why it's a thing apparently. I'm a shot on my new Sony Hey check, what is it h RX N x8 II camera using my rode shotgun mic so let's get straight into it. Alma Thank you very much Nobody Never never nobody from Kaalavela here in Sydney I did already sort of slice this open I didn't know it was a mail bag but so I didn't really look at it.

so I know what it is though and distinct armor. Early sixties smell Oh Throw you a vow fanboys, they all go wild. Check it out. it's the AVO model 7 from that a date from the early 60s Wow The universal AVO meter.

What do people still swear by these things? They're probably still used in a few Unis somewhere. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Also, some people will think of the universal AVO meter. This is the classic Model 7 mark.

- thank you very much now. This model ate rubbish. Um, and a lot of people think this is the Ducks guts of analog multimeters and does. even though as much as I love analog meters, I'm not a particular AVO fanboy actually.

Um, yeah I was never born and bred on them I always thought they were a little bit ugly compared to the triplets and the Simpsons and etc with their single rain switch. I was never a fan of like the dual range which I was never a fan of how the mirrored cutout looked like this I want to see the whole thing? You know, a bit of a square window? meet a fan boy. and anyway, a lot of people swear by this. these are, you know.

Still, it's kind of sought after this to this day. people still want these babies and don't look. It is absolutely enormous. It's just huge.

but hey, a vote were the standard for a lot time. I think they started in 1923 or something like that and these were like the industry standard meter. it was one of the most accurate as one of the ones that had the most functionality I Mean look, this one even has capacity ie. capacitance.

They were pretty robust. they had a literary mechanical I cutout protection here and you know, just a lot of functionality built into this and you could tweak the things you know cures for like the gainer, the thing on the capacitance and the high resistance. and P you can adjust some of the stuff in the resistance range to compensate for the aging battery in the thing and stuff like that, so you really had to know how to use. These are a bit more a bit Dicky er compared to some of your more traditional analog meters.

let's tear it apart. Oh, look at all the usage instructions. Fantastic. And of course it's made in the old dime.

It needs some of those weird-ass batteries that will likely discontinue before you were born. What's an extra screw in there, huh? Alright, that seemed to be the ticket. Yeah. I Think she's gonna come out.

so this is a first. Let's have a look. Ah, clean as a whistle. Look at that Beautiful.

Do you love the transformer? Ah thing of beauty. I'm glad I can bring you this in glorious 4k. Not that you really needed to see these details, but check out the one. No, it's not mega farad.

it's one microfarad. MF d that's how they. That's how they labeled them back in the day. 400 volts working thank you.

Very much so. to be is that probably a like a big film capital they had to bolt that sucker down. That's just beautiful. And there's the meter movements actually are exposed.

If you take a look at that in there, you can actually can actually see it. Come on. So I'm actually not a particular fan of being able to actually see that. see the meter movement flapping around in the breeze in there.

And here's our first knob. and that was the P knob on there. Like that and you can see No. P doesn't stand for potentiometer, but you can see that was just some nichrome resistance wire down there and a big contact swinging around and there.

Just what they're just that almost looks like solder wick. well that just been around there and then eventually connect it down the bottom. huh? There's the meter movement in there for your fishy and our toes. I'll just swing that around.

Beautiful and you can see the other knob down here. This is the cue one that I showed you in it. It doesn't engage. In fact, it doesn't spin unless you pull it down like that and then it will engage and lock in place like that.

That's like solder braid. It looks for all the world like solder wick, doesn't it? That's terrific. Anyway, more Nichrome resistance. Why are they I assume it's like Nichrome.

that's you know. Par for the course. But yeah, is it's all very mechanical, isn't it? Oh oh Houston, we have a problem that boy has come loose. I Assume this is a tag strip.

but yeah, it's just don't know where it's come from. One of those. It's fine to fascinate in how they do solder the wire under there. Then they kind of wrap it around and tie like a little knot in there.

Yes, what are we doing that for some sort of strain relief or something? I Don't know. It's kind of weird. and here we can see this has to be our shunt resistors. Take a look at these.

the big copper band going over there like that they solder on it, hold their tongue at the right angle, solder it exactly the right point to give you your current shunt resistor so that would be your highest one. What is it? 10 amps or whatever the highest range is, then that would be the next lowest range. and then to see the gauge of the wire getting thinner and thinner as we go along. and then in 4k.

Can anyone count the strands in 4k? Come on, you can do it. Sumner Is going to do that. Do my best to show you the range switch down there. There you go.

and after all these years, all these decades still hasn't corroded. It still probably works the day it was came out of the factory and you can see that it is is jewel white down in there. Yeah, you can see the extra wipe contact on the bottom. Hopefully neat.

Check out the big ass reference resistors in there. Well one, thank you very much for playing pan climatic pan Climatic. My model Resistors Fantastic! 148 K Thank you very much. What do they be? like? Half a percent or something? probably? Anyway, you can see it's like classic, older like Tag Boy.

