Hi what holiday gift giving season would be complete without mailbag? Everyone's favorite segment here on the Eev blog. so let's see what Santa Bought! Oh ladies fellow bloggers and coolest item First, this one has the triple whammy from everyone should know this name. Fran Blanch from Philly in the US if I know I sound like a local Philly not saying you know sorry I can't a Philadelphia accent but um I know what's in this one and sorry to the rest of the mailbag participants I'm sure your items are cool too, but I think this will be the coolest item because I know what's in it. and if you've seen FRS uh videos recently which her channel will be linked down below.

um then if you haven't subscribed, please do. It's well worth your while. Um yeah. I If you've seen her videos then you might know possibly what is in here.

Ta Oh I Can't wait I Can't wait. We'll read a letter. She's got a letter. but oh oh we have bits.

We have bits which we'll take a look at. Oh more bits. Jeez oh more bits. Hang on.

Hang on. Where? Where's the? where's the good stuff? Where's the good swag for you? That could be what I'm after. No, hang on, there's more. but wait, there's more.

No I think that's what we're after. Oh God it reminds me of like a cing container J cing container and I've got swag. There's a whole bunch of oh yeah, whole bunch of FR merch by the looks of it and anything else left in there. Jeez, she's really guilded the Lily here, but what's inside here? Let's take a look it it is.

Without even reading her letter, she's a bit rude of me. I should read the letter first, but no, let's get straight into the hardware cuz everyone wants to see it. This is Tada The Satin 5 LV DC Controller Board A Check it out! This is what uh Fran has been working on recently and she's got her videos of uh, got tons of views because of this. um how she's been reverse engineering this original Apollo era uh, Satin 5 Lvdc Controller awesome and she has sent it on to me because we're doing U She wants to do like a thing where it it passes from uh, you know, blogger to blogger basically and um, seeing what uh, people can do with it.

but this is the original one that she's been working on and she's finished all her videos uh which I said will be linked in down below and she's done a ton of reverse engineering work on this and well, I'm the next in line. Awesome! Thanks! Fran So quick look at some of the other stuff we've got here. We've got a bag of well, she's marked it for us. early 7s, leads and other stuff.

Awesome! I'll take a few of those out in a second and check it out. There's a little bubble display Aha! I've got one of those I think I've got a national I think it might be National semiconductor one I don't know I've got one somewhere. Uh, we've got. uh, what's this like Crazy man? What is it? It looks like a T92 translucent red package.

Is that like a a lead in a in a T? or some sort of uh no. yeah, it looks like a lead, but it looks of the dye in there. It looks like some sort of lead or something like that. I have to power that up.

Awesome! And uh. MPS A42 for Nixie Aha Nixie tube. uh, driver transistors. That's what must be in here.

We must have Electron tube NL these must be Nixie tubes Awesome I don't have any Nixie tubes. Yeah, there we go. Look at that. A beautiful oh that's just gorgeous.

We'll have to do a separate video lighting up and powering those suckers. Oh terrific. And some of her swag cards Fran Tone Electronics since 1994 has been delivered in great tone all over the world. manufacturing complete handmade analog effects built entirely in the United States are America Awesome! Yes, because FR into uh, music, and uh, effects.

um, pedals and stuff like that. Please correct me if I'm wrong. There you go. There's another card as well.

Oh, we forgot to see. there we go. some photos there, some of her stuff. There we go: Geranium Fuzz: fantastic original overdrive, lead tone ring modulator, classic amp Vio compressor and fat Distortion pink makes it sound I don't know.

more feminine perhaps? H they look almost good enough to eat. Look at that. brilliant and we have a typewritten letter. Look at this old typewriter.

Fantastic! I Love it! Dave Please finally close the Lvdc page assembly board which I have packed up carefully is missing some logic devices that I have pulled and depotted to deot at which we'll be going to Jerry as in Jerry Ellsworth with her scanning electron microscope Yes I think uh Jerry wanted a couple of the chips. so as you can as you saw, there's a few of the Uh chips missing off there. they do actually just slide out of the Uh pin holders in there that FR eventually uh found out I also enclosed some Choice relics from my Personal Collection of the earliest lead days. Fantastic Summer Monsanto Monsanto Oh I've never heard of Monsanto apart from the evil um, you know, genetically modified Food company Monsanto Oh, they're freaking evil.

