What have you bought recently?


A Victorinox Cybertool L , i wanted it in blue, but unfortunately the only blue cybertool was the M Version whit less tools for just an € less

f19ab68a9b879024808f77da6376c825.jpg



Whit best regards, Matthias
 
I was very lucky to snag myself the last ever Gigatron (TTL based microcomputer - made almost entirely from components available back in the 1970s) complete with case (there are still kits without the case available). Unfortunately it has a chip in the front, but matters not. I'm looking forward to assembling it, when I have some time. The manual is also fantastic.

Not only that, it's now fully open source (including the hardware).

hackaday.io

Gigatron fully open source | Details | Hackaday.io

<p>The Gigatron TTL computer is now fully open source! The <a href="https://github.com/kervinck/gigatron-rom" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">source code</a> had been open source (BSD license) since the beginning of course. A while ago, we published the design files for the printed...
hackaday.io hackaday.io
github.com

GitHub - kervinck/gigatron-rom: System, apps and tooling for the Gigatron TTL microcomputer

System, apps and tooling for the Gigatron TTL microcomputer - kervinck/gigatron-rom
github.com github.com

Gigatron – TTL microcomputer

gigatron.io gigatron.io

There have been assembly videos and reviews from 8-Bit Guy, Ben Heck and EEVBlog (so I suspect a good proportion of you will have heard of it before), although some of those videos were made around the time of the first ROM and seem a little unfair now.


IMG_20200620_1448186.jpgIMG_20200620_1448102.jpgIMG_20200620_1447412.jpgIMG_20200620_1447146.jpg
 
 
I treated myself to a new camera bag because the strap is detaching from my current one.

Grip-10 DL | Kata Bags

The Grip 10 DL is a compact camera holster designed with style to hold an advanced point & shoot camera in top quick grip position, while a dedicated media pouch will store spare cards and batteries.
www.kata-bags.com www.kata-bags.com
 
A Samsung Galaxy S2 that I'm going to put Replicant on.

www.ebay.co.uk

Samsung Galaxy S2 GT-I9100 - 16GB - Metallic Black Android Phone | eBay

<p dir="ltr">Samsung Galaxy S2 GT-I9100 - 16GB - Metallic Black Android Phone. Condition is Used. </p> <p dir="ltr">This has not been used in some time but charges and will have personal data clear up and password removed before posting.</p> <p dir="ltr">Good condition without any obvious...
www.ebay.co.uk

Replicant

replicant.us replicant.us
 
bought a new MSI x570 motherboard and a secondhand Ryzen3700X.... time to upgrade the old 3770K system..

new system will be
ryzen 3700X
MSI x570 pro-a mobo
g-skill 16GB 3200 DDR4 ram
Kingston 1 TB NVME SSD
Vega 64 video card.
will use the old 1TB spinning rust HDD and a sata SSD 120GB going to have fun setting it up this weekend
 
I went a bit nuts with tech purchases for my new place in Japan

- Vanko Native 1080p projector with auto keystone correction since I have the throw distance, and it was actually cheaper than buying a TV stand! Crazy!

- Pinephone since the keyboard seems to be making some progress with a slide out hopefully coming reasonably soon and the clamshell coming in the future. Worst case a cheap portable linux computer! I never did carry my Pandora around since it was big and I worried about breaking it. This is much easier to replace.

- Arduino Uno
- WS2811 lights
- 5v 10A power source
All for an ambilight clone coupled with my pi media center.
 
A Table Fan from Dyson, as my Old on from the late 1980tes is now a bit tooo old..
Its the "Pure Cool Me", looks a bit like a Ball on a Paperbin, but works pretty good, its got a Dust Filter in it ditnt blow the dust in my Sleeping room away,
Whit Sleeptimer, and Remote Controll, its quite cool but it was sadly quite expensive for a Paperbin and a Ball..

But as i ditnt buy a Fan in 30 Years, i think it should work out..
 
pmprog said:
I was one click away from this. I really want to, but my concerns is the inability to run Android software, which unfortunately i have some requirements.
Click to expand...

At least one of the distros is working on anbox support. So maybe give it 5-6 months and it might be functional.
 
A roof window. Really, two people came in, installed and another team fixed the ceiling around, I painted it around. Now I have more light in the attic. Temporarily I had to move my "goatpen" to the room below, fortunately I have permission to keep all my retrocomputinng stuff there temporarily.

Recently my friend who was admin in local neighbourhood network dropped me a big box of electronic junk for free. I wanted it as there were dead power supply units and I wanted some 5V DC regulated switching units. Although they are not easy to fix, it is in many cases possible to fix them, while transformer units, when the transformer breaks, are unrepairable (usually primary winding fails and there are thousands turns of thin wire - I have never successfully re-wound these, even if I had proper wire it always overflown).

