Hi welcome to Mailbag! Yes! I'm back on camera Usually I'm not on camera at the start of mailbag, but it's a good opportunity to give you a small update. Uh, for those who have been following on the Forum and on my blog website, you'll know that I'm getting quite close to getting my live streaming set up all happening. I'm going to be using uh YouTube live I did a test yesterday and 150 people uh, just impromptu uh turned up to my live show and I've finally got my Tagano microscope uh working capturing that I've just got to get a little bit more gear, but it all seems to work well so I'll be able to do some really decent uh live shows soon in full HD and also multicamera set up and switch between them because I've decided to use my my good cameras, my Canon Hfg10 and also my uh Canon HF M400 which is here somewhere over there. two good, really uh, good Canon cameras.

They got HDMI output. so I'm going to capture that directly, going to have a dedicated streaming server uh machine which then can switch between those main cameras, maybe some other webcams and also the Tano microscope as well and sort of do all that live and put it through uh, live streaming switching software called wirecast and stream it directly onto YouTube. It should be fantastic. Anyway, a couple of people mentioned that on that show that they'd like to see the mailbag done live.

So if you want to see the mailbag done live, then uh, please leave it in the comments because I can, uh, certainly do that. The only issue with uh the live shows is that probably they're not as polished as you would get a regular mailbag, so maybe I can do them more frequently like at the moment. I've got 12 items have turned up Okay, there's no way I'm going to get through them all in this mail bag. But now once I got all my live streaming things set up and I'm all ready to go.

All the cameras and all the wiring and all the server and the software is all in place I'll be able to just boom at a moment's notice when I get a mailbag items in or New Gear in I might get something on eBay or something like that I can just hit stream and uh, away we go live so that should be really good. So my regular content's uh, not going to change, but hopefully you'll see some of more of that live stuff once I'm all set up. Got to rearrange some of the lights in here as well, getting some glare from the microscopes and all that sort of jazz. So yeah, um, I'm certainly going to be making use of that new uh 8 Meg upload bandwidth that I got on my new internet connection.

So anyway, enough of that. Here we go onto the mail bag. A lot of people. uh went excited when I post the photo of this.

Looks like somebody sent me A bottle of wine or is it I don't know. doesn't quite feel like a bottle of wine anyway. I could probably B balance it on my little pinky. No I can't Not that good of balance.

but let's go mail bag time now. First up, my humble apologies to Jake Gton not only for my pronunciation of his name, but also for the fact that this one has unfortunately been sitting here for uh, 4 months. So I really more than that? Almost 5 months? sorry. it got lost in all the rubble that was the Eev blog lab.

but now it's quite, uh, clean. And yes, it is actually clean. Take a look, there's floor space. look at that.

I got my bean bags back. everything's nice and clean once again. for those not following on: Twitter you would have uh seen this sort of um stuff. so it is clean and I've got all my new uh stuff over there in the uh in the lab I've got all my sound proofing and all that sort of stuff in the studio in there and some new rack space so there you go.

It's all happening here so sorry. Jake this one actually got lost. so let's open it up and see what's inside. And yes, I'm no longer going to read uh, the uh contents cuz that oh oh, investigate numerous breakings in V what? what? oh oh there we go.

Oh he's got his um call card. There we go. V2 Tqx. Excellent.

And there you go. the date. Yeah, um and that's not Australian date? that's American date. so that's January Oops sorry.

Fantastic. So he's a hand obviously and is that a it's a note? There you go I don't care what day it is, 4 hours is 4 hours H and Jake is a licensed ham radio operator 15 years Radio Electronics he loves to rip apart Electronics he's 57 years, young, awesome, and there he is from the land above you. So let's have a look and uh, it's a it's a tada. it's an Impulse sealer.

Oh, one of those tape sealing machines. um I he wants me to do tear Downs on these suckers. So look at that. I mean there's not much in it.

it's just going to be a heting element I Suspect. So yeah, one of those sealers. you put your product in the bag and you put your bag in here and you go clunk and it just seals the bag like that. Um, nothing fancy.

