Hi welcome to everyone's favorite segment My ol' Bag! Monday Yes I've taken a couple of weeks off from it back into it. Got a lot of stuff to go through. Let's go. This one has been here an embarrassingly long time, so sorry one seam in from Singapore I Do want my Singapore Singaporean viewers I do like Singapore I Love Singapore It's terrific and yes, by the way, I won't always use the big knife if after the solar cell incident on the previous mailbag I think I will.

If things look like they should be delicately opened, then oh you know I might try and use a cutter Anyway, what do we got? We have a post-it note sorry about the appearance of this note. I wrote it in the post office and that's all I can find that worries I have sent? Well, let's find out it sounds good Here we go. It's a bit of kit. We always love a bit of kit, but some knobs and things.

Hey, that's nice. If he's taken the knobs off, that's very good for a rat. Transport knobs often break off in transport. Nothing worse than having you know, broke and let me tell you, um, let's see I Got that off and today we have a P Universal bridge and by the way, this was sent in by Simon he must have had the last name first thing on the package anyway.

thank you very much Simon Check this baby out. A heart. totally old school I would have said like 1970s vintage but according to the manual which you can now link him down below on the HP website which is an awesome manual by the way, it's like 200 pages full schematics, the whole works theory of operation for these Universal LCR Bridges Fantastic. Anyway, link down below.

Check it out. Yeah, it says 1982. So yeah, there you go. I've actually powered it on.

and there we go now. Centimeter there is a is deflecting and we can wind her up. Look at that precision. Look at that precision.

brilliant and you can see that we've got a decimal point down in there which will change with the range here and there we go. It's not the probably you have to get right down at the correct camera angle here to see it, but the lights on there I've got some what are we got sense and then we've got our Vernier over here for our dissipation factor and our quality factor as well. and this is just old school analog scale. Look at that and then we got fine adjustment.

Oh yeah, that's a bit. it's a bit crusty. needs some Lube on that, that's for sure. and this our range switch seems to be out of our function.

switch seems to be out of alignment here as you can see like it blanks out there so something internally is actually wrong with that. And if we go over to capacitance here of course, then you know how ranges. I'm so yeah, that's goofed up somewhat anyway. I'm quite the way if you don't know what this is, it's a it's a forty to sixty a universal bridge, but it's an LCR bridge.

It measures just like your regular LCR meters today, except it uses the Wheatstone bridge functionality to actually do that and these things can actually be quite accurate and quite precise. You can do really good and match him with these things and you know, because all the really tight vernier control you know, really fine resolution vernier controls on the thing and yet ere you tweak it against a know and reference capacitor resistor or inductor inside the thing and it's not too shabby at all. I Love how it has the symbols on there. Look at that.

There we go. That's a series there and we can change it. Nano and micro Farad's yep and there we go. So that's series capacitance and then yeah, it's a bit out of whack.

There we go. That's parallel inductance, series, inductance, and really very very old-school but I love it. So it does actually power on and do something, but I'm not going to test it. Sighs says it's it doesn't work at all.

So yeah, I'll believe him and let's take a look at the back here. One interesting thing to note is that um, it is Yokogawa look at that. It's not just it was the the collaboration between a Yokogawa and HP back in the day. They made a few instruments together and yep, this is one of them.

So it's not actually a HP meter. it is from Yokogawa and it's made in Japan And now it's probably not fair to give this thing one of my two minute tear downs because it needs more than that. It's a it's discrete transistor stuff and you know all the Vernier controls and things like that. It's going to be quite nice inside in that respect or maybe not.

I Suspect it's going to be because of the vintage of it, but it's going to be interesting inside, so I might leave that one for a full teardown. Thank you very much. I Mean now, of course you probably wouldn't bother using one of these these days. I Mean you know we're talking like goes down to one picofarad and one micro Henry I think and it's not.

You know, by modern standards modern LCR meter standards for a hundred bucks. Or you know, listen to on a buck and go out and buy. You know, a pretty decent handheld um LCR meter these days. So really, you know if if you've got one of these things that works, maybe you might want to use it, do some matching or something like that.