Well it's not really. It's not really tag board. It's like panel board construction. I'm sure there's a there.

sure there's a name for it. You know they have the like turret based connections coming out here. The turrets actually make some connections on the bottom. you might, you know we've got some that's probably the most modern looking I component in the air.

Is that no doubt carbon resistor? There got a hundred puffs plus minus 15% Thanks for playing Lemco. Anyone remember Lemco? Um, but yeah. basically sort of a combat really tag board. It's like sort of turret board or something.

I'm sure somebody's are pointed out the real name for that before. So if you're wondering what the Transformers for, well that's doing all the AC tapping, you'll notice that there's got to be multiple taps on here. Yep, all down in there to get the different taps off the different ranges for the AC That's how they do it with that transformer. Neat.

For those interested in such things, there's our electromechanical cutout down in here and this is all you know. an entire be like bimetallic strips and whatnot to actually engage and then latch off if it got an overload. So there you go. That's the model Seven mark to Universal AVO meter, which was probably the industry-standard multimeter back in the day.

It's before my time and I just never had the same affinity for them. Yeah, but I'm sure a lot of people do and I can understand why. You know they were a beautiful meter for the day and it had the performance to match for an analog meter anyway, but it's just all hand built in the old ah love it. and yes, it does smell like 1961.

oh hi, but sorry, this bad boy is actually busted. feed voltage into it. it doesn't move diddly squat. So yeah, we're gonna have to leave that for another.

Maybe that could be a vintage repair video? Hmm oh look, let's put insulation on the sides and why they blew to me and glues come off after all these decades. But check this out. Look, it's like we got the spring battery contacts. There's no wiring from the front panel and they just actually connect to these three spike terminals down here.

Look at that. It's pretty clever. Now we're talking. Check it out.

Giant flippy display. We've had flippy dots on the eevblog before. They were tiny compared to this beast. Look at it, thank you very much.

I Gabyong 92 on the Eevblog forum who basically was gonna toss these out and I said yeah Oh have him ever play around with it Anyway, turned up in quite a large number of big boxes not actually a mail bag item so was going to do a separate video on this and I did actually shoot some footage and posted a couple of photos on Twitter I think and we'll take a quick look at them but I wanted to like hook it up to like an Arduino and actually get them working. So I've got actually hack the controller that comes with it which is totally crusty. Stick around in a minute and I'll show you. oh man, it's probably the worst solder and you've ever seen.

You'll sit in 4k. Fantastic! Um, these are like these outdoor displays. These ones are well I think they're made in the you are they're made in beige or New York by Staver Co Inc there we go and there. I bet they're from an Australian company who does like horse racing events signage like outdoor signage for horse racing.

So these were used like a the tote board or the race time board or something like that and they come in different version that's obviously a seven segment display one and they come in like little single rows like that and are you just combine them all to give like a matte time and you know race times and odds and things like that I don't know whenever it is for the horse races but very cool. Flippy dots I Love them! This is gigantic things and unfortunately you can see all this black like mask. It's not solder mask, it's like some other like matte black coating so that outdoors that they just appeared like a black of background. They want the contrast between the yellow and the black and that's all just peeled off and horrible stuff.

Anyway let's have a quick look at the controller they came with because it's shocking these aren't flippy dots. these are flippy dots. haha Look at that! We've seen these ones before and these were very cute and tiny. I Love them! These aren't gigantic outdoor ones, they're absolutely enormous.

What are they? Let's have a squares. almost 40 millimeters, 38 millimeters diameter. They're absolutely enormous and their work exactly the same. but these are going to be higher voltage, higher current.

You know, higher mass in terms of our flipping them over stuff like that. So we're talking some serious grunt to drive a big matrix of these. especially. you know, a big connected matrix and you can see how all that black it's not solder mask, it's you know, some sort of you know matte black coating is just worn off and it just flakes off if I touch that just gets all over my fingers.

It's horrible stuff. Speaking of horrible, yeah, look on the back. Oh crusty. But if you think that's pretty piss-poor why do you see the controller? Anyway, here you go: Steve A Co Inc signal X is crap I Got on my fingers and here's the controller for this thing.

It's pretty how you doing. Look at this. We've got ourselves a toroidal mains transformer here. Yes, it's just got some bullet connectors there to connect it to some mains cable and well, we sever.

You know, at least I've added some heat, shrink and cable-tied it down. but Super Tech Electronics is that just erasing? Queensland There you go. That explains it. Queensland Say no more.

sorry, that's just a little Australian in joke. Anyway, is probably like a reasonable solution for this because you're going to want you know your row column driver cards. Got a power supply card here, row column driver cards and then a processor card which says just stuck on how you're doing style on the outside. They obviously didn't design this.