There's just a heating uh control on here and uh, the Imp the name impulse uh sealer. It probably gives the game away. It probably only heats up when you make contact and you can Here you can hear the micro switch down in here. Ready There We go like that.

So as soon as it goes down it doesn't heat until you give it that last like that. So no, oh, isn't that fun? Yeah, not much inside at all. just a big SEC cor Transformer there. By the looks of it, there's that micro switch down there which you can see the plate come in and click like that and there's basically uh, two contacts on here.

Here's the heating element comes up through this uh, screw terminal over here and also the other one down there and you can see those wired down in there. There's one part of it and the other one's wired right down the bottom in there, which you can't see. There's a tiny little circuit on there with a read Reay control in the Uh temperature, not much else. I See a yeah, there's a resistor and a couple of caps in there and something else.

Pretty crude. So yes, presumably that's uh, not on all the time. It would only come on when you, um, hit the button like that. I Guess the uh, this down here.

this sealer, uh, is. you know, once it gets up to temperature, then it cuts it out I'm not sure how long you have to actually leave it there, but it probably doesn't take long to seal a bit of plastic to melt that plastic. So yeah, pretty basic. Let's see what else we have in here and we have a another crusty old phone.

I Got a a couple of audio Vox Wow. try mode audio Vox Hands up Who had one of those back in whenever it was still got the original battery pack made in? Japan There you go. Jeez not made in China H Wonder what the Vintage of that sucker is and it seems to be a CDM 9000 model? uh, touted as Audio Vox's first Trode web browsing mobile phone. Yes, you could browse the web on this sucker.

Oh goodness oh how primitive. But I can remember a day before mobile phones so this was stay of the art back then kitties. Anyway, I've got a, uh, a collection of old mobile phones so maybe I can do a bulk tear down of those. So thanks Jake and sorry about being late I'm so embarrassed it was sitting in a corner.

messy lab goodness. And next up the wine box. Everyone wants to see what's in the wine box. It's not wine.

I'm pretty darn sure it's just not heavy enough from. Dave Scott Good on you Dave fellow Aussie in Melbourne Okay here here we go. Let's have a squiz and sorry, not enough wide angle on this sucker. Got ourselves a note and pretty good protection.

Oh what is it that's interesting? Phillips Oh wow, look at that that looks like the eye of hell. that's that glows red. That would be fantastic. What? What is that? I'll have to read the note I'm sure a lot of people might know what.

hermetically sealed around there. Some sort of high voltage thing. a glass tube all sealed H Interesting. Oh Intrigue enclosed is something to get you into more More trouble with the US government.

Awesome. Always looking for an opportunity there. Absolutely. I tried to sell it on eBay but apparently Australians are banned from selling these items in Australia by US law.

Really? Yeah, probably cuz we just bend over and suck up to the bloody Yanks it's ridiculous. Seriously. eBay Australia send in two very Stern warning letters about it. o Anyway, it was originally bought from ole Electronics who have sold lots of cool Surplus stuff they have.

indeed, they're based here in Sydney Um, it's fragile so and carefully it doesn't have enough parts to run. it needs some Optics and 10,000 volts. Throw it in the bin if you want, but careful of glass shards if you go dumpster diving. Thank you very much Dave Excellent.

Well he still didn't tell us what it is I'm sure some people are aware of what this sucker is. Why is it so? uh, actually it's not some sort of. it's some sort of sensor or something like that. Perhaps I can see down in it a This is not for this is not a tear down for the mailbag.

This is definitely a separate tear down. So I do some research and yes I checked and I guess it's obvious it's a first generation image intensifier tube. hi I can see myself Tada Terrific. Um yeah.

A basically uh night vision. uh, Optics uh, high voltage works on 14 kilovolts or thereabouts. and apparently this one was incredibly, uh, popular, probably still used uh, today in a lot of gear. and basically, yeah, it needs lenses uh, front and back.

So we've got our uh cathode on the front and we've got a fluorescent uh screen on the back so we need Optics on the front uh to focus it and also Optics on the back as well. But you, basically, you know image in the front. you look out here. it's effectively up passive apart from requiring the 14 14 Kilts and a focus voltage as well.