But it's really, you know it's it's way past its prime. So you know, really, if it was faulty, you know, unless you're very nostalgic towards it, you wouldn't bother fixing something like this. Next up, we've got one from Winstead that's not the name it, that's their town in CT in the U.s. CT Connecticut Probably got that wrong.

Um, Anyway, let's check this one out. doesn't have a name, it's just got an address. Thank you very much. You don't have to put a name on it, you can be.

You can send stuff in anonymously if you are so desire. See, this is where Not gets a bit unwieldy. and yeah, I probably should use a box cutter to open this stuff. But anyway, we have ourselves a note.

read the notes before I take it on after you seem to express interest in a pacemaker reader I Figured out tossing my slightly aged Oh Thomas thank you very much Thomas Door slightly Wow Okay, it's modern I Thought it was like gonna be old. It's a wireless blood pressure monitor as he hooks up your phone and stuff. What awesome! Aha no um yeah, we were fooled I Thought this is Thomas's fancy pantsy new one. And that note, we've got the old one in the box.

It's a blood pressure Monda It's exactly the same in nearly every way. but instead of using a proprietary Apple connect to the new version offers bluetooth and allegedly standard USB connection. Oh these fancy pantsy packages. Jeez y'all look at magnetic wank.

That's it. That's it. Oh, that's actually really look at that is that a aluminium tube Witten's brain blood pressure monitor Wow Okay, there you go I can't test It, I can't use it cuz I don't have an iPhone thingy little end cap bar just pops up with a coin there. It's got four double A batteries, two peril the thing and you can see that springiness that is I'm putting a decent amount of force into that to open that sucker up and I don't know.

It seems to be like a built decent quality and I like the alloy tube on there. that's pretty good. So yeah, I think what do you think? two minutes here down? Let's go. Well, there you go.

It looks like it does have an internal pump for this sucker and we've got some supports here there. They don't go anywhere. This one here goes. There is something that goes through into there but I'm not sure you know I don't think it's actually sensing anything by way of that I think it's doing all your sense in through the pressure ports there.

So yeah, let's go a bit further. I took out a couple of the tubes and the support there and of course this is all just going to slide out. but you might wonder, well how does it slide out with that cable there? Well, the designers of thought of that. If you turn it around you can see that the cable then folds into there like that and that's how they get the thing in and out.

Very neat. Tada, we're in like Flynn So this one's what's called an oscillatory type blood pressure meter with the vacuum pump and we'll see how the vacuum pump works in a second. But here we go: I Stole this from the British Medical Journal and it. There's some nice little diagrams of exactly how these things work.

Now basically what it happens is the cuff inflates of course and actually restricts along your arm and then it. Basically they do that until it cuts off your blood pressure completely and then they start releasing that and then this systolic blood pressure. that that they will slowly. I Don't know if it's a linear decrease or not, but they will decrease it in steps from completely closed and then yet systolic pressure will pump blood through there and in doing so it can actually it set us, sets up vibrations that it can actually measure that transfer through the air and can be measured by a pressure sensor in there which we'll see in a second and then once it gets down to being fully open, there's no more vibrations in there and then the diastolic pressure takes over.

So that's basically how these things work. They're basically just a vacuum pump with a pressure sensor in and that's and some smart firmware of course handle at all, but that's pretty much it actually. I just started tearing this thing apart and I think I will leave it for a separate video. although it's not complicated.

I just want to add some explanations and things of how it works. So yeah, that's best left outside the mailbag. I think and yes I have changed my shirt because well I might blow the illusion here, but sometimes I don't finish this on the same day that I actually record it and that's what happened. It's now Tuesday here.

so there you go: I'm D I better finish this up and edit, then get it upload. otherwise people who won't be Monday somewhere in the world Anyway, this one is from Samuel Ferrera Mac is Lorraine Coe sounds familiar? Is he having a second stock of the SAP Anyway, he's from Portugal and thank you very much and let's have a look what's in here. It kinda sort of opens but not really. All right.

Yeah, I know I shouldn't use this. Here we go. We have a postcard from Munchie Pugh Is that yeah? Once you cue something like that, I'm pronouncing that incorrectly. So if you are planning to go to Portugal you should visit this place.