This is obviously an off-the-shelf controller card. There you go for you 6809 fanboys. We've just got some Io interface serial interface some RAM and ROM and you know, a few miscellaneous chips and obviously I'm designed to an existing design border off-the-shelf one that they chose designed to plug into an existing rack and they just basically just didn't bother. They're just interfacing via the I/o over here and that's that's pretty much it all you need it for.

It's fine, but you've got to see this backplane. Look at this and I'll get the macro lens out. I'll show you these solder joints up close because they are horrific that is not as dry as a dead dingos donger that is drier than a dead dingos donger. Unbelievable.

Yeah that Wow the hell were they using like a plumber's soldiering iron or something. This is just awful that has to win some sort of award. Anyway, they're like like the bad Flux of the Day award. Unbelievable.

I Suspect they'd like someone might have had to go with these two because these ones over here are a bit better. but you know, not exactly. Yeah. Stella But compared to the other two, it almost looks like they've been reworked.

Unfortunately, it doesn't get any better for the row and column driver boards. Look at this. Unbelievable. Like just like that is shocking.

That is just terrible. Muriel Have you ever seen something so bad? How do these things ever work? I mean the original production soldering by the looks of it was, you know, not great. I'm although it's probably okay if you. maybe if they cleaned all the flux off, might be able to do the business.

but whoever's repaired these, what are they using like a 500 degree plumbers on or something? Unbelievable. Anyway, it's just got the expected you Ln2 double O 3 Darlington Driver transistors their drive. It looks like they just driving some larger MOSFETs up here and then it looks like we just got the single rail here and then of course the large current trace are supplying all that. and there's your other power rail in there for the basically logic level into a MOSFET driver and then it doesn't get any better with the column driver board over here.

Although it does look a bit the you know soldering does look a bit neater and we've got some digital action happening. Here are some 4000 Series CMOS thank you very much once again, are driving some MOSFETs up here. We've got the back EMF our diodes as well. We had those on the other board and it's a bit better there and House of Brooke that's the company who obviously designed these that is like an Australian company is into all these gaming.

you know, outdoor venue, gaming, type our display systems anyway. So no doubt the house Abrooke designed these row column driver boards or they had someone actually design them. probably wrote the system, software, designed the rack and built the rack and all that sort of stuff. and then the other.

The US company actually supplied the flippy dots and then, so this company was probably responsible for integrating the entire system and well, that's basically what they do. They provide these outdoor venue display things I think they're still going. They might have been bought out by a company or something I don't think they ran run under that name anymore. but so I hope who's ever in charge of all this is er, not in the business anymore because that's it's.

just terrible. Like this system design is probably like it's okay. it's what you'd expect. these are low volume stuff.

it's not massive volume so you know and then in the layout of the boards and everything's fine. and the backplane is you know everything's okay and sort of tack in the processor board on the side is fine although I would have you know integrated that into the rack. but you know it's okay for sort of like these low volume sort of. you know, one-off contract jobs or something like that.

That's quite common in the industry. but yeah, the manufacturing of it just totally let it down. and then there a pair let it down even further. Unbelievable.

Then the system was just all connected with these large pin pitch ribbon cables like this and they just daisy chain between modules and plug into the row column driver. for this, they probably had more than one rack. Of course, depending on the size of the display system probably you know, join those together somehow in maybe a larger computer-controlled system unit or something. This processor board might have just been responsible for like you know, converting you know serial ASCII data into the five by seven display matrix or something like that.

So they just plug all those onto the back of here and crush your fingers. There you go. Hope you weren't complete with bodge wire and dodgy soldering and flight, horrible flux residue and everything else. And and yeah, that's what you got at the races.

It's going on the trots. that's what you look at that. So I was hoping to hook this system up to like an Arduino or something and then just you know, sort of write some software just to I had to slay some stuff on it these large flippy joints. but they're in such horrible condition and you know I'd ever have to design and build my own driver boards? or try and you know, hack into the existing driver boards in here which shouldn't be too hard.

but jeez, I it's just slow things, just so crusty it's not worth it. I don't think thank you very much Oswald Brzezinski um in Orbis in Deutschland I Don't want my dueling viewers? Um, let's have a look what Oswald has sent in tongue in 4k how's the mic? I don't know I'm just using the rode shotgun. sorry if I've like goofed up any of the settings I'm still learning the camera and stuff like that. We have a note wah, video enhancer and audio mixer 2 minute tell you and oh no oh no we're gonna have sauce a Krusty Burger Solarii 9 Ah let's have a look at it thank you very much.

Oswald from the YouTube channel brought you which means Brett you of course why not. Free tutorial and reviews and random stuff channel there it is for those playing along at home. check it out, it's in German a hammer video enhancer + audio mixer buildin. She laughs in my fluent German Tom Misha Misha guide I don't know I have no idea.