Let me tell you. um, a fair child ad I Know that you have much fun putting some currents through those Little Wonders Awesome! Uh. I Also include a bag of my favorite lead of all time, a te ah tier 220 case red display. oh I'm going to have to power that up in a minute.

Real component porn. Crazy beautiful. You might also find some interesting odds and ends in the bag. it's just kind of stuff.

I Keep around here at the Fran lab. and yes, she does invite people to the Fran lab I believe. so check it out. Lastly, she's inclose stock of Jan Nixie tubes for you to Tinker with along with a bunch of those high voltage transistors you'll need for the cathode switching.

These displays work well on 200 300 volts DC and 50 Volts previs for the cathode. Woohoo! I've never played with Nixie tubes before so this will be fun. Um I'm very eager to see what you come up with the PCB It is a community project as I explained, so when you are done exploring the board, please pass it on to another engineer. If you want the board, then please, uh, contact me if you think you can, um, add some value after I've finished with it this Lvdc board.

Um, that's the whole idea. So I've got to choose someone to ship it to. It's my responsibility now with the agreement that they will pass it on to and so forth. like the World Cup of space artifacts and Dave that page assembly board, don't turn it on, take it apart.

Ah, it's already been hacked quite a lot. but yeah, sure, there's still more to be done. Well, there you go. I've put 20 milliamps through one side of this thing and uh, there's a tiny little uh lead dot I mean this is not bright at all I mean it just starts at I Can start seeing it at a couple of milliamps and uh, run into 20 milliamps I'm not sure what the maximum is on this sucker.

I'm sure I could sacrifice one to find out, but it's not very bright right at all and it comes out the side of that package. you can't uh, can't see anything on the bottom of course or on the uh top. Well, you can see a little bit on the top, but it's designed as a sidey Metter in a T92 package I'm not sure what the design intent for this thing was, but it's ancient. You know it's one of the first early Uh leads and uh, it's rather.

you know it's it's absolutely piss weak. So as far as modern leads go, it's uh, absolutely hopeless. But it is fascinating there it is up close and it is a three Le device. but I can't get the other lead to do anything so I'm not sure.

not sure what the deal is there. Fascinating why they designed it into a T92 case like that and is you know, have they attempted to put some sort of little uh lens on the top there? If they have, it's not doing much at all. Maybe that's just a regular molding process of the transistor I don't know. and that's our Nixie tube.

the NL 5961 made in the US OFA and uh wow look at the construction of that puppy. very nice. Is that a no? that can't be a date code? It's not 80. It wouldn't be 86 would it? But uh yeah, look at that Beautiful.

That's going to look awesome when it's all lit up a can't wait. Definitely have to separate video on that. There's a closeup view inside one of the depotted chips on the LV DC and you can see all this in Fran's video which I'll linking down below. She's x-rayed them and depotted and uh, reverse engineered and confirmed the Um circuitry in there.

you can see the D of course it's all Dio transistor logic. all old school Dtl stuff. I Mean, there's nothing serious here, but like in Ter, you know, uh, in terms of you know, processor technology or anything like that. These are just, you know, discrete uh, diodes? uh, basically.

and uh, discrete resistors in a package so you can see. the Apollo Era technology was not a challenge in. well, it was probably a challenge just creating the um, you know, the Silicon there, the individual uh dodes on the small scale, and the resistors on a chip level like that cuz you can see that there's no other uh, actual Parts on this. no passive Parts on this, but they've integrated that into the chip.

but that wasn't the issue actually getting them that small. The issue was actually interfacing with the rest of the system, getting them onto a bloody PCB and out through this huge multi-way connector down here and into the rest of the system, So each one of these chips didn't do much at all. There's only you know, a a handful. at most of you know, a diode transistor logic in there.

you know, a couple of Gates or something like that. at most, some inverters and things like that. FR Uh, decoded a couple of the chips and and figured out what they do. and they're nothing more than sort of, you know, the equivalent of uh, you know, modern, sort of uh, TTL uh, type 4,000 series type, uh, logic really.

except with Dtl. So really, you know, or they got a bunch of trans, you know, handful literally of transistors. I Don't think any of these even reached uh, double digits in terms of their uh transistor count or their uh gate count. So really, you know, really small scale stuff and you need needed a lot of these boards.

to, you know, get one system. so they're You know, they built these chips. you know, all integrated. You know, reasonably good.