All right. I will if I ever get to Portugal Hi all my Portuguese viewers and we have various letters, we have more little boards. Um, these are these are familiar Yeah I think he's having second sack of the south. He's said in some development boards before and this one is a new one based on the 18f 2450.

it's called the Pick Up and he's included some stencils and the schematics and that also suggests and I will link in down below if you're interested in this little puppy and he wants me to do a quick little La critique of the thing. and well, there's not much you can do here. It's basically a microcontroller with a jumper. It's got an oscillator on the bottom.

There we go. and that's that's about all she wrote. Well, that's not an oscillator, it's actually a crystal. The oscillator is inside the microcontroller of course, and there is a difference between an oscillating and oscillate, a module and just a crystal.

Of course, the crystal doesn't do anything on its own, whereas an oscillator module will actually output the signal directly. Anyway, not a huge amount you can critique on boards like this. The only thing you would watch out for is the fact that that you know, are there any breaks in the ground planes. That kind of thing you'll notice that is trace.

The first thing I notice is that there's no ground plane wrapping around there to join there. So that's and so that that's just got a genuine split in it. It's not like routed around, but we're not talking about any heavy currents here at all. It doesn't really matter, so you just you know I'm just really, um, talking out my ass because there's not much in critique on a small board like this.

It looks to be he's oriented the chip correctly. It looks to be found out properly. Otherwise, you'd have a dog of a job if you turned around the other way and just tried to route the traces if just placed it willy-nilly and then rounded the traces out. Yeah, you would quickly find that you probably grew goofed up the component placement, but there's no issues there at all.

Really, it's pain-in-the-ass I Qfn package and that's why he has supplied a little lump solder paste stencil with this thing and we've had a look at these before. These are from our stencils. if you didn't recognize the purple board of course it's from ash. Park And these are the mylar stencils.

You need some white behind there to actually see. There we go my stencils and they do a quite a good job. and they're dirt cheap of course. so doing that SMD stuff yourself is no issue whatsoever and they send some nice little la squidgy as well.

solder price spreader. so you whack this on top of your board and then you put your paste on there and you go like that. Hopefully you get it in one pass and you've got a reasonable amount of paste in this hugely are controlled. It's not, you know, as good as a real, proper high-quality stainless steel stencil, but it's dirt cheap and it's great for you know, short runs up to sort of.

you know, the tens, or maybe even the hundreds or something like that. If you're looking at the thousands, you don't want a my stencyl, you definitely want a stainless-steel one. For those curious to see a stainless steel, why don't you can see the reflection of my scope up there? This is my microcurrent panel of course. I Got some of these stainless steel stencils made.

This isn't the one that I use for actually producing the boards that's at most simpler at the moment and it's mounted in a big metal frame like a stiff frame right around here. This is just a loose stencil which they can use as well, but usually on a proper solder paste dispensing machine as I've shown in the previous video. They do mount them in really big, proper rigid frames as the way to do it. so you generally leave that up to your PCB assembler to get those up made for you and there's not a huge amount happening there on the schematic.

of course it's just a microcontroller on a board, but anyway, if you want one of these they pick up. Go check out Samuel Site. Thanks! Samuel Oh yes, this comes as a kit. By the way, there you go.

you can buy it. hence the stencils though. And I don't normally do postcards anymore because people have said that. You know they don't really want to see postcards but I do read them all end up so please keep sending them to me.

But anyway I just wanted to show this one. it's probably not going to auto focus anyway. it's from ah as it's a Asmara um which I guess is the capital of Eritrea I'm pronouncing that incorrectly I'm sure, but it's a country that I've never heard of and this one comes from regard. Alright, he's from Sweden but apparently he's in um Eritrea if I'm pronouncing it correctly.

um, at the moment he's the internet connection is so bad that it took an average of two minutes to download one single text-based email. Ah, he download a three kiloton 3k. that's three K bytes in one hour. Wow I Figured he could send a postcard but have I ever received a postcard from Eritrea No.