Geez, State apart. got a lot of the old to screw pack tech cases like this pack takes a brand name. They went under various different names back in the day but in Australia they were caught they they saw the pack tech ones @j Car and Tricky Dicks and other places out Ronix and that's kind of like a generic name for him so let's whack it open. We're in like Flynn G's is not much single signs of layout.

Look at that pretty spot and cheese. They've left some decent leads on those trainees. They're heavenly Wow Nothing like long legs on your. It's great.

Get your probes in there. you have easy hooks and oh yeah, probes and hook. I'm straight on fantastic for debugging. Love it.

I Assume that these are just large caps I Don't know the RDA brand? is that a German thing? I Just assume that they are larger literally. Caps: I Just haven't seen like the red case. like, like almost like a solid case. Usually they have like, you know, the plastic on the outside and whatnot.

and even the other electrolytic here. you know I don't know that they're the Phillips ones, but I haven't seen those in a long time. They're the metal cans with the with the clear plastic little condom on them. anyway.

nice-looking mains. PCB mount mains trenny there. you can still get those. there are Beauty 78 one - there's nothing else going on me.

What is a discrete transistor? Audio And like amplifiers, it does. It does some filtering. probably right. and that's uh, that's what these caps are in here for.

doing some, you know, the filtering AC You like some bypass? Oh I love the extension knobs there and it's pretty schmick. Um, yeah. look the rods pop out the back neat. And for ten bucks at the local food store like do I even want to I don't know I've never heard of a Parkside is that a German thing? I Just like I don't want to, It's mined in, is it? So that's actually means here.

What? What are these three things on here is? it does. Does it do something else? What is it was it? Wow We are. this is. it's got the dispenser.

It's a I Was gonna say is that like it does it or does it spool out the soda for you I don't know. All right I thought C I Thought these were buttons or something. They're not what sir. And where's my sponge? So we've got our sponge there.

We've got a big chisel tip which looks like the biggest load of garbage I've ever seen. Look at that. but that's not even plated like the what is that just like Chrome or something and these pissant little spools of solder. The what use is this? Unbelievable.

Welcome to the 4k Sponge Porn Channel! Who the hell designed this and how is this a thing? This looks like a space modulator like oh okay, so that was a spare tip. So you get a dodgy brothers. oh that is ridiculous. Look at it like that looks like I got like minimum four six.

Like you're gonna turn all the way around here to a hundred. Geez, that's a long way to a hundred isn't it? It's a long way at the top if you want to rock and roll and up to like it does. maybe up to 480 if it's bloody well regulated at all. Unbelievable I'm sure it hates up I Just don't care about its performance I Why I want to use this thing? Well, look at this attention to detail.

They put a big metal plate in the bottom of that. give it a bit of half. Too good on you. Um, here's our mains cable coming in.

Okay, it's got a Cable Grobart. It's going in here. at least put some heat shrink on there. Well, it's actually quite recently consumed and constructed If what you want is a Bloody Non temperature controlled, a triac controlled Pn O 506 for those playing along at home.

Oh yeah, just a tryout controlled. Which means that they are just chopped up the AC waveform and drive the element. which is where is it? Yeah, it's going up to here. There you go.

they're driving the elephant. At least they're running the mains into there like that. So you know the tip would be mains earthed, but it's just chopping up the AC waveform. There's no our temperature sensor in the tip at all and it's just it's just how are you doing.

You know? set the temperature, cross your fingers. hope your mains doesn't very enter. you know, hope it's kind of sort of within plus minus 50 degrees. I Don't care how cheap these things are, just do not get an on temperature consult.

Rolled soldering iron. Just just don't I'm not even gonna power that up even though it's actually you know it. Like, apart from the quality of the you know lack of quality in that in the in the metals and then the tip is just a joke. you know it does.

like the case and and the handle and everything is feels all right there. that almost feels like a you know a silicon type out of rubber. It's not. but it's very it's very nice rubbery feel like everything like everything's done okay but it's just a non temperature controlled you know SCR triac based controller.

but I guess if that's what you want? okay passes. They have the hide to call this thing a soldering station pulled soldering stations temperature controlled. What a load of rubbish. Thank you very much.

Brumby from the Eevblog forum for ascending this one in. he actually said in like an iPhone that I could cuz I don't use those newfangled iPhone things for the eevblog 1:21 GW meter app development and yes it's working that's now in beter and people are using the app anyway. Thank you very much for that. So it also says it's something else in here which I haven't really looked at yet.

so let's have a walk. Yeah, helping this baby. hits 88 miles per hour. You're gonna see some serious.

This is great. Look at this. Oh I'm not sure what vintage that puppy is but anyway, it's handy. Cam Video eight Pal none that NT SC never twice the same color.

rubbish um and stark contrast to the NX ad that I'm using at the moment. Wow Video eight Awesome Upside: that obviously can't be a 2-minute teardown. That's gotta be a separate teardown. We love Vintage I've done I've done was it a Sony camera I'll try and link it in at the end I did a some sort of old vintage camera.