But then how do you get the thing integrated into an entire system? That is the pain in the ass. And of course, to build a working computer with this thing, you got to have Associated core memory and uh, stuff like that. But it's effectively a computer built up with all discreet logic gates. and they needed you know, dozens or hundreds of these cards all together to make a crude computer.

and well, it's just absolutely fascinating stuff. There's uh, no chips on the bottom. they've just got uh, some sort of covering which Fran is obviously removed there I don't recall her videos I have to re-watch them all before I uh start working on this puppy. But anyway, really fascinating stuff FR done X-rays and all sorts of uh, great stuff reverse engineering there so please check out those videos.

The Links will be down below and hopefully I can do something. um will add some value to it but Fr's already done a ton of stuff so I'm not sure uh what aspect I'm going to uh, tackle this thing on if you got any good ideas, leave it in the comments. so thank you very much Fran for passing that on. I will uh Endeavor to do some future videos on this before I hand it off to someone else and as I said, if uh, anyone wants to get this after me, uh, please drop me an email thank you very much Fran What an awesome bit of uh mail bag item and quite a few things I can do future videos on Beauty I was just thinking it comes in an ESD shielded bag I mean would ESD have even been an issue back then at the huge I mean you know massive scale that these uh chips are at I mean ESD becomes a uh problem.

You know the smaller uh, geometries, manufacturing geometries. You go with your uh, silicon and there's other aspects to it I wonder if um, they had even encountered ESD problem back in the day of all this? Apollo Hardware We' got a neat little collection of bubble display technology here and you can see why, because why it's called that? I'm not sure of the proper term I've always called them bubble displays. They've got like lenses on the top because these are our seven segment displays and I'll show you a I'll zoom in and show you closer inside these things. but basically the back then the seven segment displays were really tiny in sort of the uh, you know, the D sort of form.

So they use these lenses on top to give you a, you know, a um, a multi-digit lead display like this and these were very popular back in the day and there's uh, multiple versions of those and check that one out. these ones don't have a like a lens, uh bubble thing. They've just got like a clear, you know in encapsulant on top of that so they haven't magnified the size of uh, those ones at all. They're just like a clear acrylic block on top of that.

but that is your traditional uh bubble type display with a you know lens. It like doubles the size of the or doubles the appearance of the size of the internal uh seven segment display. and there you go. You can see down into the individual bubble down in there and if I adjust the focus manually on that, you can see the see the actual D in there.

Absolutely fascinating and attaching to the individual lead segments in the bond wires. Awesome! And there's the red base one. You can see the multiplexed uh tracers running inside here and they just you know, attach over cuz these are all Multiplex displays I don't have enough uh pins to get all the uh segment data out, but let's have a look at the third one here, which is uh, look at that inside of clearer capsul so it's basically the same thing. In fact, these are.

these two are identical except one's got a red display and one is a just got a clear window on it so one's diffused and one isn't but look at that, you can see all the detail in there. Neat. It looks like it has three IND almost looks like it has, you know, like three individual emitters in there, but it's I'm you know I'm not quite sure you'd have to power that up and it does. Check that out.

I've got 20 milliamps flowing through that individual segment and you can see the four different uh individual emitters in there lighting up brilliant and you can see the same thing happening on the red display. but it yeah it does look better and more uh diffuse when it goes through that red perspects in the bubble display. there. you can see that that's much more even I can't see individual emitters down there if I turn the current uh down right down.

I mean I've only got that I've now got that 1 milliamp flowing through there and you can see the reflection of the lens at the top there. And obviously it's designed to look directly down into it, but that is that is quite fascinating and pretty efficient. Down at 1 milliamp, that's not bad at all. And what do we have here? it looks like another Nixie tube type display.

It's an RCA numitron dead giveaway that's a numeric uh display. Does it have enough pins? 2 4, 6, 8 n Yep, that's enough for a Uh seven segment display. so we'll have to uh well obviously we can't Uh Power this thing up. It's going to need a Nixie tube driver, but I might Google that see if there's any data.