Um, apart from those voltages, it's effectively Um and analog night viewing um scope. and it has an effective resolution on the back of about one megapixel or there. about, so you know. Even though it's not sort of a a digital pixelated camera, that's sort of like the equivalent, uh, sort of.

you know, uh, resolution of the thing effectively. so that is really neat. So yeah, on its own, not probably not a huge, hugely useful to make it, you know, truly useful you need some Optics but maybe I don't know. Um, people want to throw some ideas out there for experimentation or a tear down, but there's not much in it.

It's got. it's a vacuum tube pretty much. I Don't think there's a huge amount inside these things. so I don't know? Let me know what you want to do with it.

Thank you very much Dave That's awesome. Next up: I'm going to open this because it's from the If I'm pronouncing it correctly Pimon Pirate Crew and anything to do with pirates is just awesome. so that definitely gets open a me Mees Beautiful I Love it Pirate Crew Pirates Good. Okay, did you know there's a correlation between uh, the number of pirates and global warming? That's an in joke for those.

uh in the night? how do you bloody open these? H ridiculous things. Oh, it's a pool thing. Is it Okay, we have a note and oh, lots of goodies in here. Oh, we got some purple boards.

They're Proto boards. They come in handy. Awesome! Thank you very much Element 14. It looks like we have an A 8 gig run.

Raspberry Pi Fantastic! Aoy they've got a sticker. Terrific! Raspberry Pi Fantastic look at that. Tada is that the new one? I've got a um I've got an older one. oh I got a bunch of pirate stickers.

Beautiful! Look at that 8 gig. Raspberry Pi Thank you very much. And the pigo the pigo made for Raspberry Pi wonder what it does contains leads. can be super bright.

do not stare. painfully lit. Look There we go. It's a little rotating.

Uh the pigo is a little look. it rotates like that and I Guess it? uh you plug it in and run it. It is going to run a going to run a swirly pattern and that just plugs into the Raspberry Pi presumably more Proto boards. Fantastic Thank you very much.

Uh, looks like we have a Raspberry Pi disc and a pie bow the neat little layer case for your raspberry pie. Oh look, it's one of these laser cut uh laser cut cases. So you assemble the sucker and uh, that looks really neat. you'll assemble it and your Raspberry Pi is in a funky little case.

I like it and we have a mystery tin. What's it? Oh oh Hoy look at these. the old uh lead bub are they lead bubble displays I'd have to get the macro lens out and have a look in those but old school love it dip package and this is what I was talking about. Uh, right at the start the glare from my overhead lights.

you can see my overhead light. so I've got to actually move them back behind me and not have any lights actually over the bench unless I need them to actually, uh, work or something like that. So yeah, it is one of those little bubble seven segment uh displays four-way seven segment classic. I Love it! and of course they're really tiny, but when you light them up with the lens on top that bubble lens, they do appear bigger than what they actually are on the die.

Love these things. Yeah! I Saw your mailbag with the Mattel erasing game and thought you might like some of these cute little lead bubble displays which they stock in their store. Awesome! You can buy it there we go! I'll provide as always for the mailbag I provide links to all the stuff I can down in the description down below so check them out so you can still able to buy these lovely seven seg bubble displays. Oh I Love it! Oh Hoy look at that! Brilliant! Also chucked in Raspberry Pi on one of our uh Pyo cases I saw you a bit of a ninja kind of guy, so that's one I've gone for.

There are also some other prototyping Pcbs which we find dead useful to have on hand. Yes, you always got to have a good lab. will always have like you know, just lots of little Proto boards, ver boards, uh you know, adapter boards and things like that on hand? Uh, we're a company of makers and Educ does who manufacture all our own products here in Sheffield Awesome! We have a oh they have their own pick and place assembly wave soing laser cutters. Awesome excellent uh we design and manufacture a few of our own products.

the PBO the P glow, the PBR pie Hub the pie Cade oh the raspberry piie mad and also Run online store stock in a large range of stuff from AR fruit and all the rest. Excellent! Thank you very much for the Pimon pirate crew! Thumbs up! This case is really quite nice. They're all individually numbered uh 0123 right up to 7 Or8 or something like that. and the Rasbery pie just sits in there like that and then you stack them all up and I'll show you the finished product in a minute and there is the finished product.