This was probably more up-to-date than the one I did before, but that could be interesting. Thanks Brumby thank you very much Elector for having another suck of the serve. They've been on the mailbag many times, so have a squeeze. We've got Elector Magazine SP, 32, Design Contest, etc etc.

sorry I don't read Elector anymore. Um, I Go. It never really did because it wasn't It often wasn't available here. So growing up I just didn't like, you know? I just didn't get it I Just had the local magazines.

yes, it's Elector hailing all the way from Europe with a little something for your mail bag which you love. By the way, we just tried to contact you on your hate email address but it got rejected. Yes. I Do actually have a hate mail address? What is it? Hate a TV punch like I can't remember it's on the website I mean people do since I'm comments through to my hate mail I Do actually read them.

It's just part of the fun of doing the job, you know? Anyway, what we got here, This is not. This is not a book. This is not a book. Very excited.

It's a Nixie tube kid. Look at that. It's a clock kid. cool.

but that might be a good one to build with. Sagan perhaps. Anyway, I'll link it in down below. We'll take a quick look at that.

but obviously I'm not going to assemble it for this mailbag. Thanks little Okay, let's have a quick squeeze at this tube clock. yet. Check it out.

Spared no expense if. Elephant for elephant. Elephant. Elephant 14.

Yeah, calm. Elephant 14 from now on. Peril. Might that sounds good? Don't know why I didn't think of that years ago.

I'm dead power module. Jeez, that's that's gilding the lily isn't it? Um, there you go. Oh, we got some of the old school our drivers I think we do. Yes.

p32 very nice I Just love real resistors like that. Fantastic. Or your basic semiconductors. got another little power brick in there.

not sure and what else we got. We got our tubes. so a squiz Phillips oh well, no this. Russian rubbish.

Oh look they like, oh they must be like a decimal point are they? they're using those as a if for they've clock display I can't fold the damn thing out Anyway, there's a least I haven't gone lids like they've gone completely completely vacuum. So here's the tubes, no doubt. Russkies were the Masters All right that beautiful ENB Twenty-twos 92 pretty recent Cold War was over by then, wasn't it? Whoa. Hang on, they get shot at 4k.

Welcome to the 4k Nixie Tube porn channel Whoa. Beautiful. Look at that singer Beauty Joy Forever Oh At least they go for the matte black heaven. I don't mind the matte black like glossy rubbish.

and they've obviously got a multiplex design because you can see them all connected in parallel like that unlike my wood video which I might have to link in and where I've done auto routing of a board with more digits than this on the Nixie tube subscription counter video and just not enough pins to drive it. So obviously they're multiplexing this little baby. Anyway, that looks like a neat kit. Maybe I'll assemble that with our Sagan sometime.

Perhaps that could be a decent introduction. Nice through-hole board. Great. I'll link it in down below if you're looking for a Nixie tube clock, tell you what.

I Haven't looked at Elector in a while, but I'm pretty impressed with the content and the you know the presentation, the layout and everything else with it. This is really quite impressive these days. I Like it. there's a familiar name Robert Lacoste He's been around forever and there's like great articles on in this case.

So wireless protocols and stuff like that it looks like ZigBee and yeah, Laura went and wearable leg controllers. This is by the star for an Elector Labs by the looks of it. but there are and this is the Elector editorial team. But of course you could still get contributed articles.

tam Hanna from Germany I Presume this as a contributed article and still a fandom. Oliver Chrisette from France Still fantastic way to why: Gets something published and does showcase your projects and put in your resume. This is great. There's an article on EMC Limit values C declaration on products and does stuff like that.

It's only short, but geez, hey, not bad I'm thoroughly impressed by this. Well done thank you very much Person unknown: I'm just from East Eastern Creaky. Um, so let's have a squiz Eastern Kriegers just up the road kind of thing. There's a Eastern Creek Raceway in there a few times.

Go carts around Eastern Creek right Race white. About 18 months ago I cleared out the premises of a company called Pandora should we name them which used a company which used to manufacture high-end color grading equipment in the film and television industry. The Pandora XC system allows studios to color correct video footage in real time up to 2k resolution. In the late 90s and early 2000s, these are the scrapped.

PCBs Wow Silence Bad boys Wow Let's take a look at this. Oh, it's got that crusty old PCB Thrust the old PCB smell All right. What about that old? These are gods vertexes and wow, the whole bunch on here got PCB porn thank you very much Carl And he has no exact price and he's been told that a complete Pandora Pixi system would have cost around 1 million dollars in the late 90s. Wow Unbelievable.