And yes, I found the data sheet on this and yes it is a Nixie display but it's not a s segment one which you can tell by looking on the overside. this is model is Dr 2130 and I'll link in the data sheet for this. but if we zoom in there you can clearly see the wires in there. Look at that.

Check it out. You can see two wires in there for the display and really it's all it is is a cross. There it is like that and that's exactly what this tube does. It's a plus display.

plus or minus. Of course you could I assume you can light up each segment individually, but it's not a seven segment display. All it does is a plus so that' be used in a multimeter or something like that. You know? plus or minus, you know 2 Vols on your multimeter and some 1976 vintage 7 Seg M displays.

These look like your traditional lead s segment display that you'd get these days. So yeah, really, you know that's when the technology came of age to be. uh, you know, modern as we know it today. Check out this tiny Monsanto MV 580 lead.

Look at that. Oh, it's Teeny Tot And check out this seven segment display package with the staggered pins like that. Jeez, oh man, this would actually make it probably a good photo thumbnail for my, uh, mailbag video, but that looks quite neat. Look at that seven segment display in a weird ass staggered pin package and ah, somebody.

I won't even try and pronounce that last name from Germany Hi to all my German viewers and uh, yes, Australia not Austria The joke never gets old, it doesn't It pisses off a lot of people and that's why I still do it. So let's uh, let's crack this sucker open and see what Mr R has sent us. Okay, this is. uh, how do I get that open there? Go like that.

Rip it open and Tada it's a power cord. Why do I have a power cord? I'm going to have to read the note. Hm, this is mysterious hi Dave something for your pleasure of investigating odd things. This cable is indeed odd no matter how much I bang my head onto the table.

it just doesn't uh match the writings on the plug Hint it came from China thank you very much. Robert So what? it doesn't match? They got the wiring wrong. probably. For starters, let's check the Earth pin here.

Yeah, the Earth pin's okay. that's all good. no worries. So I don't know what the uh, don't know what the drama is? Well, you know they could swap active and neutral.

There we go. and of course it's not going to there. So I I don't know what the don't know what the deal is? Um, well, that's just dodgy connection. but what's the I Don't get it.

That seems fine to me unless they swapped active neutral. sorry I don't know the uh, which way around is uh, supposed to be what for this particular plug, but it looks okay. huh? said it doesn't match the writings on the plug but the plug. It looks like just a whole bunch of usual uh, safety paraphernalia on there and various uh standards approval.

So there's no I don't get it I mean these are pretty wimpy I mean these are you know, these are not. You know this is not like one square mm of copper in this thing. This is very wimpy. Uh Mains Wire indeed.

So maybe that's what Robert is referring to. You can see that it's rated there 10 amps to 16 amps at 250. Vol Well I think that's a that's a Croc because uh, this wire in here is absolutely tiny I think it's rated as 0.5 M Square millim on the cable. Yep, there it is.

3 * 0.5 Square mm I mean to my eye, uh, that looks pretty wimpy. I'm going to have to check this against a real half Square mm cable. Well, I'll cut over open another branded cable here. There you go and it is, uh, exactly the same spec.

Three uh, strands of 0.5 Square mm. Let's compare the two. Oh my goodness, look at that. No contest.

I Thought it looked pretty darn wimpy and well, yeah, I mean this is half a square millimeter. which is, you know, like a really good proper Mains rated cable would be 1 square mm of course. And this one. you know this.

this is half a square mm. So this is like a genuine half Square mm. And this thing you know I'm not going to get out the calipers and measure it, but oh my goodness, that is just shocking. What is that? I mean you know if this is half a square Mill What's this know? Point 2 square mm tops .15 something like that.

There's no way it can meet those markings. Oh one hung low piece of unbelievable. But of course you know. Not surprising because copper is actually really really expensive.

and to make these cables is not cheap people. you know? Uh, you get all these, um, all these computer cables and stuff and they give them away and you know Chuck them around like candy. but copper is actually very expensive and they've really skimp there. Unbelievable.

You got to watch out this cheap. Really? that's just awful. Next up we have one from Luding. not sure if that's first or last name from Hu in South Australia and my fellow cobba on your cober.

No worries mate, she'll be right. let's crack this thing open. It feels like there's nothing in here. I mean uh, it's completely flat and uh, there's a note.

There's no goodies. could just be a note there. nothing I swear there's nothing in there. Let's have a look.