I Like it that Raspberry Pi case. Look at that! Beautiful. It's got cutouts for nice wide cutout so you can fit the plastic in there as well for the Uh micro USB there and for the Um composite video output and the USB and the ethernet. that is awesome I love that case.

vent holes on the bottom important I'm not sure offhand how hot a Raspberry Pi uh actually gets, but if you want to, you know, if you enclose that in there and don't have much airflow, it could get, uh, could get quite warm. uh. ribbon cable expansion coming out here if that's for the camera. By the looks of it, they've got the little Uh symbols on there I'm not up on all my latest Raspberry Pi stuff and you could operate it with or without the top on.

Look at that. That is terrific. I Love that. All right.

I've whacked in the SD card which came with it and I'm going to power the thing up. Got it plugged in HDMI onto my monitor here and uh, where is the thing here we go? Let's give it a B, see if it does anything, there's a light I can see a light Taada? Yes, look at that and what's it going to do? I don't know I'm not o ref there we go Raspberry Pi it's booting up Fantastic. There we go I haven't used one for a long time. very very old one and it didn't uh do anything useful the start raspber and recommended.

There we go Arch do all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. terrific and I just plugged a mouse into that and it works a tree. Here we go we got a Dbn Wheezy Port I don't know I'm not Penguin enough to know what that means uh an Arch Linux port for armed devices Open elect fast and user friendly uh Xbox Media Center distribution Pyora which is a Fedora remix oh I one I presume all this stuff was on the uh SD card and uh Ras me and boot to scratch Ah, excellent. Very fast and compact operating system.

Which one do we want I don't know. let's just pick the open Al cuz it sounds electronic. Can we just go? hello McFly install there we go, stalls the operating system onto this SD card. Aha there you go so we can boot onto the SD card.

Yeah, all you Raspberry Pi fans y you don't know what you're doing Dave and correct I'm not into the Raspberry Pi but that's awesome. just works. So thanks guys! that's awesome stuff and definitely check them out! I Love it when when stuff is made in house like that in this case in Sheffield in the UK Beauty and this one is enormous. doesn't say who it's uh from.

it's just it's just got The Courier uh company's distribution on here so let's check it out. It's quite large and sort of I don't know. There's sort of a box, maybe with some other stuff as well. Looks like a uh, an old DSP board.

We've got ourselves a TI 320 classic TI 320 DSP Looks like it's doing some uh, audio or something like that. some audio processing. Uh, we got a note. got a whole bunch of stuff.

got TMS 320 DSP starter kit. we might yeah, looks like we got old starter kit contents. Let's have a look. Oh whole bunch of of chips and T one of these padded bags which I hate cuz these have the uh I've done this before.

you tear them apart and this crap goes everywhere. Don't tear these things open. they're just awful evil bags. these things aha it's from Andy Channel engineer on YouTube he sent me some stuff before.

Glad the Nixie tube survived the journey in the past. Mbag was worried the glass would break I was going to set an old Tectronics transistor D curve Tracer for a tear down, but the damn shipping was over 150. Yes, it would be those things AR heavy I'm surprised it was that cheap. Um, if you know of a cheaper way, no I don't know.

Um, yeah, it's just very expensive to ship stuff internationally. Anything over a K, you know, a kilo or two just gets ridiculously expensive. Fiber Kit: Um, he's included the fiber kick. Been kicking there years migrating from the drawer.

Was purchased as a student project but never used frequency counter. It was going to bin it. but h a little tear down 40 Atml micros woohoo and a DS Old School TI DSP kit? Yes and a gold pick. Here's an oldie chip you can see inside without smashing, etching or cutting.