Now it's worthless. There's the details. thank you very much. Carl Let's take a look at these boards that are there from systems that cost around a million pounds or something like that in late 90s.

Different 2k resolution. Incredible for the day. They designed everything in-house apparently including all the software and everything else. Look at these badass Xilinx is in there Wow They will cost a fortune and a Xcr 40 85 I don't know you could go look up the up No Xcv 1000 I Don't know where they top of the line for the day but anyway, that's a channel SCC board for whatever that is like a little are there IDT Rams are they possibly buffer memories? are some smaller Xilinx processes.

Once again, this is very common just to do the power. You wouldn't bother roll in your own, you just get like an off the shelf you know, switch mode module that just does the business and whack some caps on there because you'll want to spend all your engineering doing there engineer in time doing the rest of this. Wow There you go. just cut the bypasses on the bottom 99 vintage Pandora Pluto There you go.

So obviously we've got our they I presume like they like RGB color in or something like that perhaps I don't know what do we got there, it's an hour Tara job so they've mixed I'll Terror and Xilinx so obvious. Maybe they had different teams doing this and they you know one team favored out here are over Xilinx or they actually chosen because of the specific requirements on there. Once again, these little off-the-shelf power supply modules very common and you can salvage these out. These are very useful to salvage from these boards that these of course wouldn't have been manufactured in high volume.

You know they would have sold. you know, hundreds of systems. You know if they are lucky, maybe thousands of systems something like that, but they cost you know so much money than to actually develop these things. It's just phenomenal.

that yeah, price was no object in terms of the hardware. A Genom GS 29, 71 a I don't know. Look that one up. Serious about the pair on here, weren't they look at that 5 volt in and then get in point nine, one point eight and 3.3 volt rails.

but that's serious bit of juice. Don't know what this is, but look Raytheon parts I'm interesting I they like it. Is it a Raytheon chipset or is it a Raytheon like gate array or I don't know I Thought they would have stuck with the the the Xilinx is that they got in there if they needed a Gatorade or anything like that. Once again, it looks like they got some IDT me.

you know that'd be SRAM probably. Ah yeah, almost certainly. and interface stuff. Good old zero Power ram, the Lithium battery backup built into there.

Oh I Love those little I'm matrix LED displays. They're fantastic. Yeah, this looks like a some sort of you know pink ball. It's a pet control card so it doesn't actually say prototype, but it just you know, looks a bit more sort of do-it-yourself than the other ones.

Were more of a more what I expect out of a production product Vertex to Pro that would have cost a pretty penny back in the day. Um, so that's obviously some sort of our daughter board. We've got high speed board to board interconnects there, but yeah, that's pretty much all it is. is a big-ass FPGA surrounded by some memory.

They've got another Spartan down there. But yeah, that's all it is. just custom processing. Check this out.

Isn't that beautiful? Classic pin grid array expander. Basically, they're designed custom design to go onto the existing pin grid array sockets on the board. so you plug it in and then replace them with stuff in this case surface mount. What Are they? some? Some sort of memory? Something like that.

So obviously to convert an older design upgrade, they probably couldn't get these chips anymore. There was too much effort to redesign the mainboard, so they just designed this. It was a yeah I've done that before. guilty as charged, but it works.

It's brilliant. Bingo. We found the main board that this. plugs into.

once again this B and C's they don't label them RGB or anything like that. are they like SDI inputs for video I'm not not entirely sure, but there we go. Another big vertex to Pro on there and I did module - there you go. designed to have a separate one on there and oh into international rectifier modules.

and I do like that closely spaced array of tandem caps. Oh yeah, buta just love my fingers over there. Beautiful 74 point one, seven, five, eight Megahertz crystal. They probably had to get that one custom, but it just goes to show what badass technology can get at these.

You know practically unknown companies in the industry that that have these niches, but they need to develop these. Absolutely leading bleeding edge at the time. Hardware Fantastic! The design team for something like this would have been huge, would have been great to work on. This is just getting crazy.

Carl said in so many boards I can't possibly show you them all and I go over them all in any detail but it's just nuts. Look at it. Wow. look at all the IDT memory on the back.

this is interesting look. couldn't get enough power through the connectors or they just didn't bother. That's what I got. plus five plus five and plus 3.3 volts.

They're coming in separately to power this bad boy. Wow What is that? That's a that's a Motorola job XC five six three. What's it like? Is that some sort of gate array? Or is that a some sort of Motorola processor or something? or some custom job? Because considering that they're using all the Xilinx FPGA is, you know you wouldn't bother. You know, engaging someone to do a custom ASIC unless you absolutely have to.

You know, like power didn't seem to be a problem. You know, high-volume manufacturing. the price down different wouldn't be an issue with something like this. So yeah, I'd be very surprised to find a custom ASIC on something like this when you can just run it all inside I am FPGA is unless they weren't as capable as they need it at the time anyway.

and apparently all this badassery is just for like color correction. like I Just find it absolutely remarkable that it requires this much hardware for color correction. Granted, it's up to 2k, which was phenomenal back then. but Wow Anyway, thank you very much.