No there we go, we got something. Oh oh oh, it's a um I I know what this is. This is a soda can as you Yanks call them. um um uh.

converted into a stainless steel stencil. Oh that looks like the microcurrent that looks like my new microcurrent Arrangement it is H Brilliant! Unfortunately it's not my super duper latest cuz I did slightly change a few things. but let's read the note. Hi Dave Been following your microcurrent progress and with Christmas season upon us and Kickstarter demand ramping it me thinks you will be using your Reflow oven.

I certainly will. So to help I'm send you a Slda stencil whipped up here in my lunch break on the day before or closed down just like how I blogged about it here. There you go, check it out I'll provide the link down below. Yes, it was a boost to hear you and Chris discuss this briefly on the amp.

My suggestion would be to try in the green PCB cart you tweeted about just in case it goes horribly wrong. Yeah, that's the only one I Well, no I can use it for my uh red boards, but I'm getting I've just ordered a new Uh panel. a bunch of new panels with just some slight uh differences so it won't precisely match those, but it will match the old boards. Um, two round tooling holes would be used in a jigy design but not had the chance to.

Mill So I apologies for that, no worries. Yeah, oldfashioned tape and stencil? Yeah, tape and stencil just works fine, so thank you very much. Oh Simon there we go lsinc blogspot.com Au So yes, this is all the raid you can actually, uh, chemically, etch these things and you can do at home doing your own uh, stainless steel stencil. And apparently it's not too bad at all.

and that does look like quite decent quality. Let's get the macro lens. There you go. you can see the sort of like uh, you know it's not like a laser um etched thing.

it's not as sharp as that, but you know that's going to probably still do a reasonable job. It's a bit Rough and Ready on the edges there. they certainly aren't uh even. But for doing your own home boards, that is probably going to work a treat.

You can see the other side there is uh, much sharper than the top side so that's what you want. We have to move along because uh Fran hogged the first part of the blog. Thank you very much. Fran from Naga Industries proprietary limited trading as Fusion gear another one from Adelaide Jeez Adelaide's getting a bit of a burl here on a this episode.

Jeez, it's going wrong. Yeah, let's crack this open. Another note and T nothing we got just a note. sharpening stone oh I was queued up about this one.

yes um he was annoyed enough that I didn't Um, you know that I had my Swiss army knife was blunt so was sent a sharpening stone. thank you very much. It was uh uh yes, um it came. oh no.

Fusion gear. That's right, he um drop shipped from an eBay shipper here in Australia so he's not actually from uh Fusion gear SL NADA N N Nager Industries um but there you go I can sharpen my knife cuz apparently it annoys people I think it's already sharp enough, but hey Beauty, Thanks! Next up, we have a gift from Xmos Xmos as in the Uh Chip Company so let's crack this open. Here we go t and we've got ourselves a starter kit. Oh doesn't this look good? Look at this.

two four and two uh four Zone Touch sensors got Raspberry Pi GPI o compatible Header: Excellent! Of course it's got the Um Xmos Xcore analog A8 Dev with integrated debugger awesome Analog integration header micro USB for power, couple of green leads and a Xmos slice card connector or GPI I I assume they've got compatible Uh cards looks like a little uh PCI um type slot there and Tada there it is using the starter kit. There you go, you can just go to X Mos.com startkit and I don't have any Xmos uh stuff So there you go. I'll add this to my compliment of um, uh, you know, starter kits and Dev boards to uh, play around with. When projects arise, it's always handy to have like a whole bunch of uh, these Dev boards or at least I think so.

anyway uh, lying around so that you know when when a project does come up, you know you don't just go to the bin and go oh, which one's most suitable I know I'll pick this one because it has X You know, awesome probably doesn't do much I can uh plug it in but it's only got a couple of leads. It's not like it has any significant display capability and I just powered it up and yeah, nothing's interesting. Really, it just uh Fades this uh little display in and out there. Nothing that exciting at all.