Old Old School UV Erasable Pick: Yes for those youngsters out there. uh, noobs who? Yeah, back in the old days, PS Here it is used to be UV erasable. None of this Electrical Uh, erasing rubbish. which was the 16 C84 I think was the first electrical erasable pick.

You used to have to put them under the U light. Oh yeah, look at that isn't that beautiful. A Yes Old School D Old School UV Erasable. Die.

Love it. straight through the Clear Window quartz window on the top. Fantastic. Those were the days and chips in an old school bubble pack.

Look at that. you don't see those too often these days. I Love it. Pop them like pills and it comes from Element 14 Slf Farel and these are at Mega 48-20 a for those playing along at home and it's a frequency counter.

look at that from SJ Electronics never heard of them. the Sc40 frequency counter 5 HZ to 50 MHz and 40 MHz to 400 MHz dual range little uh membrane thing with a LCD on it that looks like a dot matrix that looks like a 16 character by one line Matrix and look serial number that's probably 173a wonder what the A for? Look at that totally old school all dip package in there. Got some front end uh stuff happening around here of course, but yeah, not much else. I'll take the uh, lift the skirt up on that in a minute.

but we got some 74 act uh, logic. There's some 74 HC stuff on there, some 74 act 161 and bunch of discret transistors for the front end. and Bob's your uncle. Definitely old school Pck 16 c57 Excellent.

Uh, 9th week 1993 so over 20 years old. Brilliant. And the front end there contains a TFK 893 don't know it off hand. probably some sort of uh comparator.

Couldn't immediately find a data sheet for that sucker. but yeah, you know, just your basic, crude, uh, cheap frequency counter. front end we got ourselves an agilant, uh, fiber optic um kit. Look at that.

There we go. Not a huge amount in there. We've got ourselves the cable and a couple of connectors. Not a terribly exciting kit.

There's no you know, demo board to pass data through or anything A. and we got to sell some 3M wet or dry out paper here for polishing the uh fiber ends. So yeah, uh, fibers aren't that exciting really. People think they're amazing technology.

It's just a piece of glass. Really, that's it. You polish the ends and you shoot uh, light through and well, Bob's your uncle? Yeah, I Know there's a lot of technology behind it, but it's a piece of glass. so thanks Andy for that interesting little score and his channel engineer on YouTube and this one's from someone with four names.

Samuel Loreno From Portugal Hi to all my Portuguese viewers don't get many from Portugal so that's excellent. Wonder how many viewers I've got in Portugal I Don't know. not a huge am, but I'm sure there's a nice small contingent there it. Uh, I don't think Portugal is on my top 10 list in YouTube Anyway, here we go.

Got a note. We got a postcard from Ptoo. Excellent! Thank you for years of EV Blog, no worries Samuel and what do we got? Not Fragile But handle We Care let's have a look. Oh, we got ourselves a little interface Board of some description and Samuel sent uh, what he calls the pixel.

It's a breakout board based on a P 12f 683. It also contains an I CSP header. Um, handy when programming the pick yes with a pick kit two or three of course. Excellent.

And there we go. I'll link in the website down below for those who are interested. BR Blink without delay. There we go.

We have the madeup version and the kit version for those who want to do it yourself. And yeah, little handy. Uh, just plug it into your breadboard and Away you go with your ICP header. Very handy if you just want to use a low-end pick that just plugs nicely into your breadboard.

Excellent! Thanks Samuel And this one's from Nick courtesy of Marshall from the USA Is that Marshall the like Amplifier company Anyway, um, Nick is a fellow Aussie so it's only come local. It's got one of these a, uh, awful padded J Look, this is what I'm talking about. Hate these things. They're awful.

evil, evil, evil evil evil things. and of course, idiot me tried to cut it open one of these horrible bags and and yeah, of course it's got the rip pull. If I can get access to the Ah tab to pull it there we go Taada and we should be able to get access. We're in like Flynn We have some padding.

We got a plug pack and that's all she wrote. What's inside oo oh what is that Zip tie? Wireless Zip It! Wireless Messenger 2 W I Sent another old school product. Oh look at that. Oh Taada, That's just gold.

