Keith's Electronics Blog

An ice storm was predicted for today; and in anticipation, the university shut down. Even faculty and staff don’t go in for a full shutdown.

Temperatures must have been quite a bit higher than expected; because although there’s some ice on trees, all the freezing rain that hit the ground stayed wet and is draining away.

So here I am at home, waiting for more limbs from my neighbors’ tree to fall on my garage, and catching up on some electronics.

Another Weekend of Cleanup

Cort and I went to Pittsburg this past weekend to help Maeve clean up more of Slim’s stuff. The focus this time turned out to be books, but we each plundered other areas as well.

I adore these vintage resistor storage cases. The drawers are about 1/2″ high — you don’t need much more than that to store resistors — and they’re totally dreamy. (Um, yup, I’m a geek. )

Engler Hour Meter

Cort and I found this on a shelf in Slim’s garage:

It’s an Engler Instrument Company hour meter model 10N, and I think it’s absolutely gorgeous.

It wants to be built into a rich walnut case for something. (I’m not an active steampunker, but I definitely admire real and faux antique gear with wood and brass and glass and gleaming chrome and flicking needles with paper scales behind them.)

Give it 110VAC and it counts hours. The case is riveted shut, so there’s no resetting it. Still, it wouldn’t be that hard to run it long enough to reset — only about 35 months. (I’m going to need a good reason to do that, though . . .)

Slim’s Microcontroller Development Drawer

I’m not sure which cabinet this came from, but Maeve had taken a whole drawer full of Slim’s microcomputer and microcontroller development gear out to the garage. Cort and I picked through it, boxed it all up, and brought it home.

Some of the detail that follows is as much an inventory for Cort and me so we know what we have and where it’s packed, as it is intended to be of general interest.

Lots and lots of microcontrollers and related chips: Two sticks of TL064 op-amps, three sticks of PIC16C55s, three of PIC16C56es, two of PIC16C57s and two UV EPROMable chips, two sticks of PIC16C71s, a stick of ISD 4004-16MP 16-minute audio recording chips, a stick of ADCs, a bunch of miscellaneous Mozer Digitalker chips, an XC68HC705K15, and a couple of MC68HC811E2INs.

Circuit Cellar RTC52 and RTCIO kits, unassembled. I was never a subscriber, but these appear to have been the foundation of many Circuit Cellar control and automation projects; see for example this touch-tone remote-controllable home automation system from 1991.

A PICBASIC development kit.

Various microcontroller development boards, at least two of each, and heavily biased toward Motorola.

An M68HC705KICS programming board, adorably fitted in a box with cutouts for the power leads and ribbon cable, so it never has to leave its nest.

A RAM board and two MP-09A CPU boards from a Southwest Technical Products Corporation 6800/6809 computer, circa 1978. I would really like to find a good home for these with a SWTPC collector. I think there’s a related chassis in storage as well, which I’ll dig out next time.

Couple of LCD screens in “widescreen” format.

A very funky, battery-powered speed synthesizer board. Cort said Slim picked this up somewhere (probably at the Dayton Hamvention) and the two of them (particularly Cort) poked at it for a long time figuring it out. They were able to get it to make noise, and it has both recorded phrases and a phoneme generator, but they never found any documentation about the dictionary and weren’t willing to spend the time to catalog it by trying every address. Cort also said it draws half an amp.

And a very large, datacenter-style pushbutton switch. Sweet!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 12:56 pm by Keith Neufeld and is filed under Slim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.