I haven't haven't even heard of the place. This is awesome, just have to look it up on Google Maps It's up if you hunting where it is. It's a north of Ethiopia up on the coast at the top of a Theo Pia Who knew? um problem. number one.

it took him five days to find postcard. The postcard was 12 years old. Awesome! It was impossible to send international mail from the country. Wow the Asmara bus station.

There you go by the Swedish postal website so thank you very much regard that is interesting. A country I've never heard of. Brilliant! Next up one from Anthony Parata Uh, he's from Malta Brilliant! Thank you very much. Let's open this thing up.

no idea what's in it. some paper I'm gonna hit up. with bought a ad we know another postcard excellent yet from Mota there we go Oh doesn't that look lovely? Beautiful greetings from motor with a smiley face thank you very much and a board hidden in here. So I got a couple of Arduino shields and a board and Anthony has at indie store which I'll link in it down below and he's selling some stuff.

Not only these Arduino prototype shields always come in handy. You've got to have some of these in your kit, but interestingly, a line scan camera. Let's take a look at it. And if you haven't seen a line scan camera before, well, it's like a regular camera except it only has one row so it's actually a hundred and twenty eight pixels across by only one row.

Hobby and ER for vision systems and things like that. So Anthony built this to learn our vision systems because the Arduino doesn't really have enough processing grunt in it, not your stock standard ones anyway to do any sort of decent vision with a proper you know, 640 by 480 camera or something like that. So we want to learn about line scan camera so it made this little board. All it is is basically a breakout for this the DSLR 1401 CL linear sensor array as they call it and it's 400 dots per inch at 128 by one, wide dynamic range, etc etc.

It works off a single supply and you that it's a just a simple chip like that. So what it is is, it's actually mounted on the board under there like that. and then this is just a big lens assembly which then screws on top of that, which is pretty essential. And if you have a look at the block diagram here, it's actually cut a fair bit of stuffing that each pixel is one of these, so there's 128 duplicated at 128 times.

Each pixel has its own art, sample-and-hold and integration, Op amp in their integration capacitor and a photodiode sensor. Of course, each photodiode is three thousand, five hundred microns wide, so they're hundred and twenty eight of those output buffer. It's got some switching and shift stuff, and yeah, and that's pretty much all there is. so they're pretty easy to use.

And no doubt he's got some libraries available for it. So you form a play around with some line scan camera stuff on your Arduino then give it a go and we're really haulin' ass through it. now. this one that comes from Dean Governmental people must laugh at my pronunciations.

really? Um, Anyway, he's from uh Lindenhurst in New York There you go. And um, he's from a company called Tim Products Inc. contains electronic components and documents. I Have a squeeze.

Is this got one of the rip open things? Press firmly to seal tonight. There we go. Alright. hang on.

slice across the top there and have a bag inside. and he was gonna send in this but decided to were probably. um Express Priority Internet Priority Mail Express Yeah you probably pull tab to open the tabs hidden under that. have to use the knife to get at the tab so I can pull it There we go All right.

Sorry changed his mind at the last minute what it's ended it and it's nothing and a whole bunch of documents from Dean He's a fan of the show thank you very much lived in New York for three years I'm starting a company. three years ago mailbag post new trends. nerds will love these products. Let's have a look at their products and Dean is sending some really interesting stuff here.

I'm a bit different to our usual Arduino boards we've been getting. he studies company in New York up three years ago designing the products and setting up manufacturing slowly gaining traction. The biggest problem is interfacing with some of the big distributors like did you cared Mauser yeah I can imagine I know how much work have you got this stuff on digi-key and mousey yet? Or he's still working on it? Um, Anyway, he's got the power. A Peg makes thermal management piece of beat.

integration simple and the parts are beautiful. are they? Well, let's have a look. I'm happy to ship orders through his website which I'll link in down below. but look at this power Peg is an OEM Here it is.

there's the Power Peg. Look at that little arm press in metal studs I Don't know if they're pressed fit that could just be loose fit and then you screw them I'm not sure Anyway, I'm Om Therm will connect to Integration for service mount components in printed circuit board assemblies. Thermal management design in SMD assemblies is often constrained by manufacturing methods. Power Peg thermal connectors are easy to solder due to their low mass.