Carl This is just Wow. I'm gonna keep I can't I'm definitely going to keep these boards. these. these just, you know.

beautiful. Your frame these and put them on a wall. Gorgeous. Oh stop it.

Just stop it. The grunt on that's incredible. More BNC inputs or outputs. Um, don't know.

You'd have to look at the individual chips. You go to town on this all day. Oh, here's our prototyping board. Check out this.

Yeah! Pandora color process engine. That's somebody's original hack. Fantastic Now first 4k postcards. Check it out.

Sweet, thank you very much Nordic Semiconductor who is I'm sure he's having another sucker. the salve sorry did that like clip the audio like we're gonna rip things open I see it unlike the audio waveform I can see it like flipping and peeking occasionally I try and do that anyway. I'm enough enough 3d in RF ready we've got a Smart Remote what's a Smart Remote I Guess we'll find out it's good thing about Mart Oh postcards 4k postcards Beautiful. Fantastic.

look at Bobby Dazzler Alright, I hope they're zooming in correctly. The applications team at Nordic seminar like a senior with some of our latest developing kids. The Nordic thingy if there are things sensor kit for ki roll, what on earth is that so chocolate? its light, say they're like biscuity things. there's chocolate.

feel the chocolate density in that beautiful alright. And then the jab the jab Bucky it's got two peas on there anyway. that's like a mud that looks kind of like a mars bar kinda thing equivalent. Anyway, we eventually got the Nordic thing is she's there.

pretty weighty for what's in them. Um, thank you very much for the nibblies. I'm some kind of development kit and ah, right, cuz it's a module. It's got a rechargeable battery and all sorts of whiz-bang stuff in it.

Thank you very much Applications team at Nordic Semiconductor. Let's take a look at the Nordic thingy real quick. I've downloaded the app and that was pretty seamless. and here's little macho.

Let's check it out. I actually rather like it I just pried it out of this little rubber baby buggy bumper here which has just got the USB interface there and apparently it like you take it out and then Scott we can turn it on. Here we go. They say well yeah yeah there it is.

It's lit up blue so it's on now. I like the antenna how they've got that on the flat flex like that just sitting over the back. That's really quite nice. We've got ourselves a big fat lithium-ion cell in there or lithium polymer and I don't know what type of sensors are inside this thing, what it can do.

I Guess we'll find out. but anyway I do like the design of it. looks jazzy. Yeah.

flashy flashy. alright. I'll put it back see if we can now see what we get on the phone. Not sure why you need location to grant access to the Bluetooth Low Energy devices but the 121 GW our software did a similar thing.

it was just the the xamarin development environment or whatever it was just made us do that. So yep, connect to a thingy, let's connect to a thingy. let's scan location services. Yeah Ok and if say let's scan application services disabled so we have to enable location services on don't know what? Yeah, that seems a bit.

seems a bit rude. Anyway, scan hey, we got it. We got one. There you go Oh Green green.

It's just flesh green. There we go. Wait. we're connected.

That was seamless. Well done thingy. name. Get started, Tap to navigate to other services.

Yeah, ok. Temperature? yeah. Tap here to start/stop sensors. Okay, no workers there.

we go. We've got barometric pressure we've got temperature that seems about right, and humidity Oh Co2. Well, there you go. And what's that in parts per billion? I don't know.

and what's that Ffff? Is that like a color thing? Not entirely sure, but there you go. you're automatically. you. can you scale? Can we scale that? Yeah, that's a scaling said that scaling seems to work really up.

Can I Double tap to get it back to Center Not there you go up? No, No. I could do with some polish on the pinch and zoom works okay in some respects, not in others. I Want to I Want to scale that? I Want to order a scale? Can I just click on that on the side. not what's going on here.

A few Madadi Pressure and temperature. There you go. It's just an environmental sensor. Does that work quite nicely? Wonder what the battery life is? So rather like the design of the case.

I presume that that's like for some sort of lanyard you could like, you know, put some sort of lanyard cord through it and attach it. You know, hanging off your backpack or something like that? I Don't know. Does it do any internal data login? or do you have to get it like and continuously connect to your Bluetooth app? It would be a bit disappointing if it couldn't log internally. That would be nice and then extracted via.

USB Anyway, I Don't want to do a full review of this thing. I'll link it in down below if you want to check it out and they have a development board which looks quite comprehensive as well. You can reprogram the firmware in this apparently, so I'll link that one in as well. but yet take ages to go through and do a proper review of this thing.

But if you're wondering why they've got these little pads on top of even the pin headers over there, there are SMD placements. So that's the pick-and-place machine. Because these are actually surface mount, you'll notice that they're not through-hole surface mount surface mount connectors. So the pick-and-place machine comes along boop boop places and down like any other component and then they're reflow soldered.