Imagine carrying one of those puppies around. It's booted. It's booted. Your battery level is running low.

Your zip. It will have to shut down unless T Welcome to Zip It Wireless Messenger 2 Setup: That's a pretty highres color screen actually. that's really amazing. I Mean some engineer has probably gone or a bunch of Engineers gone into a lot of trouble.

you know to design and uh and build and get this sucker into production and it probably was a dismal failure just looking at it based on you know its life. If it was a success, its lifespan would have been you know, 9 months at best or something like that. Zip It! Wireless I'm still not sure what it does. It's like a wireless messenger texy thing I Don't know.

All right, the battery has, uh, suddenly come good. What it is is a 2007 Uh 2005 Vintage is the original model. This is the model Uh 2 and it's 2007 Vintage. It is as its name says, a wireless messaging device designed to hook up with AOL Yahoo and MSN Messenger and it can also send SMS messages via uh Wi-Fi connection as well.

and uh yeah, probably had a very short lifespan if it was a success at all. Um, it's a pretty Powerful Beast It's got an X scale uh processor in it, the Pxa 270 running at 300 and 12. mahz. it's got 32 MGA RAM and yes it's running Linux and uh, apparently people have hacked these things and run their own uh version of Linux on it and used it as a little portable Linux device.

I mean you know it's not like it has any standard uh, you know, USB ports or anything like that. but it's got a uh little that's not even an SD card. What is that? Anyway, it's You know it's got some sort of universal Universal connector on the back. Things like that little DC I mean doesn't even have you know standard USB for charging or anything like that.

Just a DC jack. Really quite annoying. but anyway. um yeah.

Next to continue. where's the next button? There's the next several shouldn't get to know my friends. Yay is that's the button down here. That's the my friends button is used to enter instant messaging mode.

So there you go next. scanning for wireless networks. It's probably going to find it and look at that. It's found.

the NSA surveillance Network They're everywhere, folks. really. Be careful of those black vans and remember what they say, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you. H and we're connecting to the NSA surveillance Network I Wonder what we'll get a little friendly face is spinning around that auto time off is very quick.

Obviously they're paranoid about their uh about their battery life there. It's taking ages to connect to the network. It's not worth doing a tear down of this thing. I Mean there's going to be nothing in it.

There's going to be an LCD driver if it's not already built into the X scale process, they going to be the X scale process. Some battery management, um, charging, and well, you know, a little Wi-Fi thing. I Don't think it's worth doing a tear down if anyone really desperately wants to see down. Uh no, no.

could connect. So this is a classic example of one of those products that I can almost say you know it wasn't a success I Suspect. Um, but hey, they lasted at least a couple of years. They got their seed funding, they developed this thing or whatever it was, uh, back in the day and well, where are they now? Company who manufactured this? have no idea.

But anyway, um, yeah, sort of. You know, a niche device that was always going to have sort of. you know, with the March of Technology Well, with hindsight, the March of Technology and everything else, hello there I Am. um yeah, it it would just you know, one of those sort of failed products because you know mobile phones became the integrated device and that was just the end of that.

So it's all she wrote. Who remembers this thing? this in the uh, time period of the day? I Guess what is this like? 2005 for the first version? They probably, uh, started designing and found the company in 2004, got some seed funding somewhere or something like that to develop the thing, and well, mobile phones just you know, probably didn't have the capability to do, uh, to connect to the messaging services you were used to on your desktop computer. If you had an internet connection back then, most people did really around about that vintage 2005. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Um, hey, but even like YouTube wasn't around then I don't think so, let alone Facebook or anything else. But back then, the messaging services those AOL Yahoo MSN type messaging services were a big deal and you're probably couldn't do those on the phones of the day. You just made phone calls, maybe took a photo, perhaps W So this probably seemed like a good idea at the time, you know. and well, yeah, it wasn't successful.

probably not, and with hindsight, doomed to failure. So there you go. Thank you very much! Nick that is most interesting ancient technology and I don't know, Are these just all tossed in the bin? Now there's probably very few left around and.