Large and complex dissipators can be connected after solder In this two-part system provides limitless possibilities for cooling. Awesome. Something a bit of out-of-the-box thinking here. And if you have a look at there you go down to your SMD part on the bottom through your board.

you can screw it in. it gets the heat out like that that is. That is quite neat. and there's a little peg look at that isn't that cute.

It's got itself a yeah, a threaded hole that the thing is tiny by the way. it's absolutely tiny and it would and amounts in the board as we saw. and then that bottom surface down there connects down on the bait on the bottom side, you're surface-mount part. That's really quite novel.

Then we've got ourselves some thermal performance graphs. here. it looks like with and without thermal grease. So there you go and two degrees C per what typical thermal resistance Junction to the dissipater.

And there's some mechanical drawings for those playing along at home. And there we go. There's the how you could possibly have it. They should part with your die pad on the bottom going through your board and then it can solder.

You can put some paste on the bottom side there and just solder it on the backside of your board. I Really quite neat and then you can mount them, stand off like that or recessed. Of course if you want your manufacturer that'll cost extra If you manufacture, you have to tell them to part, drill in your board into your board like that. They can do it.

But yeah, it's above and beyond your ordinary board design and that. Go full tape, a real package and it's all very professional product. I Love it! Good on your date, but of course you can't just design these little funky pegs like this and not sell the matching hardware to go along with it. Look at this.

they've got the dissipator which is designed to go on to the power peg and wow that looks really funky. I Like that and Dean said that these things are beautiful and well I wouldn't disagree. Look at that. Ah, lovely, brilliant on design those into something.

And here's an example of a little Creed lead mounted down under this heatsink spreader. That's great I Love that. Super high quality stuff. It's great and then it doesn't end there.

He's got all sorts of other gadgets. This one is on shape ways. You can just order it from the shape waist or there's Dean good on your Dean And he's got to look this little arm retainer clip for another Cree board here. and I don't know if they just sell this or it's just a demo board, but they're certainly the retaining clip you can get from shapeways with the heat spreader on the back.

Very nice example. Ah, love it and this is neat. Check this out! I Got a little demo here so they got one of the power pegs under there attached to the bottom side of that Deepak there with the heat spreader. Editorially: a little soon on Maglev fan look at the size of that thing.

It is tiny. Oh my goodness, that is just sex on a stick and I can't resist powering this sucker up and letting it bill. So here we go. Straw in 0.1 amps at 5 volts and up.

that is not making much noise at all. That is very nice Wow I Expected it to be much shinier than that, but that is very, very low noise. Incredible. And then we supplied some examples of how this thing actually works.

How you put your hole through for your stud of course. So yeah, your power peg just goes inside the back of that. You solder your Cree LED onto there and you can. That's how you can get the heat out of that sucker Said that.

He's terrific. I huge thumbs up to this product. He started his own company three years ago just to make these little thermal power pegs and stuff and jeez, these are terrific. They really are.

And Tim also do what's called a Step a stack integrated motion controller for stepper motors. There you go. So not just the thermal products. Hmm, let's crack that open.

So this is the module itself designed to connect up to an Arduino I'll show you that in a second and there we go. It's using the Because that has a thermal pad on the bottom of that stepper motor driver chip. Check out all the huge big banked power bank there of caps. just absolutely massive button right up together.

Jeez hmm that's interesting and it's yeah, of course comes out using the power peg plus the spreader and it's the step of stack. Our five multiple operating mode supports passive drive, active control up to a 3.5 amp output current. It's a pluggable module of course it's a you know, designed to just plug into either a breadboard or you know, for development purposes or into your our board digitally configurable to adapt to any stepper motor. High quality thermal management system of course that's what Tim are specializing in here and my efficiency over current blah blah blah blah blah.

Digitally integrated Stepper motion controller and there we go. do we know time thing? I Really like is that these data sheets are very professional and comprehensive mode passive mode of operation, jog mode. and so if you're doing any sort of stepper motor work and you want to do it with an Arduino this is a really nice little solution. And yeah, very professional documentation.

Loved it so thank you very much. Dean that is a great my old bag there had some interesting stuff with these are power pegs and everything else and very very professional solution. I Love it! So if you want to check out Dean's stuff, check it out. Ten products down below I'll link it in and there's more.