Oh, I can make it toggle? No, probably heard it. There we go, it's and you can push that button through the rubber as well Nate Let's open a random crap Chinese eBay widget that no doubt cost like a dollar including postage. Let's check it out. I did still have some old footage of I was gonna do a separate video of just tearing down on a bunch of cheap eBay stuffs to put the footage somewhere.

Maybe I'll still release it. What's the help? I did I Guess their couch feet? That's all I Need a small couch? Be crazy Potato email bag I Know what's in here? If you haven't heard of Potato Semiconductor Corp Yes, that is their name Potato Semiconductor, you're in for a treat because Potato Semiconductor have cornered the market. and I'm sure it's an absolutely large market of gigahertz range gigahertz speed 7/4 series logic apparently and they've no doubt sending a few chips. Thank you very much.

We've got a what A 7404 and I can't read the other one. Wonderful and in a 31 for I'm not sure I Thought they only may last time I Looked, they only made 7400 series logic, but they they've got their own patented, presumably patented process technology that allows them to go up to like like a gig or more or something like that for a real niche application. So obviously that's gonna take a bit of. I I Really want to experiment with these to see if you can actually get these to operate at the claimed one gig 7400 series logic.

but I think we might have a hard time probing this. Might have to borrow a better scope Richard Ko thank you very much Ritchie Ko from Potato Semiconductor Corp And as far as I'm aware last time I checked Potato Semiconductor was like literally I Believe run out of the guys garage. So awesome! Thank you very much Mark Vince Vic V.i.c H from Rhine in Deutschland Deutschland Again, crazy be up mailbag in Jewish life Anyway, let's have a look at this. I kind of know I know what type of thing is in here but why? thanks for your help err as promised a small gift One of my projects from 2016.

Hope you enjoy! Thank you very much Mark and Rockabilly renascence Just what I wanted person unknown again thank you very much I'm we've just got a random electronic tool. could be anything could be a EE gadget could be a spanker meter. you don't know. It's the luck at the bail bag.

that's why I love it comes in a box. Why: I was inspired by Eevblog number 102 I do it yourself. constant dummy load. Do we have another dummy load? It's ridiculous.

Should have sold dummy loads. It's a billionaire by now. so this is Jasper's electronic load and it uses the Stm32 ARM Cortex A3 process at which Jasper says he gets for a dollar 72 on Aliexpress He couldn't make a cheaper himself and it's a great MCU No kiddin, It's just like to get that for a dollar seventy two. It kidding me kind of world are we living in? Unbelievable.

So there you have it. It's a computer-controlled our dummy load I won't - you know, power it up and play around with it. But if you want to check it out, then by all means a 12-bit ADC building to the Stm32 even though they're not the best ad C's in the world tomorrow, it's gonna be fantastic for a dummy load like this. Terrific design fair, you know? DC Supply Solar panels Battery capacity yeah, total power hits and can dissipate about 18 watts.

Play natural convection the software. The power is also limited to 18 watts. Yeah, that's smart. Definitely.

So there you go. The only issue I have with that is bit of rock a bye baby on there because the bottom pins haven't been soldered in the whole idea if these pins is that they're actually tin plated pins that are supposed to be soldered to large pads on there. So that's what I do for the next revision of the board. But the you know, like you don't have to do much now I may presume that's just a little.

Um LM three to four op amp just like my original design or something similar and that's all you need. You need a MOSFET You need an Op amp and you need something to set and read the voltage from that and that's all she wrote. Everyone should have One of these are constant current and in this case it can do. Because it's computer-controlled it can do constant power and constant resistance and you know as well as the constant current.

dummy low because it's computer-controlled You can do that. whereas the one I did which didn't have any smarts, it was just the Op-amp Then that was only constant current. But with a bit of software smarts, you can do the others neat. I'll link it in down below.

Check it out, it's on tindy Thank you very much Kanishka Son Yo I'm from Budapest in Hungary Hi to all my Hungarian viewers Ohio doesn't rank in the top 20 countries. Maybe let's have a look I Like the feel of this one. It's rain so it's going to go fast. Come on.

Ah, that's the bubble wrap inside that thing. dear Mr. Jones I Really hope you will enjoy. thank you very much.

What is it? Yeah, beautifully bow tied. What will I enjoy Will I enjoy it? Let's have a look. it's a very well protect it. What is it? Oh wow, yeah, I did was I clued up on this old Hungarian Electronics magazine? Check it out.

Anyone subscribed to that? anyone? Remember it's not particularly old. Does that know anyone? Or is that issue 91? Maybe that's issue 91. Is it? Does it have a date? No, it's it's 1991. Issue 1 There you go.

Wow I don't understand a word of it.