But the whole point of this is that, um, it uses this parallel Xmos processor and if you haven't seen these before, these are incredibly powerful 500 Mips. But there's actually 8 30 2bit cores inside this thing. So it's designed for parallel Computing and it comes with the Raspberry Pi header because you can just plug it as a whatever the Raspberry Pi thing is called that uh plugs in to the top of the Raspberry Pi to allow uh, realtime parallel processing of the iOS which of course the um Raspberry PRI isn't capable of doing. because it's a sequential processor, it's got to deal with the Io in turn.

you know it can't do Computing functions on all the Io at once, but this board allows you to do that. 500 Mips, and8 32bit processor calls? Yes, and they're not Arm. They're actually an actual Xmos uh processor core. so it's not based on Arm or anything like that.

but really worth checking out if you're into that parallel Computing stuff. So thank you very much for uh, Xmos for sending this one in. Oh, and it's only 15 bucks! Awesome! Um, yeah, I'm not sure about the compilers and all that. Sorry I don't have uh time to check into it right now, but yeah, 15 bucks worth chucking in your kit, that's for sure.

Next up we have a big one from Andreas Zafiratos. sorry I suck at pronunciations. Everyone laughs at me every time I try and do it from Deand Germany again one drag up multi-or broken. We have a broken multimeter.

Awesome! We can check it out I wonder what brand it is? Well, let's go very quickly because my time is almost up here on the mail bag folks. Literally it is. You know, 3:41 p.m. the 24th of December Christmas Eve here folks.

and yes, I've got to shoot off very shortly to a family uh, event. But uh I do wish everyone a happy holidays or whatever thingo you do because you know I hate religion and don't do the whole religion thing. but I like Santa of course Santa's awesome and let's check this out. Hi! Dave First I Want to thank you for your great show I Learned much on your PCB tutorials.

Awesome! It's all how all this creepy stuff works. It is kind of creepy if you don't know I work myself in a position on the board of a major electronics company. Awesome! So I have this stuff every day all around me I can say I love it I sent you I think some cool stuff for a new tear down. It's a drag up multi-or 2.

Okay, so it's not a M I guess it's not a multimeter. in our company we use these devices for self- protection for underground works. Unfortunately, devices broken repair was too expensive so we thought we bought some new ones. Awesome! Thank you very much! Andreas this is a I thought it was a a multimeter.

Oh jeez, there's a bit of weight in that. Let me tell you, there is a bit of weight and it's right. it's a multi- as in a warning system. There you go.

Awesome that there you go. No one. It's heavy. Two Nikad batteries in the thing there you go and it's I guess underground Lubec Lubec in Germany I've been to Lubec Fantastic little town I Loved Lubec I spent a uh a day in Lubec and I went to the Um I went to an organ uh recital at the church in Lubec there and that was, uh, interesting to say the least.

Uh, multi-or 2. So what does it? Uh, it detects. You know, if it's an underground thing it detects maybe some sort of gas or or something like that ex sensor? Yeah, it's got it. detects a whole bunch of stuff that looks really interesting.

Oh oh there we go. look at that. Oh jeez, All right, it's got a warning. Will Robinson light that flashes I'm sure.

and uh I guess it? uh, it just sits there. I Mean there's the sensor top on it. That's interesting. It's almost as if like it rotates but looks like there's multiple sensors in there.

Poss With filters or something like that, a big warning buzzer that go that'll scream at you know 100 DB or something like that I'm sure, but that is, uh, that's interesting for underground safety I'm sure there's lots of you know, type approval and uh, and stuff like that that has to go on to uh, you know, to design and get one of these things approved anyway. I'm not going to take that apart that will definitely make a tear down. Tuesday I've got to learn more about. this is exactly what it, uh, tests and we'll have a look at the sensors and we'll tear it down cuz there's interesting engineering that goes into this sort of stuff.

If it's underground mining, for example, it's got to be intrinsically safe and things like that. So yeah, that'll be interesting. thank you very much. Andreas So thanks everyone for sending all these awesome mailbag items again! We've definitely got yet another whole bunch of videos.

There's never any shortage of videos to do. There's always a huge backlog of videos, but we got some real interesting stuff coming up. So yeah, I will be working over uh Christmas uh time I am taking a little bit of a break in early January but uh yeah, then I'll be back into it. with all the kickstarter that'll all be happening.

So very busy, uh times coming up I'll be working my ass off I'm sure. So yeah. happy Holidays Happy Festivus which has passed on the 23rd and uh, all that sort of stuff I Hope Santa brings you some cool stuff or you get a vision from the Flying Spaghetti Monster may you be touched by his noodly cage. Catch you next time.