Yes! look at this beautiful shiny silver box from Jonas Grunhagen from Germany Um, and obsolete hardware. Hmm, we like obsolete hardware. so let's here we go. I Might look happy.

Look at that. see gentle alright does that? It's yep, Won't seal the tape. Goodness gracious, Lots of panic. Oh, there's something in there.

Yep. smell it. I Think there's something in there? Don't toss that out. Got a tray, got a component tray? got a whole bunch of another component tray.

Oh yeah, that's vintage hardware that's got 70 smelt and it's dead wrapped in plastic. Jonas Is actually sending a whole bunch of stuff here and this one is actually a demonstration board for character generation made in the early 80s. Look God it can generate characters. You type it in and Bingo! it can give you yeah character pattern and it's just got some.

You know, really? Template double-sided sort of, you know, homemade type boards. hmm Raffy reminds me of baby Beluga in the Deep Blue sea Texas Instruments 7404 made in England look at that the old dart and I put five volts into it and yes, it does stuff. I Have no idea what I'm doing, but it is missing the clock. There is a terminal on the back and it says to feed in a clock there, so have to have some sort of TTL I'm surprised it's doing any.

It's able to sort of do anything at all, but maybe that's just you know, garbage from having a stray clay. You know, a floating clock input or something like that. perhaps. And if I feed in a one kilohertz TT o clock, well I can get it to do the odd thing.

But yeah, I have no real idea what I'm doing there. Hmm, perhaps the most interesting thing here? Check out this: Intel a bubble memory. Yes and it's one. Meg bit bubble memory from today made in the Philippines from in 1986.

one made bit. So I'm wondering if I can crack that sucker open and take a look inside might be fully encapsulated I don't know. Have no idea what this thing is on the front. Is it some sort of you know checksum or something like that? No clue.

There's a diagram of how a magnetic bubble memory actually, what, How it's physically constructors, how it works is a bit more complicated, but it basically stores a magnetic field in little bubbles that can move inside little lines within the chip here. so there's if this is one, and each one is like a bit like the ferrite core memory, which we've looked at a couple of times before on the mailbag. This basically stores the same way in a magnetic field one bit per in this case, instead of a toroidal ring, it stores it inside a a little magnet film of magnetic material and the bubble can move across these things. They're shown them as Chevron propagation elements.

So I can move from one to the other and then when you got magnetic fields which then can move from one end to the other, you can read at one end and magnetize at the other and so on. So you know quite a lot of physics actually going on inside these things. And they were developed in the 1970s and by the mid 70s you know pretty much every major manufacturer was working on magnetic bubble memories and they were all the rage. They sort of.

This was sort of like the penultimate, the Intel r1 Meg bit to store a million bits in there. They very quickly approached the density very early days of the magnetic core memory and then they went. ha. We're onto something here.

So and of course, they're non-volatile like magnetic core memory as well. except they're not a destructive art right like in the magnetic core memory, but may quickly reach the density of the toroidal core ones and surpassed it. And the penultimate one here, the one Meg bit version. They might have gone a bit higher, but by the time this thing came around I mean this was 86.

They're still making them in 86, but really, by there nobody was designing them into here. So this one is probably like a Legacy 1. They are still making four systems that need you know? some sort of military, you know system? They can't you know? Just spin around and you use the latest technology. They've got to use hardened ones like this.

So yeah, by like the early 80s I meant hard drives that come out and just killed these things absolutely kill them. and they pretty much died overnight. And you've never heard of bubble memory ever again. There you go, but fascinating.

Um, maybe I can open that up and tear down, but that's certainly not from my Obey. so thank you very much. Jonas And to everyone else who sent him stuff into Dale's mailbag. and yes, I do have more and I will endeavor to get through them hopefully every week until they run out and then I'll be begging for stuff anyway.

Hope you enjoyed if you want to discuss it as always, links it down below the forum links down below all that sort of stuff. If you like my ol' bag, give it a thumbs up and yeah, that's it. I'm going to go edit this video now. Yeah, you may catch you next time you.