So I got it. Generally:
- 6-8 power supply units, all with the same problems: capacitors. Sometimes in the high side, sometimes in a low side, but always capacitors. When they got open in the high side, the protection diode went bidirectional there and blown the fuse, sometimes taking Gretz bridge with it. Repaired them all, finally some +5V >1A blocks, I will make a good unit for my C64.

- A single 3-terabyte hard drive. There were 6 of them, all bad, I assembled one, as one had good mechanics/platter and bad electronics. I took electronics from another one, but I had to replace them back, rip the first track and put them in the second drive using the new electronics. This is sometimes needed, I do it blindly, without it the drive (usually Seagate) with electronics replaced does not work past the first track.

- A casing from an old 4-drive array locked and with key broken in a lock. Drives were removed as the array has been disassembled from the rear. After replacing the lock I kept it, as it may be useful for some of my devices.

- Two DVD players. One "Manta", Chinese, from late 2000s, laser damaged beyond repair, second one was Philips, probably early 2000s. This one with pressure in DVD chamber kept by fan. After cleaning the filter and resoldering "cold joints" on the chokes and VFD tube it booted well and could play, but the TV could not sync, and if it could sync, the colours were garbled and constantly flickering. After putting the oscilloscope to the analog output I found colour signal everywhere but not in its place. There should be a nice "noise" visible periodically when seeing line signals (it should look like: "blank, something more or less repetitive, a little blank, noise, blank" - the noise is responsible for colour), but here - the noise was "leaking" everywhere. I had no schematics, but I knew more or less how it operates, from experience, not books. I found that it was needed to replace ca. 4.6MHz crystal for "offset" in the modulator circuit, there was a bad transistor there too.
With the nearby trimmer I tuned the colour noise to be in the proper place of the oscillogram, and 6 of 7 TVs couldn't get it properly, the one had poor colour too. I put it a bit higher, went great on all of my TVs, so probably my 40-years-old never calibrated oscilloscope is a bit crooked. Good, as my Father was looking for some DVD player.

- A few 802.11b and 802.11g repeaters. They have a universal, steel casings so these casings will probably be more useful than hardware even if I repair them. I have a feeling that inside I will find broken converters because capacitors.
 
PCXT said:
- 6-8 power supply units, all with the same problems: capacitors. Sometimes in the high side, sometimes in a low side, but always capacitors. When they got open in the high side, the protection diode went bidirectional there and blown the fuse, sometimes taking Gretz bridge with it. Repaired them all, finally some +5V >1A blocks, I will make a good unit for my C64.
Click to expand...
What's a Gretz bridge? A diode-based half-wave rectifier bridge?
 
levi said:
What's a Gretz bridge? A diode-based half-wave rectifier bridge?
Click to expand...

Ah, it's 4-diode, full-wave rectifier, in such units it's usually packaged in SMD form. And of course I messed the spelling again, it's Graetz bridge. In my language such type of rectifier is still called "Graetz bridge" for historical reasons.
 
Apple iPad mini 5 Space Grey 256 GB from Best Buy for $499. They didn't actually have it in stock at the store, so it's being shipped to me.

Also, a $30 hard case for it, and Pokémon Sword for $40. Those were in stock and are with me now.

I plan on ordering a first gen Apple Pencil too sometime later. We tried to order it through Best Buy, but the check for it got rejected. Kinda weird after the $500+ check for the mini was approved.
 
JDTAY said:
Don’t you wish we had downvotes? :p
Click to expand...
Yes, but ill just like your request for downvotes instead. But ill use an angry face!

On other news i got my hands on a mechanical cherry mx 5, brand new.
I bargained the seller down to 25€, release price was 160€.
What can i say about that piece of luxus typing? Typing feels good but the keyboard itself feels like cheap china trash, there certainly is no magical jump from a common office keyboard that would justify that price.
 
Yeah, I have a cherry mx brown keyboard. I use it's a little disappiointing, I mean if I type normally I'm drowned out by the ringing from the aluminium backplane. I still like it, largely probably because of the money I spent on it, but if you pushed me I'd be forced to admit it actually doesn't add all that much above a cheap membrane keyboard.

Edit: I voted him sad rather than angry, because angry seems to be used for a kind of 'I agree that it's good you raised this post, but I'm disappointed that you had to' for posts that e.g. I've made.
 
Yesyes the ringing. Terrible! Ive opened it up and found the sound is made by the springs in the switches. Ive been told to put rubber rings under the caps against it...
Mine are red switches, supposely they are the most silent types, How annoying are the others then?

Whatever face you choose, all count as like in the forum system. *shrug*
 
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